The short answer is the magic of a web connection or the term access. The longer answer is that for the previous 50 years, analog information was converted to digital information

Starting about 50 years ago, companies began converting their paper and manual information to digital form. 30 year ago, the Personal Computer proved to be a wonderful tool for individual records, text and graphics. The total quantity of information held in both of these types of systems is immense.

10 years ago browser software provided an efficient, two-way path for information to flow to and from, Personal and Company Computers. Each individual and each company made independent decisions about how much of their information they wished to share.

The prevailing concept, at that time, was that information would be formatted and held on computer storage devices and printed when it was required. Improvements in display technology have made much of the printing process unnecessary.

At the same time, it became obvious that Internet was an economic and easily used way to publish information in all fields. Write-once, read-many became a universally accepted practice. Sharing information and the collaborative processes that spontaneously emerged from Internet, have added yet another body of information, and this is the product of Internet participants using Internet-base information.

Blogs, Chat-rooms and Communities of Interest, not to mention much of the email volume, is yet another type of information. A type that is created on, and for the Internet. It may be printed, or stored on a local disk, but it's use is simply a network communication, much like a telephone call.

If all of this sounds common-place, it is not.

The fact that it happened in millions of places and involved such a large percentage of the population, masks the fact that it is a massive and unique change that happened spontaneously.

There was no single killer application. No one was paid to place peta-bytes of information on Internet for the common good of the participants. Rather, individuals decided that Internet was a "good idea" and for their own reasons, connected to it.

The behavior emerged. The term emergence comes from recent studies of chaos theory that observe individuals acting in concert for their own, individual reasons. This is compared to our traditional "top-down" organizations where orders come from leaders and is communicated down the organization.

The fact remains that an estimated 700 million people bought computers or more recently, smart phones, subscribed to a service, and connected to Internet. Some are individuals and some are companies. All of them contribute to the immense body of information stored and communicated on Internet.

We now have the major portion of contemporary knowledge of our species, in digital form. Much of that body of work is shared and accessible, and that is unprecedented.

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