A Horror Story Of Digital Overload

We live in a world where information isn’t just abundant; it’s a relentless, overwhelming torrent. Trillions of words, millions of videos, countless podcasts, and a ceaseless stream of newsletters flood our screens daily. It’s as if someone not only left the tap running but cranked open the dam gates. The sheer scale is staggering, a digital deluge that is drowning us all, or leaves us gasping for air, whichever way you want to look at it.

Remember the days before the Internet, before the digital revolution? When information was finite, contained within the walls of libraries, the pages of newspapers and magazines, the flickering images of VHS tapes? Back then, knowledge was a resource to be sought, carefully curated, and savored. Common opinions at best were to be found in the “Letters To The Editor” section of a newspaper. Today, it’s an avalanche, a constant, inescapable pressure.

We scroll through endless feeds, each post, each video, each snippet of audio demanding our attention. Our brains, designed for a simpler time, struggle to keep pace. We skim, we scan, we try to absorb, but the sheer volume overwhelms us. We’re left with a sense of perpetual incompleteness, a nagging feeling that we’re always missing something, which is now summed up by this acronym — FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

The numbers are terrifying. Hundreds of trillions of words produced every day. Over 700,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube alone, daily. Tens of thousands of new podcasts, and hundreds of millions of newsletters. How can any human, with limited time and finite cognitive capacity, hope to keep up?

Our professional lives are no different. Reports, emails, industry articles, webinars, training videos, conference calls — the relentless flow of information never ceases. We’re expected to be experts in our fields, to stay abreast of the latest developments, but the sheer volume makes it an impossible task. We’re caught in a constant state of catch-up, forever trying to fill the gaps in our knowledge, but the gaps only widen.

The constant stimulation, the endless notifications, the pressure to be connected — it takes its toll. Think of it — we’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and increasingly disconnected from the present moment. We yearn for the simplicity of the past, for a time when information was a tool, not a weapon. We feel small, insignificant, lost in the vast, churning ocean of data. We’re drowning, and there seems to be no escape.

So, our team at “Synopsis”, the service that brings out “Ditch The Scroll”, used an AI model to actually try and quantify how much content can an average human consume in 16 out of 24 hours (presuming the remaining are spent sleeping), and plotted it against the amount of content that is actually churned out across the world daily.

The aim of this exercise is to underline the massive scale of global content production versus human consumption, underscoring the risk of information overload and the need for smarter summarization tools.

We worked on five different scenarios:

Scenario 1: Reading continuously for 16 hours

Scenario 2: Watching videos continuously for 16 hours

Scenario 3: Listening to audio continuously for 16 hours

Scenario 4: A mixed bag i.e. reading, watching, and listening to content continuously for 16 hours

Scenario 5: A mixed bag plus factoring in time taken for daily routines — meals, work, family, hobbies.

(Included in all 5 is both, the professional and personal consumption of content. And, we’ve deliberately modeled 16 hours of nonstop content consumption in all the case studies save the last — assuming the rest is spent sleeping — to emphasize that even such an intense daily binge isn’t enough to keep up with the sheer volume of content being produced.

Now, before you read the rest of this post, and look at the statistics, here’s something you need to know:

Riders:

• Numbers Are Approx.,Not Exact (Applies to ALL Statistics). Figures are approximations but arrived at in a scientific manner. Whether we’re talking about words read, videos watched, or podcasts listened to, remember that these are estimations. The digital world is vast and ever-changing.
• Smart Computers Helped Us Guess the Numbers (Applies to ALL Calculations). All our calculations regarding content consumption, human and global, were aided by computational analysis. Think of them as educated guesses based on available data.
• We Tried to Be Fair (Applies to ALL Scenarios). We’ve strived to present a balanced view of content consumption, considering various factors and avoiding bias.
• Everyone’s Brain Works Differently (Applies to ALL Individuals). When we use the word “consume”, it includes the time taken to consume the inputs of content and the processing time taken by the human brain to understand it. The amount of content an individual can eat up and process varies greatly. What overwhelms one person might be manageable for another.
• We Figured Out When Too Much Is Too Much (Applies to the Concept of Overload). The concept of information overload is based on observed patterns and data, but the exact threshold is subjective.
• Data Fluctuation Expected (Applies to all Data). The figures presented are a snapshot in time. Expect the numbers to change as the digital landscape shifts.
• Data Sampling Considered (Applies to all data). Data was gathered from a variety of online sources to provide the most representative view possible.
• Why This? This exercise isn’t about measuring the exact hours of content consumption — it’s only to ram home the point that content is being produced today at a rate no human can keep up with.

