The total time people spend accessing data has remained nearly constant throughout the 1990s. Varian speculates that significant advances will have to be made in information management before mankind can fully benefit from the information explosion. This is no easy task. Our ability to store and communicate information has far outpaced our ability to search, retrieve and present it. Information management may turn out to be one of the major challenges of the new century.
Individuals produce significant amounts of non-digital information.
As photos and videos move to digital formats, households will have to manage terabytes of data. Print and film content is rapidly moving to magnetic and optical storage. This is true for professional use now, and will become increasingly true at the level of individual users. Terror of Terabytes. One terabyte, the smallest practical measure used for the project, is a million megabytes, which is equivalent to the textual content of a million books.