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?"
Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
How much of that is redirected to /dev/null?
Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Massive exaggeration (Score:5, Insightful)
Has the flow and importance of information really become this prolific in our daily lives?
No, they're just making up big numbers to get attention. Apparently, it's working.
Consider how many "gigabytes" you "consume" just by watching TV for a few hours. Nothing new here...
Re:Massive exaggeration (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty impressive (Score:3, Insightful)
Definitions so broad as to be pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
Their definitions almost allow grandma to count time sitting in a rocking chair on the porch watching the outside world as "consuming information". Lots of bits of data comming into those eyeballs. Or maybe even if she closes her eyes and starts daydreaming, those dreams count too. :-)
When a "report" spends a substantial amount of time explaining the notations for large numbers, it is a pretty clear sign that it isn't a very serious work.
Consumed...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sensationalist weasel words...
This number is meaningless (Score:4, Insightful)
This number is entirely meaningless.
Is a phone conversation "consumed" as its transcript (a few hundred bytes) or as an audio file (a few hundred kb) or a really well sampled audio file that conveys nuance perfectly (a few Mb)?
A tweet is 140 characters, but if I were to take a screenshot of a screen with Twitter (and about 20 tweets) that could be a couple of Mb.
And much of that "data" could be compressed in a meaningful way. I spend most of my day in my cubicle staring at my monitor. Does all of the visual data that my eyes are receiving (about eight hours' worth of grey walls and a small computer monitor's contents) count?
Shameful (Score:2, Insightful)
Shameful.
Shameful that the 'researchers' thought this information worthy of release - anyone with brain cells would revise their metrics after their data showed results like this.
Shameful that the NY Times didn't discard it as self-promotional garbage from UCSD.
Shameful that it made it to the front page of Slashdot.
Shameful.
Or reposts of the same story everywhere... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you visit any sort of tech site, you see the same stories/pictures/videos on many, many sites (this is from a blog, but I read the same story over on Gizmodo this morning).
I remember when you could come to slashdot and truly read original content. Now all these sites just seem to regurgitate the same thing.
Re:Massive exaggeration (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Massive exaggeration (Score:3, Insightful)
Opinion is information, and at least it is presented as such on Fox.
I don't understand the blind hatred for Fox by many libs --- MSNBC is the equivalent on the left, and you guys never get upset about that. CNN is left-of-center, but not as extreme. Neither separate opinion from news in their programming.
The only complaint I have with Fox is the whole "Fair and Balanced" line. They aren't balanced, and that's okay - they should own up to it.
What about our eyes? (Score:1, Insightful)
Did they forget to account that my eyes see at a higher quality than blue ray with a much wider camera angle.
Figure a blu ray movie is equal to 10 gb per hour and im awake for about 16 hours each day so thats like 160 GB of video data I consume.
Or is "TMZ" type crap (Score:3, Insightful)
where even the original is content-less, never mind all of the repros and repeats.
There is an awful lot of crap on the tube, in print and in the movies which is just more-of-the-same.
Still, with the internet, the population of the western world and Europe has never been so educated nor have had they has such opportunity to drink so deeply from the fount of knowledge.
I blame "The System" for teaching these unwashed masses to read. :-)
Yes and... (Score:4, Insightful)
any ISP peak bandwidth caps should be required by the fcc to use this as a baseline. Caps below the consumption of the average american are obviously anti-consumer.
This includes cell phone data plans of course.
Data is just data. (Score:3, Insightful)
Knowledge is data in some form of context.
Wisdom is the ability to shape these contexts correctly.
This "34 Gigabytes consumed per day" metric is worth nothing except to estimate the size of the pipe required to deliver the bilge.
Re:Massive exaggeration (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally don't watch MSNBC or CNN, so I couldn't really respond to their programing. However, I do occationally watch Fox News (good to know what others are thinking and being told). The reporting is far from fair and balanced, but they say it is to mislead their audiance. They use horrible tactics (Glenn Beck) and sometimes down right lie (Daily Show pointed this out with footage of Washington Demonstrations).
The reason you see more hate for Fox News is probably because it is not only the "libs", but some middle of the road people who take offense to their "journalism".
Also, I'd be willing to bet that Fox has much higher ratings than MSNBC. So, beign larger, they get more attention.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. I could make the outrageous claim that I am currently consuming 12 gigabytes of data per second, based on my monitor's resolution and refresh rate. And since it's hooked up over DVI-D, this is, strictly speaking, digital information.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems they converted any information you consume to digital. For example, the headline "The New York Times" would be 18 bytes encoded as characters (assuming no byte packing). Television and audio (including radio and phone) were also measured, I assume by the size of the digital signals on the provider's backend.
TV was 45% of the overall data consumed per day, clocking in at 4.5 hours of watching. That's 34GB * 45% = 15.3GB of television. 15.3GB/4.5 hours = 3.4GB/hour => ~1MB/s => ~8Mbit/s. That's a fairly reasonable (and conservative) estimate, since compressed 720p is 20Mbit/s. I'd say 34GB/day overall is a reasonable number.
median != mean (Score:1, Insightful)
First off, "your average person" implies the median person. The statistic to which this is referring is a per capita consumption, which is a mean. With such a skewed distribution (VERY large outliers), median != mean != mode, or probably anywhere close. Only with a normal distribution (or similar) does mean = median. Therefore, assuming "the average person" implies the median person, or even the mode person, the comment by the submitter is wrong.
Re:I can believe it (Score:4, Insightful)
[..] SMS messages [..]
Yes, those really add up.
On your bill, they do!!
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Using CD-quality numbers, that comes to 600MB/hour. So about 6 hours of radio per day at that rate.
Assuming average overall, as well as including ambient radio stations (most restaurants and shopping malls) I can envision 6/hr a day of hearing the radio, even if it's not active listening.