7TB is even a commodity disk these days. And it's a lot less than the torrent of scientific papers that floated around some time ago (that was ~18TB IIRC).
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
Since transient, ethereal meme culture is also basically emergent culture now, it's difficult not to also foresee a greater cultural divide in such a case. This is saying nothing of live data tools as well, even weather data...
It would be mostly unaffected. As another commenter (Michael) says, communication, news and collaboration are distinct from storage as needs/functions.
What you say here is fascinating:
> Since transient, ethereal meme culture is also basically emergent culture now, it's difficult not to also foresee a greater cultural divide in such a case.
There have always been bookish or gossipy people. Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy both make note of that in stories about English culture. The balance of those qualities may have changed in the internet age. Perhaps the degree of reach via one-to-many communications has amplified the ephemeral gossip side. The scholarly life less so. Though it's enhanced by repositories like Gutenberg, Internet Archive and SciHub and the like, a "reader" (to use Bill Hicks's take) can still only process one media at a time. But as Ted Nelson pointed out, if you have all of the worlds writing at your fingertips, all hyperlinked and with awesome semantic search tools, reading becomes a quite different non-linear experience. That's something centralised walled gardens subtracted from the WWW as its 1990s conceit.
That 90's vision of a multi-modal, multi-media "internet community" in which people read common news, converse and reference together hasn't really survived "Social Media". But then it was always a weal approximation to something like a group seminar in the university library rather than the town square or local pub.
What I also found was that many of the images in the epubs were already unuseable and nothing like their counter parts in phsyical books.
Kiwix .ZIM file format is a good example. The entire Gutenberg Library is a single ~65 Gb file, and you can read any book from it without unpacking anything.