Editor's Letter: The information consumer

last updated 8 January 2015

If you’re an average American (and thank God for average Americans, without whom no poll or study would be possible), you have spent about 70 percent of your waking hours in 2009 consuming information. During these 11.8 hours per day of reading or viewing or listening to what is now charmingly called “content,’’ you consumed, per person, about 33.8 gigabytes of data, and 100,564 words. So says a new study by the University of California, San Diego, which also found that the average American’s information consumption has more than tripled since 1980. So are we smarter than we were a year ago, or than people were in 1980? What, 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words later—the combined U.S. annual total for 2009—have we learned?

It’s an absurdly reductionist question, but one that occasionally nags at me even as I indulge my own habitual consumption of words. In Waiting for Godot, the tramps Estragon and Vladimir observe that a bit of pointless distraction serves at least to pass the time. “It would have passed in any case,’’ Estragon points out. “Yes,’’ Vladimir responds, “but not so rapidly.’’ The Internet and its brethren pass the time wonderfully well; in the digital universe’s endless linked corridors, you can wander, diverted, until you are out of minutes to pass. Consuming information, though, does not necessarily lead to wisdom, which is the art of knowing how to spend our allotted minutes amid the prevailing stupidity and chaos, so that one’s life has meaning. May the new year bring us all more wisdom, and not quite so many zettabytes.