Wednesday, December 9, 2009

1201 Alarm

From the category "Near Useless but Nice to Know" we have this gem: Carpe Diem: "American Information Diet: 34 Gigabytes Per Day"

Americans in all our glory take in an estimated 34 Gigabytes a day from all sources including TV (44.85%), Recorded Music (1%), Print media (8.61%) and computer (26.97%). (Note: All these numbers are from 2008.)

The study was an aggregate of all consumption of the U.S. public (I can't even imagine trying to figure this out) and then portioned out per capita. The total number reflects some enormous number with a name that looks made up: 3.6 Zettabytes (which is defined as 10 to the 21st power bytes). The estimate is that each American spends 12 hours taking in all this "stuff": see chart below.

You know, since I was still kind of stewing over that article yesterday regarding the fact that 4 in 10 Americans do not pay taxes means they most likely are either not working or not working enough. This leaves them with all this time to take in TV and Internet (the two largest bite of the pie above). No wonder Americans are taking in so much data, 12 hours per day they are not working!!

BT: Jimmy T sends.

2 comments:

Buck said...

That's pretty interesting stuff. I chased down the pdf and bookmarked it for a future read... coz I've just about hit my data-intake limit for the day. ;-)

JimmyT said...

Buck, it is interesting an amazing if true.

BT: Jimmy T sends.