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Numbers: Information, From Our 34 GBs/Day to the 8 Trillion Tweets in History

Explore leisure time information consumption trends, revealing Americans spent 12 hours daily on media in 2008.

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1.3 Trillion Leisure time, in hours, that Americans spent consuming information in 2008, according to a December 2009 report from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). That works out to about 12 hours per day per person; the number includes multitasking, so an hour spent watching TV and surfing the Web counts as two hours of info consumption. Daily, we each devote an average of five hours to TV, two to radio, two to the Internet and other computer use, and one to gaming. We give 36 minutes per day to print media and 27 to recorded music.

3.6x10^21

Total amount of data, in bytes, consumed in the United States in 2008, according to the UCSD study. That works out to the equivalent of about 100,500 words or 34 gigabytes per day for each of us.

10 Billion Number of online searches conducted in the U.S. in December ...

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