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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?"
How much of that is redirected to /dev/null?
Yes, we Americans are FAT, we get it! Just leave us, our couches, and potato chips (I mean Pringles) alone already!
how many of these is that?
you should see how much i consume in illegal MP3 / MOVIES
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...
Have you read my blog lately?
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.
is really fast there!!
36507222016 / 24 / 60 / 60 = 422,537.292
thats aprox. 3.4 mbits/s
time to upgrade America...
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...
Especially considering 10% of US internet users are still on dial up.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Shouldn't it be parsed out further into [A: something close to Truth, and B: Lies]?
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.
--alop
But, most humans only have a channel capacity of a few *bits* per decision. Means most of this consumption is not even considered; it just gets dumped. (an advertiser would tell you that getting a few of those bits is worth it, though).
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.
I was just scanning the auction house, jeeze!
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Ya... I consumed 64GB per day. That's right. I also consumed a couch last night. And I consumed an apartment. And I consumed a 2009 Mazda MP3. And I consumed a Christmas tree.
Sensationalist weasel words...
and expelled as ejaculate.
This doesn't include information at work. -8 hours. The average person doesn't consume information while sleeping. -8 hours (OK, not a full 8, but add in a shower and a shave, brushing teeth, etc. and call it 8). So how, exactly, do I consume 12 hours worth of information in my 8 waking, non-working hours?
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?
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.
When calculating the number of bytes of "information" they add: TV, Radio, etc etc, and GAMES. Games are 54.62% of the total number of bytes (see the figure 2 in page 11). Of course, you play 30 minutes GTA 4, that's like 8 gigas of your daily average. (estimate you dont access 100% of the gameplay in 30 mins, but car physics and 3d textures add a LOT of "information". Figure 11 in page 26 shows how computer games affect the equation: they take less than 10% of the average "time" and over 50% of the average "bytes of information".
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
I'll admit to sucking up gb's of data gaming. It's interesting to see their research. I know a lot of my coworkers probably suck up over a gb a day in facebook alone. Ohh facebook, how you consume idle time.....
they must of used a lot of non comcast customes
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?
-Dave
I'm not sure how I'm supposedly consuming information for 12 hours a day not including my time at work. After I work for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours, there are only 8 hours left in the day, and I'm not "consuming information" for about 100% of that remaining time. Is the average being pumped up by all the people who aren't working and are sitting at home watching daytime TV for 16 hours a day? I wouldn't consider that "information" anyway, but the study might.
Data is not "consumed." That is a ridiculous way to put it. Tt has no shelf life, it produces no waste byproducts, it can be reused indefinitely. It is transmitted, stored, deleted, and maybe in there it delivers information to a brain. Even then, do we really delete data, or just representations of data?
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.
The fish I caught was at least thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis big. Cuz biggar R bettar, u kno.
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.
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.
I see that the last mile problem has been solved. This is great! We have solved all the major issues with America including the depression, spiraling medical costs, outsourcing of jobs and crime simply with better reports.
Lies,
Damn Lies,
Statistics.
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...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
This is why the US definition for Broadband need to be at least 1Mbps, preferrably higher!
Ohs nos, Think of the children. What will they ever do? What kind of future is there when all the bits are consumed?
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.
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. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
i wonder how much of that is advertisements
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.
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
34 Gigabytes, nothing but cats.
Not everything that counts, can be counted / Not everything that can be counted, counts. Does 34 gigabytes per day have any value? That depends on whether or not you are a bureaucrat in a recession. What would be the value of 34 gigabytes per day be if you were a bereacrat? That depends on whether you are a red bureacrat or blue bureacrat.
Bwwwuuuuuuurrrrrp!
Table-ized A.I.
Per day? Hell, I do that before breakfast. Above average again! Damn, life is sweet.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
Having taken "Informatics" (which I still consider a useless course as this is the first time I have had a chance to use it in everyday life) at the university I studied at, I feel obligated to point out the fact that "information" only exists when you take "data" and put it together with a "frame of reference". Hence, the "recievers" are getting so and so many gigabytes of "data" as opposed to information.
I would be more interested in how much information was processed overall, as in without counting each tv show separately for each person watching it.
Bugger - I only have a 56K modem.
How many calories is that?
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.
nomnomnom tag?
Today I ate a carrot, which is estimated at over 1*10^9 cells, each cell has over 4*10^8 worth of DNA base pairs, at 2 bits each, that's over 100 quadrillion bytes.
I suspect the average American eats more than one carrot a day...
What needs to be done is recording the position, frequency, and time of every photon that contacts your eye. Don't forget to use 216-bit integers for timestamps, in planck times relative to the beginning of the universe.
Even though liberals hate all truth, Fox is just counted as data.
I think you are intelligent, by your use of "/dev/null". You are also signalling your intelligence. Others who understand this are probably intelligent as well (those who replied for example).
and hear etc..?
