California Business Minute™

Hi, I am Tim Johnson and welcome to the California Business Minute.

American households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008,
according to a new study "How Much Information?  A 2009 Report on American Consumers,"
released by the University of California, San Diego.

The study measured information consumed by U.S. consumers in and outside the home
for non-work-related reasons and included the gamut of information sources,
including going to the movies, listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone,
playing video games, surfing the Internet and reading the newspaper, among other
things.

The average American on an average day, who consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words
of information.

The new report estimates that between 1980 and 2008, bytes consumed increased 350
percent, for an average annual growth rate of 5.4 percent. According to the report,
the average American’s information consumption of 34 gigabytes a day is the equivalent
of about one-fifth of a notebook computer’s hard drive, depending on the model.  
According to the study, the 3.6 zettabytes of total information used by Americans
in their homes far exceeds storage or transmission capacity. For example, the total
is roughly 20 times more than what can be stored at one time on all the hard drives
in the world. Less than two percent of the total information was transmitted over
the Internet.

Looking to the future, the report's authors point to current patterns of information
consumption that will change the information landscape by 2015."What is clear is that
we consume orders of magnitude more information than can be stored on hard drives or
transmitted over today's Internet," said Internet pioneer Larry Smarr, director of
the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a
partnership of UC San Diego and UC Irvine. "Even small changes in how Americans
consume information would have serious implications for network planners and require
large-scale investments."

The report "How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers" is available
online and can be found at http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo.php.          

I am Tim Johnson and this has been the California Business Minute.