The average American consumes 100,000 words, or about 34 gigabytes of information, every day, according to a new report.
As a nation, that's 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008.
(A zettabyte is a million million gigabytes of data. Considering that your computer's hard drive stores a couple hundred gigabytes, that's a heck of a lot of information. )
A report published Wednesday by the University of California, San Diego takes a census of the data consumption of American households and found that the average American consumes 100,000 words each day from all channels: TV, newspapers, online, music and more.
The paper, entitled "How Much Information?" demonstrates that Americans are serious data hounds -- so much so, in fact, that your brain processes information from all those channels to the tune of almost an entire King James Bible each week.
According to the study, Americans consume 11.8 hours of information a day, on average.
That breaks down in the following way:
Much of that data consumption happens at the same time, in what we all like to call "multitasking."
More great insights from the study:
AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology funded the research.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com