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?"

Comments

Re:Yes, but...

[Bakkster]

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.