Your Digital Life Will Only Get More Crowded... If You Let It 53
Nerval's Lobster writes "By 2015, Americans' ability to access digital media at home and on mobile devices will raise the average volume of media consumed to the equivalent of nine DVDs worth of data per person, per day – not including whatever media they consume at work. That estimate adds up to 15.5 hours of media use per day per person, which breaks down to 74 gigabytes of data per person and a national, collective total of 8.75 zettabytes, according to a new report. Between 2008 and 2013, Americans grew from watching 11 hours of media per day to 14 hours per day – a growth rate of about 5 percent per year, lead author James E. Short wrote in the report. The increasing number of digital-data consumers and the shift from analog to digital media drove the total volume of data in bytes to grow 18 percent per year. That growth rate 'is less than the capacity to process data, driven by Moore's Law, [of about] 30 percent per year,' he added, 'but is still impressive.' Social media is growing even faster than other options – 28 percent per year, from 6.3 billion hours in 2008 to an estimated 35.2 billion hours in 2015. Companies expecting to catch the attention of either employees or customers will have to do so in the context of an increasingly media-swamped population. Digital data consumption will continue to rise, the SDSC projections estimate, possibly to more than an average of 24 hours per person per day – which is only possible assuming multiple simultaneous data streams running through the minds of Americans watching TV, browsing the Web and texting each other simultaneously, probably to ask why they never have time to just sit and talk any more."
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My working job generates hundreds of megabytes of papers, data, simulation outputs and code.
My weekends are wasted on minecraft videos.
if you let it (Score:5, Funny)
Between 2008 and 2013, Americans grew from watching 11 hours of media per day to 14 hours per day
And also grew from weight 140 pounds to 190 pounds.
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What a stupid storyof course your consumption will increase IF YOU LET IT. To quote my niece, "Duh."
That post is 100 bytes long.
In 1995, that would've been the end of it, but here in 2013 we need a high-res mashup of your niece saying "Duh" above a hip hop tune, so it would probably turn out to be 10MB.
Just trying to figure out where all that "progress" is going.
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Between 2008 and 2013, Americans grew from watching 11 hours of media per day to 14 hours per day
And also grew from weight 140 pounds to 190 pounds.
Use your brain for something other than fat bashing.
That only leaves 10 hrs a day for other things. What it says is people come home from work and sit in front of the TV, don't shower, and get less than 8 hrs sleep. And this is suppose to be the average. If it were true, you wouldn't see people outside, or shopping, or doing anything else in the community. heck the streets would be quiet and empty after peak hour.
On the positive side... (Score:2)
That brings down the time spend watching media per day PER pound of viewer down from .0786 hours per pound of weight watching media per day to .0737 hours per pound of weight... ;-)
Re:bulls!@$ (Score:5, Informative)
The summary is misleading. What the study actually says is that the total amount of content that the average person requests, if that person took the time to fully read or watch it would take 15.5 hours per day to fully consume. That's a very critical difference.
For example, let's say you read Slashdot. You read the headline, you read the summary (maybe), you read the article (hah!), and then you open up the comments, skim a few of them, and post a comment or two of your own. However, there are 500 comments farther down the page that you did not read. You spent three minutes on the page, but if you had read and digested every comment, it would have taken forty minutes. This study says that you consumed forty minutes of media.
It's not about how much time you spend consuming media, but rather how much media you are exposed to. This statistic is interesting for entirely different reasons than the amount of time you actually spent. It is a better indicator of how well informed you are (assuming the media is informative, or else it indicates how well you know your memes), and is a good indicator of how much bandwidth you use. By contrast, the amount of time you actually spent is a good metric for obesity and other health problems. :-)
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its about marketing in the end, or better yet advertisement consumption metrics.
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Also multiple steams at once. Not all that uncommon for me to be watching a movie on the projector while coding something on the laptop while keeping Facebook open on my phone. And every once in a while I add one or two additional laptops to the mix for various reasons...
