U.S. households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to the “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” released today by the University of California, San Diego. One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes, and total bytes consumed last year were the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.
The How Much Information? project is creating a census of the world’s information in 2008. The study measured information consumed by U.S. consumers in and outside the home for non-work related reasons, and included the gamut of information sources, including going to the movies, listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and reading the newspaper, among other things.
“This report is a snapshot of what the information revolution means to the average American on an average day, who consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information,” said report author Roger Bohn, Director of the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. “The total volume of 3.6 zettabytes consumed last year is much larger than previous studies have reported, partly because they measured different views of information, such as information creation rather than consumption. Also, nobody had looked at the role of computer games, which generate a staggering number of bytes.”
The new report estimates that between 1980 and 2008, bytes consumed increased 350 percent, for an average annual growth rate of 5.4 percent. According to the report, the average American’s information consumption of 34 gigabytes a day is the equivalent of about one fifth of a notebook computer’s hard drive, depending on the model.
Hourly statistics confirm that a large chunk of the average American’s day is spent watching television. The new report estimates that on average 41 percent of information time is watching TV (including DVDs, recorded TV and real-time watching). American consumers watched 36 million hours of television on mobile devices each month – a number that, while expected to grow, is a fraction of the hours spent watching television at home.
To allow comparisons with earlier studies, the UC San Diego report’s authors devised mathematical formulas to convert all information statistics into words, bytes and the number of hours spent consuming information.
This initial report focuses on the U.S. consumer sector (both inside and outside the home, including use of cell phones and movie-watching). Future reports will focus on information in the U.S. workplace, in other regions, and different types of information (such as machine-to-machine data that is analyzed automatically and may never be seen by human eyes).
More information: The report, “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers”, is available online and can be downloaded in PDF format at http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo.php
Provided by University of California – San Diego (web)