Information explosion

The information explosion is the rapid increase in the amount of published information or data and the effects of this abundance.^[1] As the amount of available data grows, the problem of managing the information becomes more difficult, which can lead to information overload. The Online Oxford English Dictionary indicates use of the phrase in a March 1964 New Statesman article.^[2] The New York Times first used the phrase in its editorial content in an article by Walter Sullivan on June 7, 1964, in which he described the phrase as "much discussed". (p11.) ^[3] The earliest known use of the phrase was in a speech about television by NBC president Pat Weaver at the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising in London on September 27, 1955. The speech was rebroadcast on radio station WSUI in Iowa City and excerpted in the Daily Iowan newspaper two months later.^[4]

Many sectors are seeing this rapid increase in the amount of information available such as healthcare, supermarkets, and governments.^[5] Another sector that is being affected by this phenomenon is journalism. Such a profession, which in the past was responsible for the dissemination of information, may be suppressed by the overabundance of information today.^[6]

Techniques to gather knowledge from an overabundance of electronic information (e.g., data fusion may help in data mining) have existed since the 1970s. Another common technique to deal with such amount of information is qualitative research.^[7] Such approaches aim to organize the information, synthesizing, categorizing and systematizing in order to be more usable and easier to search.