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12-11-2009
INFORMATION CONSUMED: 3.6 ZETTABYES; 10,845 TRILLION WORDS
The amount of information consumed by Americans in 2008 totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, according to a report released Dec. 9 by researchers at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), "How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers."
For an average person on an ordinary day, this represents 34 gigabytes of data and 100,500 words.
Findings::
* A 1980 study estimated that Americans received slightly more than seven hours of information on an average day.
* Americans are now exposed to 11.8 hours of information each day, based on the new UCSD study, which calculated only the amount of information flowing into American households. It did not include the amount of information received in the workplace.
* One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes; these units of information are used to define digital information storage capacities. To determine the 1.3 trillion hours of information Americans consumed in 2008, researchers looked at 20 sources of activities unrelated to work, including movies, cellphones, television, the Internet, video games, newspapers, magazines, books and music.
* Television, in all its forms, consumes the most hours of Americans' time, but only a medium number of bytes to which they're exposed."
* [The report] definitely showed us that texting and tweeting are on the rise.
* Americans spent 16 percent of their information hours browsing the Internet, which is second only to television's 41 percent.
LINK TO ENTIRE ARTICLE.
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