You probably already saw that the average American tears through 34GB of data per person per day. Here’s how the media has evolved these last few decades (sorry print), and below a way to compare your consumption with Joe Average.

This chart breaks down each activity by hours, bytes, and words for the total population, average per user, and average per American in 2008. There’s a lot to process here, but my first reaction is: that many people still watch TV in standard def?

Send an email to Brian Barrett, the author of this post, at bbarrett@gizmodo.com.

via How 3.6 Zettabytes of Data Get Consumed – hmi – Gizmodo.

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Response

What surprised me is not the amount of standard definition TV, but the large amount of live TV overall. It’s hard for me to find people who watch TV live – they either Tivo it, or watch something on the Internet, or rent DVDs with the shows they want. Unfortunately, the Nielsen TV data that we used lumps anything seen within 72 hours of original broadcast into its “live audience” report. Also, our data is for 2008; by 2010 I expect to find a lot less truly live TV. Finally, it is possible that the people I interact with are not typical. But even my computerphobic father watches recorded C-SPAN.

RB