800 Megs of Data Per Person Last Year?

Ant writes "Growing net, computer and phone use is driving a huge rise in the amount of information people generate and use. US researchers estimate that every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet. Their study found that information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical disks has doubled since 1999. Paper is still proving popular though. The amount of information stored in books, journals and other documents has grown 43% in three years."

Comments

Re:What about redundant information?

[t0rnt0pieces]

The article fails to address the issue of redundant information

You mean stuff like this?

Re:Only 800Mb per year

[bersl2]

Personally, I find that figure insulting.

I mean, I'm worth at least a gig...

This would be more interesting

[mcc]

If in generating the average they could discount the extremes.

Some of us go through a truly silly amount of data. There's a nontrivial number of people reading this discussion who exhaust their dorm's 1 GB bandwidth cap every day.

On the other hand there's somewhere a barefoot palestinian refugee child for whom not so much as a piece of paperwork was generated since he was born.

These two extremes would probably tend to distort things. It would be interesting to find out if the study was based on usage of storage data as it appears and these extremes were included in the study, or if they just (being Americans) couldn't be bothered when compiling their study to talk to geeks and starving african children. If the former, i'd be curious how their results would change if they could somehow just like chop off the ends of the bell curve.