ARE we in danger of an information overload? Salford professor Nigel Linge is giving a public lecture this week on the expanding 'data smog' of emails, multi-channel TV and text messaging. Here, he talks to Paul Taylor about the 21st century avalanche of knowledge.

   ON New Year's Day 2007, the nation's busy thumbs dispatched 214m text messages - more than three for every man, woman and child, and 50m more than the same day last year.

All this from a means of communication which, only 10 years ago, hardly anybody used.

Every day, many of us field hundreds of emails, not just from colleagues and friends but `investment' opportunities in Nigeria, offers of Viagra from online pharmacies and the marketing missives from every company to which we have ever given our email address.

Our digital TV gives us enough choice to make our thumb tired from channel-hopping. Our home computer allows us to zoom giddily from outer space right into our own back garden on Google Earth. And the information at our fingertips from the ever-burgeoning worldwide web is so immense that if you simply type the letter `a' into Google you will get 7,350,000,000 hits - at least you will at the time of writing this.

"In the last 170 years, communications technology has been an enormous enabler to the world, a very positive effect," says Professor Nigel Linge, of Salford University's school of computing, science and engineering. "The worry is that it could in itself start to be perceived as a problem if we get information overload."

Vast ocean

Business and commerce may start to groan and slow down under the weight of its own data, and in the vast ocean of information, ordinary people may begin to lose the ability to discriminate which data is right and wrong.

These are the kind of questions which will be raised in a public lecture by Linge at the university's Maxwell Hall on Wednesday evening, one of a series of events to mark National Science and Engineering Week

"I'm not claiming I have answers. My message is that from a communications and engineering point of view, this technology has been a phenomenally successful and fascinating story," says Linge. "But where are we going next? If we keep pushing the technology train forward, there are implications for society which we need to think about."

As well as our overloaded brains, we may even run out of storage space for all our digital data by 2010, according to technology research firm IDC. Last year the world generated 161bn gigabytes of digital information - the equivalent of 12 piles of books each reaching from the earth to the sun, or enough to fill two billion of the biggest i-Pods.

"What communications technology has done is greatly improve the speed at which we can transmit the message. Distance is no longer an inhibiting factor," says Linge. "But when you type something in Google and it tells you how many hundreds of thousands of pages there are, you then have the problem of how to cope with so many information sources with no real way of assessing quality."

As long as two years ago, research was suggesting that the mass of emails, texts and mobile phone calls affected worker productivity to the same degree as if we were smoking marijuana. As technology gets more powerful and portable, we have these distractions with us night and day.

Web browsing

"Eventually we will be talking not about a mobile phone but a device. You will use your device to do some web browsing, watch a TV programme or a film and then call someone on the phone," says Linge. "In the home you will have another device with a bigger screen. The Blackberry is a classic case of convergence."

Linge also predicts much more wearable technology - devices built into our clothes. O'Neill already manufactures jackets with keypads on the sleeve and earphones in the collar into which you can plug your phone or i-Pod. There is even a solar panelled backpack to charge up those devices.

If we are constantly plumbed into an information network, though, we give up more and more of our privacy.

"People were worried sick when itemised phone billing came out. They said they didn't want their partners knowing who they've been phoning," says Linge. "Then people worried about their mobile being tracked. Now people are worried about satellite tracking in cars and whether they want the government to know where they are."

If and when road pricing is universal, the government will know where each and every car in Britain is at any one time - yet another example of information overload.

But although we are generating huge amounts of digital information about - right down to our family snapshots and i-Pod musical collection - it could all disappear if we are not careful.

"As long as we have eyes, we can still look at the original Domesday Book," says Linge. "I did my PhD in 1983-86, and it's on a five and a quarter inch disc, written on a CPM operating system computer. I've got the disc but it's unreadable unless I go to Bletchley Park where they have a computer museum."

Prof Nigel Linge delivers the public lecture Message Received and Understood? at Salford University's Maxwell Hall on Wednesday at 7pm. Entrance is free. Register your attendance by going to www.salfordphonesproject.org -  or just turn up on the night.

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