Dr. Robert Replogle's Weblog

The world was, and may still be, drowning in paper to handle information. Consider a few pertinent details. The worldwide production of printed original content, if stored digitaly in terabytes, had an upper estimate of 1,199 terabytes in 1999, and 1,633 terabytes in 2002, an increase of 36%. 86% of all this material was the result of printed office documents, largely the production of computer printers. Just for the record, a tree can produce about 80,500 sheets of paper and 786 million trees are needed to produce the annual paper supply. Fortunately trees are a wonderfully renewable resource. Each inhabitant of North America consumes 11.916 sheets of paper,while each citizen of the EU consumes 7,280 sheets. Half of all this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce documents.All this material and much more is contained in a comprehensive report from the UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. Now consider the Internet. Around the world about 600 million people have access tp the the Internet. only about 30 % of them in North America. Both Europe and Asia Pacific outnumber North American users. In 200 it was estimated the the volume of information on the public Web was 20-50 terabytes. By 2003 this had increased to 167 terabytes. There are currently about 2.9 million active web blogs conaining about 61 GB of information. About 31 billion emails are sent daily, a figure which is expected to double by 2006. The annual flow of email worldwide is 667,585 terabytles. What all this means is that the flow of information around the world has changed from traditional methods, e.g. newspapers, to a more instantaneous and personal method, Weblogs, email and instant messaging. The main stream newsmedia is feeling the pressure financially in my opinion in no small way a result of their own incompetence. The opportunity for all the people of the world to get new, unedited information from sources often right on the scene is of great concern to countries with totalitarian governments having central control of the news media. A push has started to wrest control of the internet from the current independent repository and place it in the hands of the United Nations. I will use another blog to set forth my views on the UN, but suffice it to say I do not hold it in high regard. The beginning discussion of the UN control will be held next week in Tunisia. Needless to say,may in the world are concerned about the possible impact of this political pressure on the integrity of the Internet. Here , for example, is the attitude for internet freedom held by the host country, Tunisia, of next weeks UN conference.

Tunisian internet crackdown
Twenty young men, many of them students, have been arrested in Tunisia for looking at
banned websites.
The Tunisian Government is believed to censor the internet more tightly than any other country in the
world, with the possible exception of China.
A lawyer for the men, told the French news agency AFP that they are suspected of carrying out
subversive activities on the internet.
He said during their arrest last week in the southern coastal city of Zarsis, the police found and
confiscated computer equipment used by the men.
The International Association for Support of Political Prisoners said police were interrogating the men in
the capital, Tunis, and refusing family visits.
Lawyers say the arrested men browsed sites including one from the banned Tunisian Islamist Nahda
party.
Tunisan President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's government tightly controls the media.
It jailed its first internet dissident last year for disseminating "false information" on the web.
Zouhair Yahyaoui, the founder of satirical website, www.tunezine.com, which gave a space for
opposition groups and politicians to air their views, was sentenced to two years in prison.

In the immortal words of Kurt Vonegut, " and so it goes."