The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day
The report suggests the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. (Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is only 460,000 words long.) This doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day — it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period. That information comes through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games.
The report also describes our voracious appetite for information and entertainment. In addition to the amount of information we consume, the researchers looked at how much time we devote to each medium. The study suggests that, on average, most Americans consume 11.8 hours of information a day. Most of this time is spent in front of some sort of screen watching TV-related content, taking up a little over four and a half hours of our daily information consumption. Then there’s the computer, which we interact with for about two hours a day. There’s also the phone, radio, music, and print. Most of these experiences happen simultaneously, too, such as talking on the phone while checking our e-mail, or instant messaging while watching TV.
» via The New York Times
