Zetts all?
If you're feeling a little tired and stressed out lately, it may well be to do with sensory overload, as a new study in the US claims its citizens consumed an absolutely whopping 3.6 zettabytes of information and some 10,845 trillion words in 2008.
Yes, zettabytes. And no, we never heard of a zettabyte before either, but it's apparently 1 billion terabytes, or 1 million million gigabytes. Or for the more visual amongst you, it's like blanketing the whole of Russia with a three foot stack of War and Peace novels.
Aptly entitled "How Much Information?" the University of California, San Diego study - partly funded by AT&T, Cisco Systems, I.B.M., Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology - takes into account not just computer data, but almost all forms of communication, from the Internet, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, mobile phones, video games, films, music and more.
The survey says the oodles of information average out at around 33.8 gigabytes of information and 100,564 words per person, per day, which does sound rather a lot less scary than zettabytes, but is still a mind-blowing figure.
It's even more incredible when one takes into account the fact the report does not cover the work related data Americans sponge up.
Building on previous research from California's Berkeley University, boffins used some 20 different sources of data, which included Nielsen television ratings and U.S. census data to build algorithms that could compute just how much information was consumed in words and bytes over a period of time.
