Information Age, quantified
Jinfo Blog

9th December 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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A study released on December 9 by the University of California San Diego's Global Information Industry Center puts metrics behind what we all sense is true - we are swimming in information and barely keeping our heads above water. According to the study, which focused on American households in 2008 and is available for download at http://digbig.com/5batat, the 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…. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video)'. If you, like me, though zettabytes was a pet name for a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, it's actually '10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes.' What I found particularly chilling about these results is that information consumed in the workplace is not included in this count. The study's authors plan to tackle that at a future time, but I'm already wondering what the next step up from zettabytes is. The concept of information overload is old hat, but it's interesting to see metrics put around it. I think it ties in with what I saw at London Online too (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27408); more vendors are there to showcase tools and platforms to organize, filter, and stem the information flow. The old research problem was knowing where to go to find data to support decision making; the new research problem is knowing what to ignore, so as to focus only on the high value data you need.

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