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Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the gonna-need-more-than-isdn dept.

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?"

7 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, but... by tool462 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How much of that is redirected to /dev/null?

    1. Re:Yes, but... by dotgain · · Score: 4, Insightful

      and did they calculate the total the same way as they do the "street value" of "drugs"? 34 gigs a day, come on...

    2. Re:Yes, but... by Medieval_Gnome · · Score: 4, 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.

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      :wq

    3. Re:Yes, but... by Bakkster · · 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.

      --
      Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
  2. Massive exaggeration by 14erCleaner · · Score: 4, 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...

    --
    Have you read my blog lately?
  3. Consumed...? by eepok · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  4. This number is meaningless by jcronen · · 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?