American appetite for data continues to grow
A new UCSD study found that the average American consumes 34 GB of data every day. What’s surprising, however, is the reigning source of all this information.
The UCSD study found Americans consuming a whopping 11.8 hours of media every day, often simultaneously. While computers and smartphones are all the rage, television still accounts for the largest portion of our daily data diet.
In fact, Americans are spending an average of almost five hours per day in front of the boob tube. Interestingly enough, this is followed by second place radio, which still plays for 2.22 hours per day in the average household.
After these two primary media sources comes the computer with 1.91 hours a day on average. Obviously not many of these households included Web Developers or Bloggers among their ranks or that number would be much higher.
All told, Americans consume 100,000 words on an any given day through all of these combined sources. The New York Times puts this nicely into perspective by mentioning that “War and Peace” weighs in at roughly 460,000 words.
With all those words being devoured by Americans, reading print only makes up about 30 minutes of their day. This shows that a good portion of our learning comes from either mass media or the Wild West of information, the Internet.
Other favored data sources include computer games at almost an hour per day and phones at just over a half hour. The phone is one area that where we might see a dramatic change in the next decade as the Internet becomes more common on phones and people come to rely on them for navigation and search as well as communication.
Let’s hope that mobile devices can help Americans get out from under this pile of as many as 11 hours of inaction behind televisions and computers. Otherwise our waistlines are likely to continue expanding along with our data consumption.
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