Adult gamers

A group in San Diego is creating census data to figure out how much information we consume in a given year. “How Much Information? 2009 report on American Consumers” was released today by UC San Diego and video games have come out on the top of the list as the largest source of data.

One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes. To give you perspective, the total bytes consumed just last year was equal to the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States including Alaska. Yes, we’ve buried ourselves in data.

“This report is a snapshot of what the information revolution means to the average American on an average day, who consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information,” said report author Roger Bohn, Director of the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. “The total volume of 3.6 zettabytes consumed last year is much larger than previous studies have reported, partly because they measured different views of information, such as information creation rather than consumption. Also, nobody had looked at the role of computer games, which generate a staggering number of bytes.”

Based on bytes alone, video games are the biggest source of information totaling 18.5 gigabytes per day for the average American consumer. Basically 67 % of all bytes consumed. The study estimates that 80 percent of the population plays some kind of computer game.

“Games are almost universal, but most of the gaming bytes come from graphically intensive games on high-powered computers and consoles, which have the equivalent of special-purpose supercomputers from five years ago,” said Bohn. “Games today generate their bytes inside the home, rather than having to transmit them over cables into the house, but gaming is increasingly moving online.”

We’ll have to see if Twitter rivals gaming in the 2009 study. Download the entire report here.