How Much Textual Information Do We Consume Daily?
In this post we examine how much textual information we consume in a typical day, focusing in particular on blogs, news, email, IMs, Twitter. In a follow-up post, we will explore visual information consumption.
At a high level, information is a fascinating concept. Each year we learn more and more profound facts about the seemingly simple patterns of zeros and ones that make up our daily lives. Indeed according to recent discoveries in Physics, we are made of information. Seth Lloyd, professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, popularized and explained this notion in his bestseller Programming the Universe. His theory revolves around information as a physical entity and the universe itself as a quantum computer. In his work, he poses questions like this:
- How much information is there in the universe?
- What information existed at the moment of the Big Bang and what happened to it?
- How do quantum mechanics and chaos theory interact to create our world?
- Could we attempt to re-create it on a giant quantum computer?
But he does not just pose these questions, he works to answer them as well. In 2002 he calculated the answer to to the first question (how much information is there in the universe?) to be a whooping 10120 bits.
The Big Bang of the Social Web
Leaving the cosmic matters aside, let's focus on our daily lives. Obviously information via the Internet and other media is having an increasing impact on us. In addition to exchanging more information daily, we are consuming more and more information. What's more, the recent rise of social services has brought nothing less than a content explosion - which has led to a sharp rise in our daily information consumption.
But just how much information do we digest daily? Of course it varies and it's hard to calculate exactly. But now we will look into several text information types and try to figure out how much information is contained in each.
Text Information: Blogs, News, Email, Chats and ... Twitter
It is common these days to use news aggregators like Bloglines or Netvibes to subscribe to RSS feeds. So we can build a simple model to estimate how much information people consume via these channels. The model is of course crude and depends on the number of feeds that you subscribe to, but you can get a feel for the order of magnitude. Below is the model that I worked out based on my own RSS subscriptions. All of the blogs that I read are divided into categories, depending on number of post that they generate. In the first row there are blogs that generate at least five posts per day. As an aside, some of the blogs that I read have been generating 10-15 posts per day - ouch! I like filtering information, but I like it even better when others do it for me! Then there are blogs that do at least one post per day and the ones that do at least one per week. Finally, some blogs I read post very infrequently, which this model ignores. Here then is the result:
So my daily intake via RSS is about 55KB. Of course I do not really read 32 posts fully, instead I skim them. But that happens with most things these days.
The other forms of text that we considered were Email, Chat and Twitter. These are tricky to calculate because you have to make a lot of assumptions. In the example below, Email and Chat numbers are based on my experience - but I personally do not use Twitter that often. If you would like to plugin your own numbers, here is the Excel spreadsheet that we used for calculations. Please note your own results in the comments to this post.
So all the text information I consume daily adds up to 100 KB. Perhaps for some people this number would be two or three times more, but it is unlikely that someone is consuming 10MB of text per day.
Now for a comparison with the universe! 100K is about 106 bits, which is vastly smaller than the universe. And note that this is only for text-based information. Images and Video are entirely different, much heavier objects. We are planning to cover visual information in a separate post.
Conclusion
You need to take these calculations with a grain of salt. The amount of information that you are actually processing when reading a piece of text is actually much more than just the number of bits in the text. It is an intricate interplay between the object and the observer - and truly it is in the eye of the beholder. However, the amount of information that you are getting when reading this article is no less than the number of bits in it.
Human beings are capable of a staggering array of things. There is little doubt that our information processing abilities are near the top of this list. Interestingly, with the rise of social services and the read/write web, these abilities are being put to the test. How much can we process? Is there a limit, or will we continue to learn new ways of dealing with information? These are profound questions that neuroscientists are working on everyday.
In the mean time, we are left with a sea of information to deal with on a daily basis. Good luck to you with that, filter well and have fun!
Note: the top image is from the Afg Checks web site.
Note: Thanks to Lars Hundertwasser for pointing a bug in my original calculations
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As soon as I saw charts with numbers in them, I skimmed the rest of this post too. But it seemed like an interesting one anyway. I tend to go back and re-read things I glance over later in the day when I've run out of new things to look at.
