For your information

Trying to get heard above the din?

Americans consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2000. One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes, and total bytes consumed last year were the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.

I've never heard the term zetabyte before. So there's another first.

We learn all this from the “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” by the University of California, San Diego.

Here are some details:

• The average American on an average day consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information. 34 gigabytes a day is the equivalent of about one fifth of a notebook computer’s hard drive

• The new report estimates that between 1980 and 2008 bytes consumed increased 350 percent, for an average annual growth rate of 5.4 percent

• On average 41 percent of information time is watching TV (including DVDs, recorded TV and real-time watching)

• American consumers watched 36 million hours of television on mobile devices each month
  

• Based on bytes alone, however, computer games are the biggest information source totaling 18.5 gigabytes per day for the average American consumer, or about 67 percent of all bytes consumed

• Americans spent 16 percent of their information hours using the Internet (second only to TV’s 41 percent). With the proliferation of email, instant messaging and social networking, the Internet today dominates two-way communications, with more than 79 percent of those bytes every day

 Byte me.