How much information does a typical household consume? Plenty, according to Roger Bohn, a professor of management and director of the How Much Information? Project run by the University of California at San Diego.
The project sought to measure all the information that reaches consumers. The ambitious task was to gauge the level of data reaching people through radios, televisions, telephones and even quaint activities such as reading.
The result, said Bohn, director of the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego, is that each person consumes 34 gigabytes of information per day. That, he said, equates to 100,000 words. It takes 11.6 hours to consume this information. In all, U.S. households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, the period the project covered. One zettabyte is equal to one billion trillion bytes of data.
Computer Games Score
The group did no primary survey work. Instead, it relied on published studies and surveys from organizations such as Nielsen. All told, Bohn said, the study used about 100 reports and studies, though some were employed just as cross-checks.
The results were interesting. “We found that computer games are more important than anyone realized,” Bohn said. “Television is still very important. Depending on whether you are measuring bytes or words, you find different things. If you are measuring bytes, only three things matter: Computer games, television and movies” since other forms of media are transferred in far less capacity.
When words — not bytes — are the metric, the results become broader. “Obviously, we care about more information than those three,” he said. “When we measured using words also, lots of things become important. Television is still important. Radio and the Internet become important, and even conventional reading plays some role.”
A Gradual Increase
Bohn said the amount of time spent on consumer data…