Do you remember the days when the standard, consumer measurement for data was the megabyte. With the rise of the personal computer and subsequent popularity of digital media devices such as cameras and mp3 players, we began to measure everything in gigabytes. Then came data centres and external hard drives, which put the word terabyte on the tips of our tongues. Future generations will include petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, zottabyte and brontobyte. Just how much data are we consuming nowadays? This is the question posed by the University of California, San Diego who’ve determined that:
from 1980 through 2008 the total number of bytes bitten by Americans has upped by 6% per year and now stands at an incredibly huge sounding 3.6 zettabytes. Or one billion trillion bytes, if that’s easier to imagine. The Upswing is, of course, interested in unlikely economic indicators of good news and this is surely one. How lean, after all, can the times be when we continue to gorge on data? And someone has to produce all this content, which means the future of electronic innovation appears to be rather secure.
Rob Vargas’ infographic that’s displayed above, breaks down what 3.6 zettabytes (or 34 gigabytes a day) means in terms of daily consumption.
