Information.

How informed do you really feel? Are you keeping up? Do you feel you need to know everything about everything because it feels like others know everything about everything?

The race to keep up with the mountains of information piling on top of you, everyday, can be challenging, can be overwhelming and can be out of control. So we end up with information about information on feeds, tweets, blogs, posts, inboxes, Bloomberg, Google, Yahoo, Bing and countless other compounding search platforms. Seems there is nothing more abundant on earth than information. I used to be amazed at guesstamets of the grains of sand on the planet but that figure pales into insignificance when talking about exabytes (1 billion GB) of knowledge and information already consumed.

At the end of 2000 UC Berkeley school of information, estimated that all the words ever spoken by human beings amounted to 5 exabytes of data. As at march 2010, 21 exabytes of data were being transferred across the internet every month. The size of the world’s digital content was approximated at 500 exabytes and expanding rapidly. By 2013 internet video will generate 18 exabytes of data per month. Who has the time to watch it all? Watch out for the next level as Zettabytes (1 billion terabytes) and Yottabytes (1 quadrillion GB) head for your suburb.

I’m sure a lot of people would be happy to put the Genie back in the bottle as they long for a time of certainty and clarity of knowledge bought on by a few experts. Change and risk is not what people look for and there are more people wanting to live in the suburbs of certainty than have the thrill of living in silicon valley.

Yet this race to deliver information is only just starting and we need to drive it responsibly. We consume facts like products and spew forth information that’s convenient, often without checking the validity. I had a laugh when a Fox poll identified that 20% of Americans thought Barack Obama was Muslim. Geez it sounds like he is, doesn’t it Billy Joe Bob? In 2008 America consumed information amounting to the entire country being covered in books stacked over two metres high.

That didn’t include Twitter! Interestingly the Library of Congress has decided to archive all Twitter posts since then for posterity. Anything you would like to detract knowing what you sent after those 10 beers?

You need to make sure that information works for you and not against you. Information overload can cause decision paralysis so the search for the ultimate source of validated information continues. Will we end up with a single meta search layer that filters and validates any information we search for? I’m sure the Googles of this world are working on it right now.

What can you do right now? Take time out to cope, reflect and gather your thoughts because you have a choice with this avalanche of information. Use it as a currency of knowledge to live better, prosper, give back, accomplish, pursue your passions and most important of all, live longer. You never know what you might learn tomorrow.