american way of information consumption: 1.3 trillion hours, 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words in 2008
Posted on 11. Dec, 2009 by wolfgang in all
a recent study of roger e. bohn and james e. short from the global information industry center university of california, san diego reveals fascinating numbers for the information overload. their 2009 report on american consumers “how much information?” shows the average american consumes about 34 gigabytes of information per day, whereby the term information is defined as flow of data delivered to people and the term data means “artificial signals intended to convey meaning”. Therefore they were interested in a wide variety of types of information:
- text in readable form such as on a printed page or cell phone display
- moving pictures on a tv, in a movie theater or on a computer screen
- an mp3 audio track received through earphones or speakers
- an electronic spreadsheet
bohn and short measured the bytes (infoc) , words (infow) and hours (infoh) of consumer information:
how much information? 2009 report on american consumers, p.13
how much information? 2009 report on american consumers, p.12
how much information? 2009 report on american consumers, p.11
head over and read / download the full report!
