Information volume. In 1500 30,000 book titles are available in Europe. In 1994 daily newspapers have a worldwide circulation of 558,000.000 per day. In 1996 alone 1,000.000 book titles are published worldwide. As of February 1999, the publicly indexable World Wide Web contains 800 million pages, encompassing about 15 terrabytes (16,106.124.360 bytes) of information.

Transmission speed. In Greek and Roman Antiquity a messenger could cover 50 km a day. Today, data transmission via fibre-optic cables, satellites, and microwave is transmitted at 300,000 km/sec

A Small World. From the very beginning - the first Sumerian pictographs on clay tablets - to today's state of the art technologies - broadband communication via fibre-optic cables and satellites, the amount of information collected, processed and stored, the capabilities to do so, and the capable speed of information transmission exponentially accelerate. Since the invention of the electrical telegraph, but especially with today's growing digital communication networks, every location on earth seems to be close, however distant it may be, and time no longer seems to remain as a significant dimension.

Threatened Cultural Memory. Data increasingly require specific software and hardware, but to convert all available digitized information regularly is an unexecutable task.

Compared to the longevity of pictographs on clay tablets, digitized information is produced for instant one-time use. The increasing production and processing of information causes a problem hitherto unknown: the loss of our cultural memory.