We have unleashed a torrent of words

About 500 years after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, and with the emergence of computers and the internet in the 20th and 21st centuries, human beings have become amazingly wordy, perhaps annoyingly so.

I was contemplating my own output during a 40-year career as a writer and editor in the oil industry. I came up with about 6 million words. That is based on a rather prodigious output of about 3,000 words per week. Scribing articles for newsletters and other publications over four decades, I recall many weeks in which I exceeded that volume.

Compare this to Shakespeare's word count of 884,421, encapsulated in his major works, including all his plays. But this is akin to comparing apples to oranges — quantity versus quality — and there is no comparison. Millions of people across the world will forever recall Hamlet's phrase, "to be or not to be, that is the question," while my semi-technical description of how an extended-reach oil well is drilled faded from readers' memories faster than paint dries.

With our computers' word processing and storage functions we've become incredibly efficient in racking up the words. Best-selling author Stephen King, for example, has published about 8 million words in his 57 novels, and that doesn't include earlier, unpublished drafts.

[Internet allows us to live in bubbles with blinders on]

Tom Clancy's seven best-selling novels contain about 2 million words. The daily newspaper New York Times prints an average 150,000 words per day. In a year that would amount to about 54.8 million words. How many people read all of this, let alone digest it?

Meanwhile, the second edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains only 171,476 words!

Yet in this sundry barrage of words, there are a few American authors who achieved fame with considerably less of them, found in a single novel. For example, J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye;" Margaret Mitchell, "Gone with the Wind;" and Harper Lee, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Reading speedometer

Over time humans' reading speed has not increased appreciably, even though some people achieve positive results with practice and training. According to one website, readingsoft.com, super-speed readers can achieve 1,000 words per minute with about 85 percent comprehension. But that only represents 1 percent of the human population. The average reading speed, the site indicates, is closer to 200-250 words per minute, with about 60 percent comprehension.

I once thought the Encyclopedia Britannica was quite vast, with its 44 million words within 32 volumes. It pales to what is on today's internet, which contains astounding repositories of exabytes, zettabytes and other terms I find incomprehensible.

On one website, I read that the storage capacity of the internet is 10^24 bytes, or 1 million exabytes. A byte is a data unit comprising 8 bits, and is equal to a single character in one of the words you're now reading. An exabyte is 1 billion billion bytes. The website also says there are more than 1 billion websites on today's internet.

One way to estimate the communication capacity of the internet, the website indicates, is to measure the traffic moving through it. According to Cisco's Visual Networking Index initiative, the internet is now in the "zettabyte era." A zettabyte equals 1 sextillion bytes, or 1,000 exabytes. By the end of 2016, global internet traffic reached 1.1 zettabytes per year, according to Cisco. By 2019, global traffic is expected to hit 2 zettabytes per year.

One zettabyte is the equivalent of 36,000 years of high-definition video, which, in turn, is the equivalent of streaming Netflix's entire catalog 3,177 times.

[Attack on words reflects mob mentality]

I have no idea how many words reside in the Library of Congress's 16 million books, which I believe have all been digitized, or at least are in that process.

So now, Stephen King's 8 million words and my 6 million and Tom Clancy's 2 million don't seem nearly as overwhelming, nor does the King James Bible with its 783,137 words.

Unlimited time to read

I'm reminded of a 1960 "Twilight Zone" television episode in which a bad-luck character named Mr. Bevis is evicted from his home, loses his job and even wrecks his car. But he doesn't care. Bevis loves words. He just wants to be left alone so he can read books. He survives a war apocalypse and stumbles upon a huge library filled with shelf upon shelf of undamaged books. Just as he is about to embark upon an idyllic future of uninterrupted reading, he accidentally steps on his eyeglasses and destroys them.

It's a tragic ending, but a story that conveys an important message: Many things in life are unexpected and transitory. Unending change is the norm.

Newspapers across the country seem to be shrinking, and the Alaska Dispatch News is no exception. With a smaller staff, the paper will purvey fewer words. Maybe that's not entirely a bad thing. Compare most written works throughout history to those of William Shakespeare: quantity versus quality.

From that perspective, my 6 million words don't amount to a spit in the ocean.

Frank E. Baker is a lifelong Alaskan and freelance writer who lives in Eagle River.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com.