Dennis RomeroWe are truly media gluttons.
Researchers from the Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM) at the USC Marshall School of Business crunched the numbers in terms of how much television, radio, phone and computer media Americans consume each day and came up with a number:
63 gigabytes. That would have been enough to fill your laptop's hard drive, and then some, just five years ago.
The number comes from the just-released report “How Much Media? 2013 Report on American Consumers,” which says that the nation consumed about 6.9 zettabytes of media last year.
The academics say that's the equivalent of a 14-foot-high stack of books — filling every inch of space from coast to coast.
(A zettabyte is a billion terabytes or about 250 billion DVDs).
The time each of us spends talking to each other and listening and viewing media was about 13.6 hours a day in 2012, a 5 percent increase compared with 2008, according to USC.
In 2015, the researchers project, that number will go up to 15.5 hours a day.
Credit: Sergey Galyonkin / Flickr
Since 2008, we've doubled online video viewing from three hours to six hours a month, and that's projected to nearly double again, to 11 hours, by 2015, the school says.
America's annual Facebook and YouTube use will go from 6.3 billion hours in 2008 to 35.2 billion in 2015, USC predicts.
So what does it all mean?
We're shifting from televisions to computers in consumption, the school says in a statement:
… Half of all bytes are now received by computers, with mobile computers the most rapidly growing segment.
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