Do It Now!

As the last guy on the planet without a cell phone but also as one who is up at 6:00 a.m. checking my news and op-ed sites, I have to agree with Kathleen Parker this morning and wonder how much this technology has been driving our national “do something and do it now” mentality:

The phrase "too much information," a now-cliched talk-to-the-hand deflection, isn't just a gentle whack at someone who tells you more than you want to know about his Cialis experience. It's a toxic asset that exhausts our cognitive resources while making the nonsensical seem significant.

In 2006, the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data, according to Columbia Journalism Review. Put in perspective, that's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes.

How can CJR possibly track that?