Eat Your Zettabytes. There are Kids Without PS3s in Africa.

Have you ever heard of a zettabyte? It's a billion trillion bytes of information. And we consume 3.6 of them every year.

A new study [from University of California, San Diego] finds that the average American consumes more than 34 gigabytes of video, music and words a day—and that's only on our free time.

One byte of information is equivalent to one letter of text. One gigabyte is equal to roughly 8 minutes of high definition video. Thirty-four gigabytes of data would fit on about 7 DVD disks or 1.5 Blu-ray disks.

We still spend more time consuming information from TV and radio, but the lion's share of the bytes come from computer and video game input, thanks to increasingly awesome graphic chips.

Via Seed magazine.