A new study sponsored by AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology discovered that the amount of information we recieved throught our eyes and ears in 2008, ouside of work, was the equivalent to a stack of paperback novels seven feet high covering the continental U.S. and Alaska! That translates into 3.6 zettabytes, or 3.6 trillion gigabytes. The average American recieves 34 gigabytes of information a day outside the workplace. One gigabyte is close to 1 hour of high-definition video.
The study sifted through information that people come in contact with in hours, words and bytes from TV, radio, computers, phones, print, music and theatrical movies, but all outside of the workplace. Total consumption in 2008 totaled 1.3 trillion hours, that’s 11.8 hours per person per day (Figure seems high because a person might be reading and watching TV while the radio plays in the background would be triplecounted.) The average amount of words consumed per day per person in 2008 was 100,500.
This is not to say that people are absorbing all the data, meaning a TV set might be on in the living room, but we’re not always paying attention. The study will be used mainly for marketing as it defines how many bits and bytes are entering households, spots trends in media use, and will help identify technologies needed to support data growth.
Source: Investor’s Business Daily
