Digital Universe

= the total volume of digital information that is created and replicated globally.

Description

"this number reached 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes) in 2007, which adds up to about 45GB of digital information for each person on earth. For the first time ever, the total volume of digital content exceeds total storage capacity. IDC speculates that, by 2011, only half of the digital universe will be stored.

IDC attributes accelerated growth to the increasing popularity of digital television and cameras that rely on digital storage. Major drivers of digital content growth include surveillance, social networking, and cloud computing. Visual content like images and video account for the largest portion of the digital universe. According to IDC, there are now over a billion digital cameras and camera phones in the world and only ten percent of photos are captured on regular film.

The study also reveals that the volume of information about us generated automatically on a daily basis surpasses the total volume of digital information that we actively create about ourselves. IDC notes that this trend has significant privacy implications and that pressure will increasingly fall on the IT sector to address information management issues that pertain to privacy." (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080312-study-amount-of-digital-info-global-storage-capacity.html)