Your Digital Life Will Only Get More Crowded... If You Let It

Nerval's Lobster writes "By 2015, Americans' ability to access digital media at home and on mobile devices will raise the average volume of media consumed to the equivalent of nine DVDs worth of data per person, per day – not including whatever media they consume at work. That estimate adds up to 15.5 hours of media use per day per person, which breaks down to 74 gigabytes of data per person and a national, collective total of 8.75 zettabytes, according to a new report. Between 2008 and 2013, Americans grew from watching 11 hours of media per day to 14 hours per day – a growth rate of about 5 percent per year, lead author James E. Short wrote in the report. The increasing number of digital-data consumers and the shift from analog to digital media drove the total volume of data in bytes to grow 18 percent per year. That growth rate 'is less than the capacity to process data, driven by Moore's Law, [of about] 30 percent per year,' he added, 'but is still impressive.' Social media is growing even faster than other options – 28 percent per year, from 6.3 billion hours in 2008 to an estimated 35.2 billion hours in 2015. Companies expecting to catch the attention of either employees or customers will have to do so in the context of an increasingly media-swamped population. Digital data consumption will continue to rise, the SDSC projections estimate, possibly to more than an average of 24 hours per person per day – which is only possible assuming multiple simultaneous data streams running through the minds of Americans watching TV, browsing the Web and texting each other simultaneously, probably to ask why they never have time to just sit and talk any more."

Comments

if you let it

[themushroom]

Between 2008 and 2013, Americans grew from watching 11 hours of media per day to 14 hours per day

And also grew from weight 140 pounds to 190 pounds.

Re:if you let it

[Anonymous Coward]

What a stupid storyof course your consumption will increase IF YOU LET IT. To quote my niece, "Duh."

That post is 100 bytes long.

In 1995, that would've been the end of it, but here in 2013 we need a high-res mashup of your niece saying "Duh" above a hip hop tune, so it would probably turn out to be 10MB.

Just trying to figure out where all that "progress" is going.

Re:if you let it

[Anonymous Coward]

Between 2008 and 2013, Americans grew from watching 11 hours of media per day to 14 hours per day

And also grew from weight 140 pounds to 190 pounds.

Use your brain for something other than fat bashing.

That only leaves 10 hrs a day for other things. What it says is people come home from work and sit in front of the TV, don't shower, and get less than 8 hrs sleep. And this is suppose to be the average. If it were true, you wouldn't see people outside, or shopping, or doing anything else in the community. heck the streets would be quiet and empty after peak hour.

EVERYBODY PANIC

[Press2ToContinue]

'cause good fear-based reporting is always appropriately met with a good panic.

Re:bulls!@$

[dgatwood]

The summary is misleading. What the study actually says is that the total amount of content that the average person requests, if that person took the time to fully read or watch it would take 15.5 hours per day to fully consume. That's a very critical difference.

For example, let's say you read Slashdot. You read the headline, you read the summary (maybe), you read the article (hah!), and then you open up the comments, skim a few of them, and post a comment or two of your own. However, there are 500 comments farther down the page that you did not read. You spent three minutes on the page, but if you had read and digested every comment, it would have taken forty minutes. This study says that you consumed forty minutes of media.

It's not about how much time you spend consuming media, but rather how much media you are exposed to. This statistic is interesting for entirely different reasons than the amount of time you actually spent. It is a better indicator of how well informed you are (assuming the media is informative, or else it indicates how well you know your memes), and is a good indicator of how much bandwidth you use. By contrast, the amount of time you actually spent is a good metric for obesity and other health problems. :-)

... or "by 2015 nobody will be allowed to sleep"

[Guy Smiley]

This seems like extrapolation gone mad. People will consume almost 16h of media every day excluding work hours so they'll either be watching two shows simultaneously in the 8 non-work, non-sleep hours in the day? Or they will watch 16 hours of media and never sleep? Ah, "consumption" in the original paper means media delivery to the household, with no guarantee anybody is even paying attention (I'd guess set top box on but TV is off, click on 1h YouTube video but stop after the first 20 seconds).

"Your digital life will only get more crowded if

[dyingtolive]

you let it, otherwise in which case it won't." Research in the "We Point Out Bullshit Stories and Also Comment on Ones That Are True" department at the Tautology Research Institute has found that, technically, if you word your headlines precisely enough, you can pass bullshit as 'news' and still be correct.

They don't actually mean 15 hours in front of a TV

[AdamHaun]

Note that the report (third link) treats data (bytes) and time (hours) as separate measurements. The various summaries are mixing 15.5 hours with 9 DVDs, which is not correct. Also of note: media consumed at work is not included in the estimate.

Also, as the summary points out, consumption is defined in terms of what goes over the network and for how long, not what actually gets attention. Thus, it's possible to double or even triple your rate of media "consumption" without spending any more time or attention than you did before.

Still disturbing, though.

Re:... or "by 2015 nobody will be allowed to sleep

[dgatwood]

Exactly. The person who wrote the summary apparently didn't actually read the article, but he/she consumed it. :-D

Oblig. Xkcd: Extrapolating

[darkshot117]

http://xkcd.com/605/

And then by 2023 we will be consuming 25 hours of media per day.

Re:... or "by 2015 nobody will be allowed to sleep

[AmiMoJo]

If someone could develop a DVR that edited out the filler I'd buy in immediately. There is so much padding and time wasting in TV shows and movies I could halve the time I spend watching most of them.

Mythbusters is one of the worst offenders. That show could be about 10 minutes long, but somehow gets padded to 45 minutes. The 10 minutes of real content is actually quite good, but I don't watch it any more because I got fed up of pressing the skip forward button every few seconds.

Re:... or "by 2015 nobody will be allowed to sleep

[Megane]

I don't get cable TV, only antenna, but I set up a MythTV box a few months ago. While some of what it records is duplicates (because I'm using the EIT information rather than an external schedule service, and there is an old MythTV bug that causes incorrect descriptions to be saved in the schedule database), the number of things that I say "hey, that would be cool to watch" and tell it to record is now really starting to stack up. And that's when most TV stations only have 12 hours ahead of schedules, so I'm tagging them only a few hours in advance! (But mostly it's the fault of the local 3-stream PBS station. There's a lot of cool random stuff on KLRU-Q.)