Data is being created at an astonishing rate today.From Youtube to Twitter to everything in between, billions of people around the world are creating content every day. The dramatic growth in social media in recent years has led to the creation of even more data, For example, millions of videos are uploaded onto Youtube, Facebook, etc. every day. According to one IBM report in 2016, the size of the digital universe may reach a Brontobyte in the coming decade.

How big is a Brontobyte? The following chart shows the answer:

Click to enlarge

Source: What’s causing the exponential growth of data? by Timoth Greaton, Nikko Asset Management

From the above article:

One of the most interesting statistics about the increasing volume of data appeared in a 2016 IBM report “10 Key Marketing Trends For 2017”, which outlined that 90% of all worldwide data at that time was created in the preceding two years, when 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created per day. With data volume around the world still growing at an immense pace, it could be a matter of time before the global datasphere reaches a brontobyte (approximately 1,024 yottabytes) in the coming decade (Chart 3).

An interesting question to think about is this: Has the exponential growth of data made people smarter or dumber? Or to put differently, has social media made people more intelligent, educated, cultured and responsible citizens (or) has it made them dumb, foolish and mindless zombies cocooned into their own little world?