Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08 245
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?"
Re:obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
Since the LoC is traditionally pegged at 20 terabytes, this would be 1.66 milliLoCs. Or, to put it another way, the person consumes a Library of Congress once about every 20 months.
Re:This number is meaningless (Score:4, Informative)
It shouldn't be entirely meaningless. Claude Shannon [wikipedia.org] showed that no matter how you represent something, it contains the same amount of information. If I remember right, he did a study early on that showed that each letter in English text carries, on average, about 1 bit of information (in the information theory sense of "information"). You can store it in ASCII or UCS-4 or as a JPEG and even though the different representations require different amounts of data, they all contain the same amount of information: some representations just have more redundancy than others. (Sadly it's undecidable to determine how much information something contains; otherwise compression would be a lot easier).
Unfortunately this study seems to have ignored all of that good research and ignored the whole field of "information theory" in general. The numbers they're using on page 8 are totally exaggerated and seem to have no basis in information theory. There's no way a "small picture" contains 8 million bits of information, and even if it did there's no way a person could actually appreciate all that information unless they were staring at it for hours.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Informative)
From TFS:
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)
They are not talking about internet usage. They're talking about overall information consumption. So torrent users has not much to do with it at all.
Not that I believe their number.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Otherwise it is really hard to get to ~20GB/day of internet use.
I knew nobody RTFA, but I thought people at least read a short comment before replying.
Not internet use, all information/data. That's including possibly non-digital formats such as television, phone conversations, or print.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Radio was 10.59% of the overall, or 34GB * 10.59% = 3.6 GB per day. CD quality is 44100 * 16/8 * 2 = 176KB/sec. So they're saying the average American listens to stereo CD-quality radio for over 20 hours per day? I doubt it.