Consumerism in the Information Age
I ran across three articles today on the same study from UC -San Diego. It states that human consumption of information has increased dramatically over the past few decades. The study broke up this information into various areas:
Does this research really mean anything? It certainly doesn’t reflect my pie chart of information consumption. But it did make it to two highly popular technology websites, not to mention the New York Times (those are the media outlets where I encountered this study). According to the report we consume ~100,000 words per day, or 34 gigabytes a day (thus in a month we fill a decently sized hard drive). Instead of reading the NYT article, though, I will only provide the link to the actual document, which is publically available: http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo_research_report_consum.php.
Such research is always provocative - that is, it calls us to actively question our environment and information rich world. But here is my question, my current brain drool:
It appears that we “consume” significantly more information than we have in the past, but how often do we bother to chew any of it?
