Study Shows We Consume 34GB of Data Daily
Some of us spend more time online than others (guilty), but according to a recent study, the average American consumes roughly 34 gigabytes of data and information each day.
A recent study by the Global Information Industry of the University of California at San Diego looked at the year 2008 and tried to quantify how much information the average American consumes across all forms of media: TV, newspaper, internet and radio.
According to the report, Americans consumed information for 1.3 trillion hours last year, 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.
The group defined "information" as flows of data delivered to people and measured the bytes, words, and hours of consumer information.
Hours of information consumption grew at 2.6 percent per year from 1980 to 2008, due to a combination of population growth and increasing hours per capita, from 7.4 to 11.8. More surprising is that information consumption in bytes increased at only 5.4 percent per year. Yet the capacity to process data has been driven by Moore's Law, rising at least 30 percent per year. One reason for the slow growth in bytes is that color TV changed little over that period. High-definition TV is increasing the number of bytes in TV programs, but slowly.
Check out the full study here.
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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jellico 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?Reply -
JMcEntegart jellicoComcast 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?Reply
Yeah, television, radio, etc. -
Onus 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.Reply
There's no story here. Next... -
Socnom 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?Reply -
spectrewind Socnomuseless 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?Reply
Even if this study was valid...
Is this compressed or uncompressed? ;o)
That weould be a big difference. -
Parsian yay to consumerism, soon we gonna have to be concerned about the Laws of Conservation of InformationReply -
"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.Reply