Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08

eldavojohn writes "Metrics can get really strange — especially on the scale of national consumption. Information consumption is one such area that has a lot of strange metrics to offer. A new report from the University of California, San Diego entitled 'How Much Information?' reveals that in 2008 your average American consumed 34 gigabytes per day. These values are entirely estimates of the flows of data delivered to consumers as bytes, words and hours of consumer information. From the executive summary: 'In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.' Has the flow and importance of information really become this prolific in our daily lives?"

obligatory

[Icegryphon]

how many of these [loc.gov] is that?

and thats just my porn

[Anonymous Coward]

you should see how much i consume in illegal MP3 / MOVIES

Data Hogs

[Reason58]

The study found that the top 5% would digest over 70 GiB a day. Upon reading this Comcast, for the purpose of easing traffic, has installed horse blinders on them.

broadband

[mehrotra.akash]

is really fast there!!

According to comcast

[anticlone]

only the bandwidth hogs using P2P are responsible for almost all of that. The rest of "normal" American users only read a couple emails a day...

What's this information business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be parsed out further into [A: something close to Truth, and B: Lies]?

Re:We are fat.

[Kratisto]

My file structure is NTFS, you insensitive clod!

Re:Massive exaggeration

[Tired and Emotional]

But they said information, so not much TV counts. (do they subtract for Fox news?)

Outdated Americans?

[Darkness404]

If the average American gets 44.8% of their information from the TV, per day. Something is wrong with the MPAA/RIAA's facts. Also odd seems to be the 10.59% of radio that the average American listens to. And also strange is the 1.11% of recorded music that the average American listens to. That means that 55.44% of words that Americans listen to is controlled by many factors, including the government and private (think RIAA/MPAA) interests. This study should more or less prove that the RIAA is in no danger, as user created and RIAA/MPAA uncontrolled mediums only add up to 28.28% of what an average American is exposed to.

"consumed"

[Anonymous Coward]

and expelled as ejaculate.

Re:Consumed...?

[dingen]

You must be heavily obese.

Resource overuse

[mtrachtenberg]

While the average American uses 34 gig per day, the average citizen of a developing country uses only 27.3 megabytes.

A proposal to cap and trade rights to generate and transmit information was introduced today by Bernie Sanders; Fox News immediately called it a "dangerous step towards communism."

Sarah Palin said she didn't believe Americans used that much more information than the rest of the world, and if we did it's just because Americans are smarter.

President Obama, in a forty minute speech (30.27 gig), explained the details of information theory and laid out a twenty point plan for getting Congress to reduce Americans' transmission of information by 10% over the next thirty years. A coalition of conservative Democrats replied that the President, while obviously well-informed, was moving too aggressively, and that more research was needed.

George W Bush asked what a gigabyte was.

how much data collected per person per day?

[bugi]

More interesting would be how much data is collected on each American each day.

Be sure to count each datum separately for each person to make sure it's a big number. Please also break it down into several categories, both private and government.

Re:We are fat.

[gzearfoss]

Easy there, he's just trying to get a Reiser out of you.

Re:I can believe it

[El_Muerte_TDS]

[..] SMS messages [..]

Yes, those really add up.

Re:Anthropomorphizing data

[Locke2005]

You should never anthropomorphize data -- it hates it when you do that!

Re:Consumed...?

[ahem]

He's actually just a *really* obsessive Katamari player.

Re:According to comcast

[jeffasselin]

Of course there's a shortage, most of the bandwidth mines in North America are already empty. We've importing all our bandwidth from China and Russia for a while now. Is it wise to rely on such countries for our bandwidth?

Re:Or reposts of the same story everywhere...

[SomeJoel]

I remember when you could come to slashdot and truly read original content. Now all these sites just seem to regurgitate the same thing.

The original content appears in the comments.

Re:Or reposts of the same story everywhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, beowulf cluster of the Natalie Portman's hot grits welcome you as their overlord.

Damn and blast

[Gogogoch]

Bugger - I only have a 56K modem.

Re:Yes, but...

[von_rick]

Way more.

Now if you start assigning value to the kind of information based upon your preference, you may have a different opinion. But you can't change the fact that 12 hours of Stargate is packed with considerably more information than a Physics textbook file.