Americans consume an estimated average information diet of 100,000 words each day, in print and online, via TV and radio, as well as music, movies and even games. An exhaustive study of data consumption by researchers at the University of California, San Diego concludes Americans averaged almost 12 hours per day of information consumption in 2008.
Despite a surge in computer use, “traditional media of radio and TV still dominate our consumption per day, with a total of 60 percent of the hours. In total, more than three-quarters of U.S. households’ information time is spent with non-computer sources.” A New York Times summary of the study points out that consumption of print media is a mere 36 minutes per day on average, but the report itself notes that time spent reading is actually rising:
The use of different media has changed dramatically over time. It is a cliché that reading is in decline. But on the other hand we get considerable information from the Internet, which is a heavy print medium. Do we really read less? Conventional print media has fallen from 26 percent of [words consumed] in 1960 to 9 percent in 2008. However, this has been more than counterbalanced by the rise of the Internet and local computer programs, which now provide 27 percent of [words consumed]. Conventional print provides an additional 9 percent. In other words, reading as a percentage of our information consumption has increased in the last 50 years, if we use words themselves as the unit of measurement.
The study focuses exclusively on consumed information and is largely focused on information as data (34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day). There was no attempt to capture the number of words “consumed” in face-to-face conversation, although phone usage is part of the study, thus face to face conversation would add to the 100,000 word average daily consumption. There was also no apparent attempt to look at information consumed by different demographic and socioeconomic groups.