Study finds Americans consume 34 gigabytes of information per day
By Donald Melanson 
posted December 9th 2009 7:49PM
posted December 9th 2009 7:49PM
Well, it's a good thing life comes with an unlimited data plan, as a recent study conducted by the University of California, San Diego has found that Americans consume plenty of gigabytes in the average day. Thirty-four gigabytes, to be specific, which translates to a grand total of of 3.6 zettabytes of information consumed by American households in 2008 (or 3.6 billion trillion bytes). Of course, that doesn't just consist of gigabytes "consumed" the traditional way, but instead encompasses everything from TV (still the leader by a wide margin) to phone calls to newspapers. In terms of time, the study found that Americans spent about 11.8 hours a day consuming information in one way or another, the majority of which was spent staring at a screen of some sort -- and, yes, they did take HD content into account, but its growth apparently hasn't yet resulted in a huge jump in data consumption.
I consume about the same amount of Diet Coke daily. I'm going to drop dead any minute now.
If only eating junk food could also be measured in terms on GBs.
@fanboykiller
*in terms of*
@fanboykiller Well if you want to do the conversion then reading Engadget is like eating junk food and reading Dickens or Steinbeck, or the like, is akin to a good wholesome meal.
1.78GB of information from your phone per day? On averege? WTF?
I'd better go on a diet. My bandwidth has expanded.
.068GB per day for movies? With all the torrent sites in the world, that's it? Really? Hear that MPAA, you're full of shit!
Yes they consume 34 gigabytes a day.... but for the majority of the population, only 34 byte :)
you mean information = porn, then yes.
I am happy that they changed the font from Times New Roman, it is much better now!
Some very interesting info in that report. I've saved it to read more carefully when I have time.
One thing to point out to people is that 'Movies' is only counting viewing movies in a cinema. Watching a DVD counts as TV. *shrugs*
Too much data.
At some point we will reach some threshold and our brains will implode (or explode) it will be a datarific mess.
Please, everyone, don't read the report, it will hasten the apocalypse!
And stop watching TV, your continued cranial integrity depends on it!
University of California doesn't just have too much time on their hands, but its credibility is highly suspect with numbers like 1.7GB of phone data per day for the average user.
Not only would you need to recharge your phone at least twice, considering you have a prototype, NSA-certified battery, but that also means that in equilibrium, the abundance of passive users would have to be countered by people that use 2GB+ per day on their phone...
ET, put the friggin' phone down.
HD TV has little impact on data 'consumption'?
... A lie if I ever read one.
And as mentioned, how does print equate to a whopping 2.9GB+ of data? Most people don't read that much in a lifetime, let alone a phone-browsing, tv-addicted, fapping radiohead in "11.8 hours".
My two bytes.
All this info yet America seems to have the most active ignorant and uninformed population levels/ nothing like using the internet's to spew racist and homophobic slurs while online/ another question would be how much of this so called consumption of info is actually accurate/ in other words how much does faux news account for/ It ll be fun to see how the Canadian stats compares to this
@beuboy The problem lies in how they operationalized information. Read their full study. Information to them is simply the transfer of data... I would hardly call that information...
@beuboy
I don't know what your native language is, but English uses a period (AKA full stop) instead of a forward slash to denote the end of a sentence. Just thought I'd let you know before you make yourself look any less competent.
@gsmsosv before you make yourself look anymore of a smart ass, I was home and my keyboard is kaput after spilling liquid on it.So hence the foward slash/ to make sure individuals with your train of thought have no issues reading my statement. You spent a minute composing a 50 worded statement to inform me of the absence of full stops in my comment? Now I'm getting a good picture of how this 34.gb of so called info you consume on a daily basis is utilized. And yes the Queen's English is my first language. Now I'm at work with a fully functioning keyboard so you can have a whole hot load of my full stops.....AKA PERIOD.......
What is considered "Information", why does word count matter, there's a difference between consume and retain, the difference between substance and filler. meh, pointless study.
No, I'm sorry, I call shenanigans. If "computer" use is 26.97% of 34 GB that is 9.16 Gigabytes, not including video games. That translates to the 24 hour constant transfer of 849 kbps. I can only get that at rare hours in the middle of the night and I'm paying dearly for that connection. And we must remember that this is supposed to be an average value, meaning for each normal user out there who spends 3 MB a day reading the news and sending 5 e-mails, there must be some other guy running his line at 2Gbps all day. I don't know where these numbers came from, but they are just silly.
