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

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).

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