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Statistics demonstrate the exponential growth of information and students' growing dependence upon the Internet as their primary - or sole - source of this information.

The "information explosion" is, indeed, real. The faculty and students at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley maintain a sort of "living study" entitled "How Much Information?" measuring the amount of information produced each year. It is, of course, on the web, although you can print a pdf file of the current living document in about 200 pages. A short quote from their Executive Summary of the data is very illuminating:

• How much new information is created each year?… Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks…How big is five exabytes? If digitized, the nineteen million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.
  
• We estimate that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002.

According to the 2000 UCLA/American Council on Education CIRP (Cooperative Institutional Research Program) Freshman Survey (an annual and the largest and oldest empirical study of higher education, involving data on some 1,700 institutions and over 10 million students since 1966):

• 85% of freshmen reported using a computer frequently during the year prior to entering college.
• 67.4% of freshmen used the internet frequently for homework or research.

According to a study on student internet use which surveyed 1,300 college students at eight institutions, the typical student uses the Internet for 100 minutes a day.

Anderson, Keith J. "Internet Use Among College Students: an Exploratory Study." Journal of American College Health. Vol. 50, p.21 (July 2001). (Search for the full text of this article in Expanded Academic ASAP.)

Michael Gunn, English major at the University of Kent, considers suing his institution for not informing him that his plagiarism was illegal: "I hold my hands up. I did plagiarise...But I always used the internet -cutting and pasting stuff and matching it with my own points. It's a technique I've used since I started the course. I never dreamt it was a problem."

Times Higher Education Supplement. May 28, 2004.

Students report that when doing research 87% of their peers “at least sometimes” cut and paste from the Internet without sufficient attribution.
2003 National Survey of Student Engagement

A study conducted on 23 college campuses has found that Internet plagiarism is rising among students. Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of "cut-and-paste" plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior trivial or not cheating at all"

Rimer, Sara. "A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism"
New York Times. September 3, 2003, p. B7. (Search for the full text of this article in Lexis Nexis Academic.)

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