Study Shows We Consume 34GB of Data Daily

Comcast and AT&T are reading that and probably having heart palpitations. Still, 34GB is a hell of a lot of data. Does that include television watching and listening to the MP3 player, I wonder?

Yeah, television, radio, etc.

Utterly irrelevant. I just looked out my office window for a minute. Let's assume my eyes (taken together) have an equivalent 10Mp resolution, and operate at an equivalent of 30FPS. Using 24bit pixels (3 bytes), in that minute I processed 54GB of data. That doesn't count the chatter my one good ear was picking up, temperature and pressure data on my skin, etc. etc.
There's no story here. Next...

useless study. How would one quantify how much information our eyes see? Our eyes can see in resolutions far beyond anything an electronic device can simulate. How would you measure the sheer clarity that we can see into bytes of images you can measure?

Even if this study was valid...
Is this compressed or uncompressed? ;o)
That weould be a big difference.

Jacked in BORG v1.0

yay to consumerism, soon we gonna have to be concerned about the Laws of Conservation of Information

so much porn...delicious, delicious porn

"Consumed information" is a pointless measure anyway. What's important is how much of that information is important and how much of that important information is retained.

this is pretty much a useless experiment..

Actually your comment is what is irrelevant. The article is about how much data is consumed through forms of MEDIA on average. Not how much data is processed through your actual day to day life through your eyes and ears.

Not quite, FoShizzleDizzle, not quite.

Something is not right with the study. You have 100k words per day. Sound like a lot, a veritable shit ton in fact. But to store these words on a computer as a TXT file would be about 600k, and thats on the high side (you can see how many 3 letters word I use here, can't you?).

Now, take the 100k words and store it as a spoken 64kbps MP3 mono file. Considerably bigger, as it takes about 500 minutes to actually say all those words at 200wpm. This is of course 30kS, which is a 245MB file. And thats low quality mono MP3 @ 44.1kHz. Now, try storing it as an uncompressed WAV file -- likely what the study did as our ears are the ultimate in audio anyways (proof: if one can make an audio file more precise than our ears it is a waste of information). Now this becomes 5.4GB. Our little old 600k TXT file = 5.4GB WAV file.

Now, take our 500 minute spoken interaction and add words to it. Presumably, this would be the equivelant of receiving your 100,000 words via BluRay movies all day. For shits and giggles, lets compress the audio again but do so with, say, DTS @ 1.5Mbps (yes, BD uses a higher bitrate). Roughly speaking, you can get away with 1080p at 10Mbps (BD will be higher; but this should represent most HD cable stations). Now with these parameters we're at 44.2GB.

Its fundamentally meaningless to weight different forms of data equally.

100,000 words:

600k as TXT
245MB as MP3
5.4GB as WAV
44.2GB as 1080p/DTS.

Yet the same information is there -- the 100,000 words. (One may argue, of course, the video stream attached has some information, but this still illustrates the point that information is not to be measured in bits.)

Now, your reaction is to be expected. It will likely be of the form "The study measured data, not information." Quite true. However, as you can plainly see the amount of data does not indicate whatsoever the quantity of information contained. One may use 5GB when merely 600kB sufficies. Given this, I don't understand how you can defend the study as having any purpose. The idea that we consume 34GB per day may very well be a good approximation of the actual facts, but what does it mean? It certainly does NOT indicate how much information we use. The Internet likely comprises the lowest percent of that 34GB, yet it is by far the most useful day-to-day tool. Let me see the TV answer your questions; the TV is a simple device that is one-way communication (it is a "dumb" device.)

She looks like she is in pain upgrade your grey matter hun...

Hmm you'd think the amount of data transfered between your brain and sensory nerves would blow way past a simple 34 gigs. Just to walk your brain has to have massive amounts of communication. Not to mention your eyes and how they "auto focus" or your muscles being told what to do. Simple typing would require "on off" type situations. Just image since your hand is moving in a 3d plane the amount of "calculations" your brain is really doing and communicating back and forth..

34 GB seems a lot, but is only about 20 min of NTSC resolution TV (720 x 480 x 3bytes x 30fps x 1200 seconds). I think all other medias together will not even reach 10% of those 34GB. That is why the data consumed has not increased more with the time, because the TV is old but is still the media with more traffic by far.

Ok... converting words to bytes for getting an estimate that mean nothing...?

I could do a stupid research like this too.

By the way, this study make you think that a media like a news papers actually making a different paper for every american... same for a news broadcast.

This is rubbish and mean absolutely nothing. If you want to know how much data you are using, just check your internet bill.

So.... if we don't consider pR0n, how much is it really?

This study is not stupid. but people leaving comments here are. This study is measuring the amount of man made data (transmitted electronically) consumed. birdwatching doesn't count, retards. And btw, "consumed" doesn't mean a human brain absorbed it 100% and understands it. By the comments here it is obvious that simple text is beyond the capacity of many that are consuming it.

OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That would blow my bandwidth cap in 1.5 days.

Fixed!

hahaha, we need more storage...in our brain's.

well I for one have plenty of time, no job, and hardly ever watch TV!
I also don't have a phone.
I regularly check my network traffic, and we're well below 30GB per month, even with an occasional youtube or TV episode download.

The majority of that data transfer comes from RAW TV data, or lowly compressed TV signals.
34 GB would mean a webpage of text that would take a full lifetime to read!
34GB of photo's would be about 9000 8Mpix photo's, which again would be a lifetime worth of photo's.
It would take 3400 minutes or almost 2,5 full 24 hour days of RAW Audio CD, or 25-30 days of compressed music @ CD quality.
So obviously the results are deducted from video data, which equals about 80 hours of 480p video, or 40 hours of 1080p video.

What a stupid study, what was it for? To eventually realize the creation of a stupid implant that charges us on how much media we consume?
I would find it more intriguing to read a study about how many seconds it would take a humans complete brain activity to be recorded in every computational way feasible to fill up 1 petabyte (1024 terabytes) of information. Such a study would make some people realize our drastically wasted potential in life.

Johnny 5 only had a 20 GB hard drive. How can Johnny Five be alive?

The internet is a bad place m'boy...

...soon you shall probably see the darker side of it...



-coughfurriescoughcoughcough-

soooooo, if speaking in GB terms, how many GB`s can our brains store! i`m sorry to say, this is dumb, unless they show the article which explains in detail what this was based on its pointless...

before I get a smart ass comment, the "full" article does not show all that much either and leaves many questions.

Whatever the real number is, that is a crap ton of data.

I think "consume" is the wrong word for this.

I am "consuming" electricity when I am on the computer or watching TV.
I am "consuming" paper if I print something out.
I am "consuming" gasoline in my car when I am driving and listening to the radio.

As for the data itself I'm not really consuming it. In reality the little 1's and 0's are not being consumed...they are being shared...



...and I shared 34GB just in porn last night. They need to up that number some.

if you consider, radio, music, that stupid t\/ in the grocery store, t\/ in your home, cell phone data, etc etc. Then I can see that. I know for a fact that I don't actually consume that much, and I am on the high side of data consumption, always downloading something or watching hulu or other t\/ programs/gaming. But 34 gigs a day? i don't think so. well... unless i watch like 5 high def t\/ shows in a row. that's a hunk of data there. :-p