@devlncrnt Agreed. Shenanigans. Pointless and incorrect.
@devlncrnt
I don't disagree that the numbers seem suspect, but you are comparing your internet connection to their data for computer information. I don't think this has to include only information accessed on the internet. If I were to count the GBs of GIS information I work with everyday while at work I could easily exceed 9.16 GBs just while at work. The amount of this data that I actually consume, I'm sure, is much smaller than that. I don't know how it would be possible for them to quantify the amount of information that is being consumed.
@perrbr I suppose 2560*1600 @120hz users get the highest consumation levels on their PC, huh.
@perrbr
While I agree that this doesn't only include information from the Internet and there are several professions which one might practice that require the use of huge amounts of data in a given workday such as video editing or engineering and so forth. I think that this usage represents a minority of American computer use and I find it highly suspect that the population using that data is using so much that it counterbalances the surprisingly low data requirements of the casual user. I also contend, that for the average user, unless their computer is being used as an HTPC, a majority of the data being used is being delivered through the internet.
I watch all my TV in uncompressed HD thanks to FIOS so i'm sure I use way more then that. esp. when recording 2 HD shows on the DVR and possible watching a 3rd some else in the house. I think these numbers are for light users. I use gb's of bandwidth a day, Around 20+ easily
@Murkurie An HD channel encoded in MPEG-2, even on FiOS, is probably no more than 20Mbbps. Meaning 2.5MBps, or 9GB per hour. Not sure consuming but not watching counts in this study though...
I agree these numbers are total bogus and idiotic. In parts they are talking about Bytes consumed in which they have the bitrate of the various forms of communication severely skewed, especially when it comes to phone, computer and radio. Then they start talking about words? You can't measure how many bytes a word counts as. A word spoken on a HDTV broadcast for 1 second is going to take up about 1.5 million bytes, whereas that same word in a text message would likely take 10 bytes or less. I am as absorbed in media as anyone, and I assure you I don't take in 34 GB per day in media.
I think it would be interesting to see how much data we process in our normal lives every day. From the moment we wake up, everything we see, hear, think, and do all day. If it were somehow translated into a quantity. Petabytes?
TAX it
By "Americans" it refers to the USA or the whole continent?
@AnastasiosAntoniosToulkeridis
By whole continent, does you mean North America or South America?
I will give it a month till this is spun into some global warming BS and we have to pay $$$ to reduce our carbon footprint from all the servers and computers.
this is flawed...a half hour SD broadcast might be more physical data than a phone call or a book...but you don't just take in the words, it's the emotions and images associated with the data input, which can be huge, moreso than television or similiar media because the images you associate with them are so clear cut and defined.
FOR PORN
Wow, this is almost as impressive as the BS statistic from a decade ago that attempted to quantify the data content of the average human brain at 10 terabytes.
By today's standards, that's barely enough to hold most people's collections of porno, movies and music.
Furthermore, it's unlikely our brains actually "consume" any form of input to completion. More likely, we only actually "remember" tiny fragments of any event, then simply reconstruct them by tweening the fragments we do memorize back together in a way that seems logical to us when asked to recall them.
In other words, nothing is stored or recalled objectively enough to be quantified by any reliable means. We just wing it and self-correct each time.
I guess the information is consumed over different networks (Cable, Internet, fixed and mobile networks...). So if an ISP plans to bring all that traffic over one channel, namely the internet, he would have to dimension its network accordingly. Taking these figures and doing the math, you end up that a 6 Megabit/sec connection could handle it. Interesting! (34 GByte / 11.8 hours = 23 Gbit/h = 6.4 Mbit/s)
zomg how do you process 2,93 Gb of print information, a fucking large pdf of 700 pages is just 6mb
34 GB a day? I'm sure if our HD was 20Mbps [where it should be] instead of 3Mbps [where it is], we'd be looking at ten fold of data usage.
wheres the pornography part in the pie graph?
It's a typo, it is suppose to read:
'americans consume 34 giga bytes of cheeseburger a day'