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Americans Consume 34 Gigabytes a Day, Study Finds

by Caleb Johnson on December 10, 2009 at 07:25 AM

It's no secret that obesity levels in the U.S. have been rising over the years. But according to a new report, our consumption of information is on the rise, too, which isn't a bad thing. The New York Times reports that an average American consumes 34-gigabytes and roughly 100,000 words of information each day. In total, American households consumed 3.6-zettabytes of information last year (if you're wondering, a zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes).

These numbers come from a paper published by the University of California, San Diego, titled "How Much Information?" Similar to a census, the study's goal is to find out how Americans communicate, how much information we consume, and how we do it. So how do we get info? We get it from all sorts of places -- TV, radio, the Web, text messages and video games, among other mediums. But the study found these aren't independent from each other. People are often texting while watching TV, or listening to the radio while checking e-mail.

With more people having access to the Internet, we're not surprised by these numbers. Expect them to continue to rise in the future, too. After all, our consumption of information increased by 350-percent over the last 28 years, according to the research. [From: The New York Times]

Tags: culture, data, information, study, top, tv, videogames, web

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