"What the heck is a JigaWatt?" - (Gigawatt), Marty McFly 1985/1955.

In 1985, Robert Zemeckis brought to his audience an amazing glimpse of the future and what it could bring.  2015 saw hover converted cars, intelligent clothing and large flat screens.  Two out of three ain't bad although i'm not sure sticking a solar panel on a t-shirt counts as intelligence. See this link of 'Nano Wires - power dressing'.

Scientists claim the arrival of the digital age was in 2002 when this was the first year that digital storage capacity overtook analogue capacity.
From today's post on the BBC news site:

The study, published in the journal Science, calculates the amount of data stored in the world by 2007 as 295 exabytes. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes....

"The Human DNA in one single body can store around 300 times more information than we store in all our technological devices" according to Dr Hilbert.

It is now estimated that in 2011, there is over 600 exabytes of data in the world.  So what the heck is an exabyte? One exabyte is a billion gigabytes.  That's a lot of stuff to store, yet the human DNA is so sophisticated that even in today's modern wave of data overload, the complexity of a single cell dwarfs any technological advancement.

Is intermediality becoming integrated into a biotechnological form? It seems a little scary that we ourselves can be a walking storage medium where information is absorbed rather that up/downloaded.

Reference links and further reading:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12419672

Special Online Collection: Dealing with Data:
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/data/

Listen to an interview with Dr Hibert here:
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/11/133686000/Defining-A-Data-Deluge

Hmmm, the cover from 11th February's special edition of the Science online collection looks familiar..