Over the past thirty years, the global human population as we know it has radically advanced its consumption of raw information and data consumption on an individually scalable basis. By nature, the United States consumes a significant portion of the world’s aggregate information cluster. With the forthcoming of a new decade and generation approaching in 2010, it is important that we quantify these statistics not only for our own understanding, but also for our daily improvement.

Yesterday, Professors Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short at the University of California, San Diego published a report titled “How Much Information?” discussing how much data Americans consumed on a daily basis in the year 2008. After a brief introduction into the semantics of data, information and the comparative differences between storage and consumption, their assessment revealed that Americans spend a significant amount of time at home receiving information, an average of 11.8 hours per day. Since the year 1981 when IBM launched its first personal computer, bytes of information consumed by U.S. individuals have grown at 5.4-percent, far less than the growth rate of computer and information technology performance.





That is not to say that computer knowledge is outstripping human perceptive knowledge, as the studies of cognitive science and philosophy of mind can debate the likelihood of a robot apocalypse any day of the week. In addition, the report positively suggests that “in 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.”

The term “information” was defined as interrupted flows of data delivered to people that were measured in the bytes, words, and hours of consumer information. “Video sources (moving pictures) dominate bytes of information, with 1.3 zettabytes from television and approximately 2 zettabytes of computer games. If hours or words are used as the measurement, information sources are more widely distributed, with substantial amounts from radio, Internet browsing, and others. All of our results are estimates.”

Interestingly enough, the report defines the term “data” as artificial signals intended to convey meaning. The term “artificial” is used to appropriate the idea that data is created by machines – computer systems, artificial neural networks, automated environmental statistic robots, and even automobiles are some of the many examples of binary content creation systems.

The full report can be found here.

Industry affiliates who sponsored the University of California, San Diego report include Intel, IBM, Seagate, AT&T, Cisco, LSI and Oracle.