In 2009, only 29 individuals successfully swam the 22-mile English Channel according to the Channel Swimming Association. They all had something simple in common: surrounded by a sea, they focused on swimming it, not drinking it.
Facing an ever-increasing amount of information, personal and business success increasingly depends on efficiently swimming the sea of data instead of drowning in it.
In a recent New York Times OP-ED piece titled “Should Old Articles Be Forgot,” William Falk, the editor in chief of The Week magazine, illustrated how important news trends can easily get obscured in the 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words of data that Americans now collectively consume each year. (A zettabyte is roughly one trillion gigabytes.) Referring to the University of California, San Diego, research behind those figures, the Times article notes that this is three times the amount of data content consumed by Americans in 1980.
On an individual basis, this means that the average American consumes 35 gigabytes of data each day. That includes 100,000 words of information per day, the equivalent of over a fifth of Tolstoy's War and Peace or over an eighth of the King James Bible!
Given the tremendous volume of data, do Americans really read less now than in previous decades, as is commonly said? The answer is no. While reading of conventional print media has fallen from 26% of the words that Americans consumed in 1960 to just 9% in 2008, if you add the words we read through a computer, “reading as a percentage of our information consumption has increased in the last 50 years, if we use words themselves as the unit of measurement.”
In other words, the shift in personal use from paper to electronic documents is well underway. People are becoming comfortable living in a digital world. We shop online, bank online, read our newspapers online, take classes online, and stay in touch online. Most do a good portion of their professional work online as well.
Digital documents offer a number of advantages over physical documents, including the ability to have a wealth of information at our fingertips through a device as small as an iPhone or Blackberry. Properly structured digital information is quick to search and retrieve as needed, allowing the modern professional to swim a sea of data without having to attempt to ingest every drop of it.
Only ten years ago, converting large quantities of existing paper documents into scanned, searchable electronic files was cost-prohibitive for all but the largest companies. In recent years, though, the technology costs associated with scanning, storing, and distributing digital documents have decreased to levels where small to medium sized businesses and even individuals can cost-effectively convert their existing paper records into scanned documents.
i/oTrak specializes in helping organizations of all sizes deal with their specific paper challenges in an easy, open, cost-effective manner. For more information on how we can help make dealing with paper easier in your professional life, contact one of i/oTrak's solution specialists for a free assessment.
