A UC San Diego study says we’re all “data fatties,” consuming 34 Gigabytes of information every day.
But data isn’t information. And most of what you’re getting is junk food.
That’s because the study breaks all information into bytes, and a lot of our wasted time is very byte-intensive.
Take playing video games, for instance. Video games are 67% of the total “byte load” you consume each day. This is because video games are now very byte-intensive, with video game machines as powerful as the supercomputers of just five years ago.
Or take TV. Some 41% of our time is spend consuming some form of video — mostly cable or DVDs, along with some Internet clips. Not a lot of real information there.
Perhaps the most interesting data point is here, from a chart reproduced from our friends at C|Net. It shows where we’re getting our words from. TV gives us almost 45%, the Internet now gives us almost 25%. Which means 70% of the words we ingest each day come from screens, not paper.
How is that for a green headline?
