Business Bytes
Renee Oricchio

Amercan Consumption: 34 Gigs A day

 

At first blush this is just more fascinating cocktail conversation.

Did you know the average American consumes 34GB of inforrmation a day? That's the conclusion of research put out this week by UC San Diego.

Collectively, we as a nation consumed 3.6 zettabytes in 2008. New word alert, by the way: zettabyte. A zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes of information... and no, you can't fit it all on a thumb drive yet.

Okay, enough fodder for looking smart at your next holiday open house.

Here's the part that is useful: how we are consuming 34 gigabytes a day:

- That's 4.91 hours of TV a day

- 1.93 hours on the computer

- 2.2 hours of radio

- .93 hours of computer games

- ,73 hours on the phone

- .6 hours with print

- ,45 hours with recorded music

Note that we are spending more time playing computer games than on the phone or reading print or even listening to music.

Note that radio is not dead, in fact its the second largest bandwidth hog of our day.

I think this is something for business owners to consider as they consider their marketing channels reaching customers.

Just a thought.

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio