The following is an excerpt from Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel.
In computer science, the unit used to measure information is the bit, short for “binary digit.” You can think about a single bit as the answer to a yes-or-no question, where 1 is yes and 0 is no. Eight bits is called a byte.
Right now, the average person’s data footprint—the annual amount of data produced worldwide, per capita—is just a little short of one terabyte....
