Illiteracy Hurts More and More

Another article in the same issue of The Economist states:

Researchers at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) examined the flow of data to American households. They found that in 2008 such households were bombarded with 3.6 zettabytes of information (or 34 gigabytes per person per day). The biggest data hogs were video games and television. In terms of bytes, written words are insignificant, amounting to less than 0.1% of the total. However, the amount of reading people do, previously in decline because of television, has almost tripled since 1980, thanks to all that text on the internet. In the past information consumption was largely passive, leaving aside the telephone. Today half of all bytes are received interactively, according to the UCSD. Future studies will extend beyond American households to quantify consumption globally and include business use as well.

Estimates of the number of illiterates, such as the 700 million made by UNESCO, are clearly too low, depending on poor methods used in surveys, but one may assume that there are a billion illiterate adults in the world. They are increasingly distanced from the information society.