How Much Data Did You Create Last Year?

from the plenty dept

Suffering from information overload? It's only getting worse. A new study has shown that the average person created 800 MBytes of data last year, leading to "5 exabytes of new information stored in print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media." If you're wondering, that's 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. The report says that's twice as much info as was created just 3 years ago, so we're only growing more prolific in all that information we're spewing on a regular basis. Of course, that 5 exabytes is only information that was stored. The study says that a total of 18 exabytes "flowed electronically over TV, radio, telephone, and the Internet in 2002." If you want details of how this was all calculated you can check out the project page and then argue about how they calculated these numbers. Even ignoring the actual numbers, you can still conclude we're creating a hell of a lot of information (whether useful or not) on a regular basis and it's only going to increase. The study does have some interesting findings, showing that the vast majority of info flowed over telephone networks, and that 93% of Kazaa users are downloaders - not offering their own files up for sharing . Also, because we never shut up, it appears that we Americans are responsible for about 40% of the world's stored information created last year.

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