The average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day (excluding work information) — 11.8 hours of information — according to a report by the University of California, San Diego.

U.S. information consumption in 2008 totaled 3.6 zettabytes (10^21 bytes) and 10,845 trillion words.

Video sources dominate bytes of information, with 1.3 zettabytes from television and approximately 2 zettabytes of computer games.

Hours of information consumption grew at 2.6 percent per year from 1980 to 2008, due to a combination of population growth and increasing hours per capita, from 7.4 to 11.8. More surprising is that information consumption in bytes increased at only 5.4 percent per year. Yet the capacity to process data has been driven by Moore’s Law, rising at least 30 percent per year.