Data Overload: Americans in the Digital Age

(Dec. 16) -- Americans now spend three out of every four waking hours being bombarded by some form of information, according to a new study called "How Much Information?" put out by two researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

The report says that the average American consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words over the course of about 12 hours every day. Nearly half of that time is spent watching television; about a quarter on the computer; and the rest on radio, print media, telephones, computer games, recorded music, movies and other sources.

Overall, from 1980 to 2008 the number of bytes has increased by 6 percent a year, for a staggering total of 350 percent.

"This topic is referred to daily, but when we started scratching into it we found that there are very few quantitative studies," James Short, one of the report's co-authors, said in an interview with Sphere. "We didn't try to probe the amount of information that's actually consumed, but rather what's being made available for consumption."



One surprising finding is that teenagers watch less than four hours of TV per day, while the largest amount is watched by people from 60 to 65 years old, who view more than seven hours each day.

Another surprise is that even as print media continue to suffer through a much publicized decline, Americans are actually reading more, not less.

"Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet," the report states.

But with the National Endowment for the Arts reporting that nearly 46 percent of Americans over the age of 18 do not read a single book in a year that's not required for work or school, it's a safe bet that few Americans are reading Dostoyevsky. Or even Don DeLillo. They are, however, spending about 7 billion hours a year on text messaging, which was in its infancy when the report was compiled and is sure to expand in the future.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the report was the huge increase in bytes consumed through video games, everything from shooting games to analytical games like Bookworm and social networking games.

"Gaming turns out to be very important in this growth of information," Short said. "As the delivery devices improve, these kinds of byte counts are going to be significant."

Short declined to speculate on how this rising tsunami of information is affecting attention spans, the quality of written communication or the future of conventional media such as books and newspapers.

"I'm kind of an empiricist," he said. "Our goal was to try to develop estimates of the digital revolution. We're trying to measure that in a way that's not speculative."

The research, which is continuing, will look at trends, the information intake among different age groups and the implications of such practices as multitasking.

"We're at an early stage in learning how people will use these devices over time," Short said. "There's an assumption that rapid adoption implies permanence. But that's just an assumption. People can always turn these devices off. In fact, it does happen."

Funding for "How Much Information?" came from AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology, with early support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.