TMI

Today I am grateful for another enjoyable movie in "Joy" and also for clean drinking water. It is one of those things I most often take for granted.

TMI. Too much information. It usually refers to personal or private information that someone shares too often or with too many people. It is easy to do with the technology we have.  A quick post on Facebook or other social media and we can have TMI.  I appreciate social media in ways, but I also wonder what it has done to boundaries. And I wonder how much time it sucks away from more important pursuits.

TMI. Too much information in the age of information. We have so much data so easily accessible to us via the technology that has become commonplace.  In many ways, this information drives our wider world, including the economy. And to the varying degrees we allow it, it drives our own individual lives as well.

I could find many statistics for you, but they are almost beyond my comprehension. I came across a term new to me as I did a little reading about all this information at our disposal: exabyte. An exabyte is one quintillion bytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A byte is commonly the smallest unit of measurement used when referring to digital data. Mind-boggling.

So here's just one statistic to consider: In 1986, the world's technological capacity to store information was 2.6 exabytes. By 2000, it was 54.5 exabytes. And by 2007, it was 295 exabytes.
That kind of growth almost scares me.

I certainly have benefitted from the age of information. I will turn to Google for quick answers to many mundane questions; ranging from what are that store's holiday hours to what year did that song get released?  I have watched and listened to many of my favorite songs on YouTube. I can easily post a new blog entry. I appreciate and utilize the technology in numerous ways.

But I can't help being concerned about where we are headed. It is one of the reasons practicing gratitude is valuable to me. It grounds me in the present as well as my present surroundings. The virtual world is not a place for true presence. Right here, right now is.

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