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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?
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!!
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.
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
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.
My file structure is NTFS, you insensitive clod!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
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...
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.
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
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.
Easy there, he's just trying to get a Reiser out of you.
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.
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
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.
Bugger - I only have a 56K modem.