Discussed: daily media consumption, zettabytes, information, content,
The video in my previous post had me go back to a study that I remembered reading about how much “information” each American consumes on a single day. If you think that the amount is gargantuan, you are right. The numbers are 34 gigabytes and 100’000 words* a day, the digital equivalent I guess of 15 Big Macs with cheese and large fries. Something like that. Annually, it’s measured in a word that you may not yet, be familiar with, “zettabytes”. Those numbers come from a study released last year by the University of California in San Diego. And since they’re big, the authors kindly provide us with an nice table to size it all.
“Information” in this context needs to be qualified. “We defined “information” as flows of data delivered to people and we measured the bytes, words, and hours of consumer information ” write the authors.
And so this is the digital diet that is now our common lot in the developed world. (I suspect that the figures might not be that different in most G8 countries.) And I am tempted to say that the word “information” should actually be replaced by the word “content”. Content today is what people spend their time absorbing. It’s where they spend their time and how much time they spend watching, reading, “ingesting” flows. Content no longer implies “meaning” or “sense”. In this quantity, at warp speed, it is indeed just bytes. *We don’t read 100’000 words a day of course, we are bombarded, or immersed in 100’000 words a day. The graph below shows the “wordflow”.
This is what our connected homes have become. And our appetite doesn’t seem to be abating as accessing information and connecting to the “flows” becomes easier thru better technology and friendlier interfaces. The study estimates that overall, our information consumption has grown a steady 6% each year between 1980 and 2008, year of the study. We may even be oblivious to our technological environment. Again, an illustration from that study serves as a reminder:
I guess we better get used to the word “zettabyte”.
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