American Information Consumption

Last month, researchers at the University of California, San Diego published a report entitled "How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers. As one would expect, this report indicates that, in 2008, U.S. residents consumed an incredible quantity of information from radio, television, computer, newspaper, mobile telephone, and other sources. It was interesting to me that they presented these same information consumption results using three different measures with significantly different effect (at least from my perspective). In hours, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion (1,300,000,000,000) hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day for each of us. The detailed breakout was 4.91 hours of TV, 2.22 hours of radio, 1.93 hours of computer, 0.93 hours of computer games, 0.73 hours of phone, 0.60 hours of print media, 0.45 hours of recorded music, and 0.03 hours of movies. In words, Americans consumed 10,845 trillion, which works out to about 100,000 words per American per day. The breakout here was 44.85% of words were consumed from television, 26.97% from computer, 10.6% from radio, 8.61% from print media, 5.24% from the telephone, 2.44% from computer games, 1.11% from recorded music, and .20% from movies. Computer games, recorded music, and radio, therefore, appear to be lower word per minute information sources. Finally, in data bytes, we consumed 3.6 zettabytes (3,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) or about 34 gigabytes per person each day. Using this measure, graphical information dominated. 54.62% of this information represented computer games, 34.77% represented television, and 9.78% represented movies. All other information sources (computer, recorded music, radio, phone, and print media) added up to less than one percent of the information total when measured in bytes.