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?"
I can believe it (Score:3, Interesting)
Just think of ALL the information... Pandora in the background, HDTV at home... pr0n.... SMS messages. I guess this includes things like the Newspaper you'd pick up in the morning, or the leaflet you grab in a lobby of a building. It can all be considered data.
I would be interested in how much *information* we consume also.
window (Score:5, Interesting)
If I look outside my window and observe reality in its full high-definion glory, am I consuming data?
If not, what if I set up a camera outside my home and watch the video feed on my televion?
Anthropomorphizing data (Score:3, Interesting)
Prolific (Score:2, Interesting)
What has become prolific is the amount of useless (read advertising) information consumed each day. And, ironically, we consume more paper (in our paperless society) than ever to print all this crap out. The bean counting business has never been better. Just another day in a bureaucrat's paradise...