Gotta do some parallel processing :)
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So, someone skimming Reddit would have a far greater MWF than, say, someone watching Fox NEWS. This might be another way of indicating the relative worthlessness of conventional media that tend to drive viewers through a set of topics of subjectively varying interest.
I still call BS on this, however. I suspect there is a saturation limit on a
EVERYBODY PANIC (Score:3)
'cause good fear-based reporting is always appropriately met with a good panic.
... or "by 2015 nobody will be allowed to sleep" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:... or "by 2015 nobody will be allowed to sleep (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. The person who wrote the summary apparently didn't actually read the article, but he/she consumed it. :-D
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I had the same initial reaction as yours to TFA. I started to ask myself the more obvious question. Are they trying to state that higher quality media requires more bits so our data will increase by said proportion? But that is nowhere in their scheme. I am with you, TFA is simply a very bizarre set of statements.
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And I have to ask, is your handle "Guy Smiley", the reporter from Sesame Street?
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Actually, my reaction even while reading TFS was spot-on to TFA assumptions. I know plenty people who have either radio or TV on throughout their waking hours. While they're not always eyeballing the TV, they're sure as hell hearing it (or the radio), therefore the term "consumption" isn't that far fetched anymore. Furthermore, some even sleep with TV or radio on, which to me seems like an insanely stupid thing to do. Give your brain some rest, I tell them but noooo....
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Apparently maths is the accountant's responsibility in most media companies ;-) Down in Marketing, they think some ads are so good they count as "double hours" though.
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If someone could develop a DVR that edited out the filler I'd buy in immediately. There is so much padding and time wasting in TV shows and movies I could halve the time I spend watching most of them.
Mythbusters is one of the worst offenders. That show could be about 10 minutes long, but somehow gets padded to 45 minutes. The 10 minutes of real content is actually quite good, but I don't watch it any more because I got fed up of pressing the skip forward button every few seconds.
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My Internet connection at home was down for a week, and when we got it going again on Tuesday, I probably wouldn't have even booted up my laptop if I didn't need to get on to pay my student loans. We need to step back and really think about whether we even want what our habits are giving us in the first place.
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"Your digital life will only get more crowded if (Score:3)
They don't actually mean 15 hours in front of a TV (Score:5, Informative)
Note that the report (third link) treats data (bytes) and time (hours) as separate measurements. The various summaries are mixing 15.5 hours with 9 DVDs, which is not correct. Also of note: media consumed at work is not included in the estimate.
Also, as the summary points out, consumption is defined in terms of what goes over the network and for how long, not what actually gets attention. Thus, it's possible to double or even triple your rate of media "consumption" without spending any more time or attention than you did before.
Still disturbing, though.
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You have kids, and you let them use Internet Explorer. WTF are you thinking, man?
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Not only that, but a lot of people download or stream 1080p nowadays, which tends to be at least 4 times as big as DVD-quality media.
I already eat 7 DVDs a day... (Score:1)
...not sure I have room for any more.
Oblig. Xkcd: Extrapolating (Score:2)
http://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
And then by 2023 we will be consuming 25 hours of media per day.
Living hundreds of km/mi from friends (Score:2)
What about consuming some good time with a friend?
That depends on the cost of round trip airfare.
15.5 hours per day? Don't think so. (Score:2)
To be consuming 15.5 hours of media per day that would imply people only spend half and hour for all non-media activities if they're getting 8 hours of sleep.
Half an hour for all showering and grooming, eating, etc. Even if you are listening to the radio as you commute to work there's still the few minutes you spend walking from your car in the lot to your desk at work that would need to be part of that figure.
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Yes and if you spent 5 minutes reading TFA we would all have been spared of yet another stupid comment.
But I guess you merely "consumed" it, if even.
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Well, if you sleep while you work, you can double the time available to consume media. :)
gah (Score:1)
Link and troll bait (Score:1)
I won't let it (Score:1)