There’s a pretty interesting report that was just published today entitled “How much information?” It was put together by the Global Information Industry of the University of California at San Diego. It looks at the year 2008 and tries to quantify how much information the average American consumes across all forms of media: TV, newspaper, Web sites, radio, you name it. When you crunch all the numbers, it looks like the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of data every single day. (That’s 3.6 zettabytes in total.) That’s a lot, yes.
The report says that Americans consume information for an average of 12 hours per day. And this may be a dagger through some of your hearts, but “old media” (TV and radio) make up 60 percent of all consumed hours.
The word “Twitter” does not appear in the report at all. Call your congressman.
Americans consume 100,000 words per day on average. That includes all words read, all words heard, etc.
Americans are also on the computer for an average of two hours per day. It’s safe to say that everyone here at TC/CG isn’t “average” in that respect.
In other words, Americans consume a tremendous amount of information every day.
Wow, if only I had a tablet or “pad” that I could use to visualize all that data.
Something simple for “crunching” all that data.
If that’s how much Americans take in, then imagine how much intake the people in other countries would have! Kidding :P
Don’t forget color-coded charts along with words!
“A tremendous amount of information” doesn’t necessarily equal a good thing. I would assume most of the information is would be similar to stuff you put on your desktop for easy access and then delete soon after it’s used. lol
I wonder how much bandwidth the word “lol” consumes. And in turn, removing it from the internet lexicon might prevent global climate change.
This made me laugh out loud…if only there was a way for me to shorten that and still have everyone know that I was sitting at my desk laughing…out loud. Very funny.
Weird: phone is 5.4%, but talking to people right next to you you doesn’t even figure on the chart.
ohhhhh….Americana may wants more….:d
Really that’s it. I think I eat more than that for breakfast.
Color coded charts are awesome…
I wonder how much information is actually retained
this has to be one of the stupidest studies of all time.. hopefully it wasnt paid for by our stimulas package :)
A usefull study would be how much ELECTRONIC information a person uses though.. but including sources like the Newspaper kind of makes this study worthless.
How else would it be measured??
Of course Twitter is not mentioned, do you actually believe that those 140char tweets add up to anything substantial? Or that Twitter has a large chunk of the US populace? Wake up, Twitter is tiny. It’s only a big deal fad amongst “tech” bloggers like you Nicholas. Farmville game on Facebook alone is larger than Twitter.
Good thing Comcast has the 250 GB monthly limit in place. Otherwise we could overdose on information!
I wonder how much of that supposed 34GB is composed of meaningless drivel like this?
I will now waste more gigabytes finding out who the:
Global Information Industry of the University of California at San Diego
is exactly and why they hate academic rigor.
I bet this study is skewed by the huge amount of porn that gets downloaded. I’d be more interested in a study on the quality and nature of information being downloaded into american brains on a daily basis…
That’s the catalyst for business cases like http://www.filespots.com and http://www.dropbox.com
By The way excellent graphs!
What a dumb article and dumb number. WTF.. it all depends on resolution, storage media.. etc. The same number can be huge amounts of information or not..
GARBAGE can’t you write something that matters?
My first reaction to seeing this was to think, “I know I use a lot of bandwidth, but not ‘that’ much bandwidth, not to mention that I probably use more than normal people”. Until I looked at the image at the top. Of course if you include everything from TVs to Cell Phones, to keyboards, to video games, the average person will consume over 30 GB, and even still, that’s just an arbitrary number.
Far from being garbage this is very important. we have no idea of the consequences of pouring so much information into people. Particularly as a goodly proportion of it is dangerously manipulative marketing and much downright lies or fantasies. I for one have had enough. I have cancelled all my magazine subscriptions, got rid of the TV completely, stopped taking newspapers and I’m trying to cut down on the Internet. One thing not noted in the article – information is NOT knowledge and is unlikely to lead to wisdom.
And then gets digested and Sh!t back through twitter, facebook, myspace, etc.
The web is turning into one big infomercial and re-tuned information.
When papers ran the information, information was more focused and informative. Now I need to move through so much garbage to reach something original and worthy.
It’s less CONSUMING, it’s more of “being confronted with”, at least regarding visual and acoustic information, as reading is a process requiring higher rational involvement.
the human brain does a great job in self-selecting information being processed furtheron to reach consciousness. It’s not that people could intentionally control that process.
I think my brain needs more RAM to handle it all.
This is why the 5GB cap by all the wireless company’s when tethering is just unacceptable.
Like food, overeating information is not healthy.
Good thing I have FIOS 20mbit/20mbit service to eat more bandwidth.
This article seems to use a strange definition of “information.” Surely the majority of the information we take in is simple visual data from the world around us?
wow. just wow. that’s a lot. i remember my first hard drive (after cassette tape) was a whopping 10 megs.
man i’m old.
I think this is an important area to study…but the way its been done is absurd.
The human brain primarily receives input from the world around us and that doesn’t really depend on the “electronic and print input” you have.
I’m pretty sure the average joe on the street who doesn’t have have wireless broadband or hi-def TVs takes in more info than 34gigs…
I’m no math whiz but just looking out the window watching birds fly or the traffic below can account for hundreds of megs of data in computer terms.
I think it depends upon how you define ‘consume’ and ‘information’. I’m sure that 34GB of stuff is hurled at me every day but I bet the actual amount of ‘information’ is much smaller and the amount of it I ‘consume’ instead of just skip or scan is probably smaller yet.