A quick googling states the the "pixel" resolution of a human eye is 576 megapixels. And lets give a conservative estimate for the refresh rate of a human eye: 30Hz. If your eyes are open for just 12 hours a day you see 76 * (10^6) * 16 * 30 * 60^2 * 12 bits = 1390457.15 GB of visual data.
These statistics are stupid.
What is my daily allotment based on a 2500 calorie diet?
Let's use these numbers constructively: 1.3 trillion hours consuming data, $14 trillion GDP. America produced $10.76/hour of data consumption by Americans. If we slow our connections down by 50%, we halve content, double the hours of data consumption, and thereby double GDP overnight, without mandating the consumption of one bit of additional data! Clearly a win-win.
My ISP caps me at 100GB a month! NO WAY I could do 32 a day!!!!!!!!!
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
THe median would be a better measure here since it's highly unlikely bandwidth consumption is a normal random variable.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They can ONLY reach those numbers by counting digital television.
But, are they counting the compressed bits, or uncompressed? Before an image reaches the display, it must be uncompressed.
Even staring at a modern DVI-or-HDMI-connected computer monitor with a static, unchanging picture/image is to be staring at an amazing stream of uncompressed bits flying at your eyes. Are they counting this?
My monitor I'm looking at right now is 1920x1080 @ 60Hz, RGB-8-bit color, DVI-connected, a data rate streaming at me of nearly 1.5 gigabits per second. Whether computing, looking at a screensaver, typing, or watching HD video, that doesn't change. So if I'm looking at it 2 hours a day, that's ( 1,485 megabits * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hours * 2 hours ) all divided by 8 bits/byte = 180 gigabits, or roughly 1 1/4 terabytes of data. Perhaps I average that over 30 days. That's over 38 terabytes per month.
I guess that answers my question. A person watching full 1080p HDTV at least 2 hours per day should also hit the 38 terabyte per month figure at least.
So the article is off by several considerable orders of magnitude.
Hehe!
however it was mostly catabolic data, consuming more information that it provided.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
The human genome is about 800 megabytes. I'll bet that with the one sandwich I consumed far more than my daily 34 gigabytes. This doesn't include the information processes involved in bringing that food in its current form into my kitchen, or the dustmites and mold spores and ...
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
Lets see what's skewed that average: .01 GB a day
p2p compulsive downloaders stealing music, movies, software and porn 24x7 60% avg: 350GB a day
windows malware sending spam 28% avg 15GB a day
users downloading netflix and other legitimate media they paid for 8% avg 4GB a day
median user using internet for news and email 4% avg
Look ma, I can make up statistics too! Mine are probably more accurate.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
and it hardly ever writes to disk, so you guys better stop using up all the Gigabytes!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
meaningless I don't think is a strong enough word. Stupid comes to mind.
Other examples might be me consuming information by say looking at a tree for 10min. That's like better than 1080p man!
Perhaps doing anything in life I am gathering "information", though like my senses, like touching or hearing things... not to mention my extra sensory perceptions!
Also to add an additional level of stupidity/complexity are those 34GB compressed or not? If so all those memories in photo or video format could be totally reduced (and to be honest they likely are).
Anyway I have already spent 10 minutes too many writing about this ridiculous topic.
30% of internet users have no internet access? That is truly alarming. But impressive.
The title of this makes me feel like I should be a yellow circle and running from ghosts...
TFS and TFA grossly underestimate the data stream, at least for people who are not blind. The whole time our eyes are open, you and I are consuming terabytes' worth of high definition "video" per hour, and it is all processed in realtime. What is the resolution of the human eye equivalent to in terms of pixels at a given viewing distance, what would the color depth be, and what would that stream be uncompressed? That doesn't take into account the equivalent data produced by your other four senses.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
These data suggest that consumption has only increaded by 1/3 in 30 years!. If you factor in the fact that the internet has displaced a significant amount of TV viewing and book reading, then growth in data consumtion is even less.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
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.'
12 hours a day of data consumption, work not included? Either you Americans don't sleep, or we've just found a possible cause of the economic crisis.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
Useful data is very different from "data" like TV and movies.
I was a TV-a-holic and have a movie collection with almost 1 thousand DVDs. I haven't jumped to BluRay - not a sports or pron fan, so anything better than DVD seems a waste of money to me.
Isn't the average BluRay disk 35GB? Then add the 10GB of stuff they make you watch that you don't want to watch on that disk. No thanks.
...times 2 times 2/3 times 300 million and you've got it.
Notes:
Other senses are negligible in data rate compareed to the eye
2 eyes
assume people are awake two-thirds of the time
US population is about 300 million
Of course we still have the question of what it means to "consume" information, but hey, we're all "consumers", right?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Spam. After all hasn't it been stated that 90% of all traffic on the net is do to spam?
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
When I was a university professor, I reserved the right to subtract more than 100% of the value of an exam question if the student gave with a ridiculous answer (for example answering that the current in a circuit with a 12V power supply and resistors with values of Kohms was so many mega amps). I fear that the authors of this work need a similar "wake up" slap.