We consume a lot of information on a daily basis, this is a given. How much of that information do we actual use in any real way, that's a bit more complicated. I'd say you take the gross sum of the information we consume and take maybe 5% of that.
What you have left are the headlines, which appear to be the way that your average reader consumes information in this digital age.
Textual information is relatively easy, if you start counting images and audio the numbers go up quickly. Just one human eye delivers 10 million bits of data per second!
I think there's a great parallel between services like Google (on the online world) and what our visual cortex (in the brain).
I call it the "Digital Cortex" :)
http://wanderingstan.com/2006-11-17/digital_cortex_2_information_overload_in_the_brain
Great post, got me thinking: as hinted at towards the end, actually you are not really talking about the amount of textual information, but about the space taken by the serialization thereof. By your logic, if your content were encoded using UTF-32 (fixed-width Unicode encoding), you'd be consuming four times as much information per day. On the other hand, considering you are reading English and therefore a typical character cannot have much more than 64 distinct values (or "states) (rather than 256), the information in terms of characters would be much less.
But then: what makes the Latin alphabet the best possible representation of natural language? and, more importantly, why would natural language be an optimal serialization of "information"? How would you quantify "information" anyway? How do we store it in our brains (we remember "ideas" rather than "words", how would we quantify an abstract idea in terms of "amount of information"?)? This opens a philosophical Pandora's box.
Christian,
You raise good questions, and actually, there are very specific answers found in Information Theory. In a nutshell, optimal representation is considered to be the most compact one. However, as you pointed out, bits of the object do not really amount to information.
The key to understanding information lies in: 1) Understanding how to represent objects as bits 2) Understanding that as in any complex system, representation of the system is not equal to the system itself because of all non-linear effects that occur once bits of the system interact with each other.
Alex
Alex
thanks for your back of the envelope figures.
that and this is certainly an interesting idea that should probably be followed further.
with more experiments performed.
I believe that to make an informed decision one needs to consume a lot of information. Then any tool that it makes it easier and faster should be on demand.
Your calculations are wrong. For RSS based you have the data: Posts: 32, Avg. size: 300 wds, Avg. word: 6 ltrs, that makes for 32 * 300 * 6 = 57.600 characters or letters and you even specify that one letter = 8 bit so one letter = 1 byte, i.e. you consume only 55KB of RSS data a day not 0.5 MB.
Lars,
57,600 * 8 = 460,800 which rounds up to 0.5MB
Alex
Lars is correct. Your figures of Daily News:
- 57600 characters = 57600 bytes or 460800 bits.
- 57600 bytes divided by 1024 bytes (1 KB) = 56.25 KB
- 56.25 divided by 1,024 KB (1 MB) = ~0.055 MB
Oh yes, you are right, my bad. I will fix this soon.
Alex
Fixed. Thanks again for pointing it out.
Alex
Somehow I get this image of a new language more readily consumed by human beings. What we attempt to do now is the equivalent of trying to walk the edge of a mentally stimulating and informative razor blade.
What is the highly developed cerebral person to do with "bits" of the Library at Alexandria shoved in front of his/her eyes. Perhaps there is a technology/language that can more quickly be assimilated.
For my part I seldom read an entire post or article either and this is unfortunate and almost insulting to bloggers like myself who try to convey the essence of things. In the case of this post I read the first part, the divisions and the conclusion and used an "intuitive" approach to digesting what you have offered Alex.
Perhaps we should make a RRW that enables people to just come here and rest relatively assured that they can find and have demonstrated to them a high percentage of the most important news and information? Hey, maybe that is why so many people come here! :)
Always,
Phil
Maybe it would be kinda of a stretch if we still include newspapers, written reports we prepare for our office and also the mail!
This is a great little experiment and I can't wait for you guys to have some conclusions as regards to video and audio.
This my "Post of the Day" for my blog. Great job!