If you’ve suddenly taken to wearing pants with an elastic waistband and can’t stay away from the fridge, chances are you’re consuming too much food and drink – a nutritional over exuberance that’s easy for all to see. But, when it comes to how much electronic data we all consume, judging how fat or skinny we are is a little more difficult.
Mmm, macaroni and cheese-flavored data! Image: Hoggheff aka Hank Ashby aka Mr. Freshtags/Flickr.
However, thanks to a recent study carried out by a team of researchers working from the University of San Diego in California, ravenous consumers in the United States can at least get something of an idea regarding their quite considerable data girth.
According to the team’s findings, we’re all pretty bloated given that the average person is supposedly exposed to around 34GBs of electronic data each day, and consumes somewhere in the vicinity of 3.4 zetabytes (3,400 trillion gigabytes) of digital information in a single year.
The appropriately named ‘How Much Information’ study gathered its figures by looking at digital information usage in relation to computers, televisions, radios and other forms of recorded audio.
Although spread across several different sources, you may think it unsurprising to learn that the highest consumption levels were associated with computer and videogames, movies and television, with general gaming pulling in a whopping 54 percent of all data usage and high-end PC gaming accounting for almost 39 percent.
However, the university team were actually somewhat shocked by that finding given that, despite the popularity of gaming as a mainstream medium, the high-end PC category actually accounted for less than two percent of the hours logged by Americans when it comes to consuming digital information.
The report’s explanation for the massive consumption levels linked to high-end PC gaming suggests that modern PC games demand a great deal of processing power in order to properly display hugely detailed 3D environments and the high quality visual effects and character animation that take place within them.
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