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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?
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?
Especially considering 10% of US internet users are still on dial up.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[..] SMS messages [..]
Yes, those really add up.
On your bill, they do!!
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