Last but not least: Zettabytes and terabytes
Homo sapiens likes to spend an hour or so every now and then watching TV, surfing the Internet, or reading the newspaper—he also likes to be tempted into playing a computer game or having a quick chat on his cell phone, and sometimes he even picks up a book—while the radio might be playing in the background.
A lot of information rushes past us every day. But how much exactly? Two scientists from the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California asked themselves this question - and the answer will blow many an imagination: In 2008, the entire US population spent a total of around 1.3 trillion hours with television, radio, Internet, newspapers, books, cell phones or game consoles. The amount of data consumed amounts to a whopping 3.6 zettabytes - 3.6 billion terabytes - i.e. 3.6 x 10 to the power of 21 bytes. Calculated down to one person, this means Each US citizen consumed an average of 34 gigabytes of data per day - most of it in moving images, by the way. Computer games have now replaced television as the No. 1 media source - at least as far as the data source is concerned. Not bad. Even if it's not easy to imagine.
