In a recently released study from the University of California, San Diego, Americans were found to consume about 1.3 trillion hours of information. in 2008 Eating up 3.6 zettabytes of information and 10,845 trillion words, that equals out to 34 gigabytes and 100,500 words each day, per person!
Uh, Zettabyte?!? A zettabyte = a 1 with 21 zeros. In regards to the 3.6 zettabytes… the study points out “if we printed 3.6 zettabytes of text in books, and stacked them as tightly as possible across the United States including Alaska, the pile would be 7 feet high.”
This isn’t to say that we read 100,500 words a day though… In the paper “How Much Information?,” authors Roger Bohn and James Short define “information” as “flows of data delivered to people.” They measure the data by “the bytes, words and hours of consumer information.” So, rather, it means that we come across 100,500 words a day. The leading source of information is video sources (1.3 zettabytes from television and almost 2 zettabytes from computer games) with radio and Internet rising not too far behind. Reading has even tripled from 1980 to 2008, “because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.” An even more shocking jump – a previous study estimated only .3 zettabytes consumed worldwide in 2007 (3,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 more than UCSD’s recent findings for 2008).
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For a bit more, Nick Bilton of the New York Times sat with Roger Bohn to discuss his recent findings.
