Investors.com - So, That Explains The Headache

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The amount of information received through the eyes and ears of Americans in 2008, outside of work, was equivalent to a stack of paperback novels seven feet high covering the continental U.S. and Alaska, says a report slated to be released on Wednesday.

That total comes out to 3.6 zettabytes, or 3.6 trillion gigabytes. The average American receives 34 gigabytes of information a day outside the workplace, says the report. One gigabyte roughly equals one hour of high-definition video.
The study looked at information 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. That consumption totaled 1.3 trillion hours in 2008. That's 11.8 hours per person per day, up from 7.4 hours in the 1960s. (The figure might seem high, but a person reading and watching TV, while the radio plays in the background, would be triple-counted.) The average amount of words consumed per day per person in 2008 was 100,500.That's not to say that people are absorbing all this data, Bohn points out. A TV set in the living room is delivering information, but people aren't always paying attention. He said the report is valuable to industry players in that 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.

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