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Science 12 August 1983:
Vol. 221. no. 4611, pp. 609 - 613
DOI: 10.1126/science.221.4611.609
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Articles

Tracking the Flow of Information

Ithiel de Sola Pool 1

1 Professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139.

By using words transmitted and words attended to as common denominators, novel indexes were constructed of growth trends in 17 major communications media from 1960 to 1977. There have been extraordinary rates of growth in the transmission of electronic communications, but much lower rates of growth in the material that people actually consume, representing the phenomenon often labeled information overload. Growth in print media has sharply decelerated, and a close relationship is found between the cheapness of a medium and its rate of growth.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
A 67-Year-Old Man Who e-Mails His Physician.
W. V. Slack (2004)
JAMA 292, 2255-2261
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Communication Technology and Social Movements: Contributions of Computer Networks to Activism.
D. J. Myers (1994)
Social Science Computer Review 12, 250-260
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The Economic Value of Information.
D. Bellin (1993)
Science Communication 15, 233-240
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