UC San Diego experts calculate how much information americans consumed in 2008. Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

Here is a short table on what this number is.

Counting Very Large Numbers
Byte (B) = 1 byte = 1 = One character of text
Kilobyte (KB) = 103 bytes = 1,000 = One page of text
Megabyte (MB) = 106 bytes = 1,000,000 = One small photo
Gigabyte (GB) = 109 bytes = 1,000,000,000 = One hour of High-Definition video, recorded on a digital video camera at its highest quality setting, is approximately 7 Gigabytes
Terabyte (TB) = 1012 bytes = 1,000,000,000,000 = The largest current hard drive
Petabyte (PB) = 1015 bytes = 1,000,000,000,000,000 = AT&T currently carries about 18.7 Petabytes of data traffic on an average business day
Exabyte (EB) = 1018 bytes = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = Approximately all of the hard drives in home computers in Minnesota, which has a population of 5.1M
Zettabyte (ZB) = 1021 bytes = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

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