Scenario 1: Reading* for 16 hours a Day at a Stretch

To do this effectively, we need to make some assumptions about the average length of a blog post.

Assumption:

Average blog post length: 1,000 words.

Calculations:

Number of blogs: 312,000 words / 1,000 words per blog = 312 blogs.

Impact:

In just 16 hours, a person could theoretically read 312 blog posts!

(*In this “continuous reading only” scenario, we used a couple of different reading speeds to account for skimming and in-depth reading:)

Skimming:

500 words per minute / 60 seconds per minute = approximately 8.3 words per second.

In-depth reading:

150 words per minute / 60 seconds per minute = 2.5 words per second.

We then averaged these out, presuming that the person spent 50% of the time skimming, and 50% of the time reading at length.

Scenario 2: Only Watching Videos for 16 hours a Day

Assumption:

A mix of short clips (2 minutes) and long videos (1 hour).

Some videos are watched at 1.5x speed.

Calculations:

To make this easy, let’s presume that the subject watches 8, two-hour-long movies.

That is 16 hours of video.

Impact: 16 hours of continuous video watching is a huge amount of visual information to process, and the brain will become easily fatigued.

Scenario 3: Only Listening to Audio Content Collateral for 16 Hours a Day Straight

Assumption:

Average podcast length: 45 minutes.

Some podcasts are listened to at 1.25x speed.

Calculations:

16 hours = 960 minutes.

960/45 = 21.33 podcasts. So roughly 21 podcasts can be listened to in 16 hours.

Impact: Even at faster speeds, the sheer volume of audio information can be overwhelming.

Scenario 4: A Mixed Bag — Reading, Watching, and Listening to Content Continuously for 16 hours

Assumption:

4 hours reading.

6 hours watching videos.

6 hours listening to podcasts.

Calculations:

Reading: 4 hours x 60 minutes = 240 minutes.

Presume 50% skimming and 50% reading at length.

120 minutes x 500 wpm = 60,000 words.

120 minutes x 150 wpm = 18,000 words.

Total reading words = 78,000 words.

Watching: 6 hours of video. This could be 3, two-hour-long movies.

Listening: 6 hours of podcasts. 6 hours = 360 minutes. 360/45 = 8 podcasts.

Impact: Even with a mix, the brain is constantly processing different types of information, leading to potential overload.

Scenario 5: A Mixed Bag — Reading, Watching, and Listening to Content Added to Your Daily Routine

Now, added to the approx 8 hours of sleep, we added other daily routines to content consumption in the 16 waking hours — meals, commuting, work, caring for family, sports, hobbies, and more — that obviously eat into a portion of the 16 hours.

• Sleep: 8 hours
• Meals: 1.5 hours
• Work/Commute/Professional Content: 8 hours
• Personal Time: 2 hours
• Total Deducted: 11.5 hours
• Remaining Personal Content Time: 4.5 hours

Professional Content Breakdown (8 Hours):

We’ll assume a mix of:

• Reading reports, emails, industry articles.
• Watching webinars, training videos, presentations.
• Listening to industry podcasts, and conference calls.
• To make this easy, let us presume that 4 hours are spent reading, 2 hours are spent watching, and 2 hours are spent listening.

Professional Reading (4 Hours):

2 hours skimming, 2 hours in-depth reading.

2 hours = 120 minutes.

120 minutes skimming: 120 x 500 = 60,000 words.

120 minutes in depth: 120 x 150 = 18,000 words.

Total words = 78,000 words.

Approx 78 blogs.

Professional Watching (2 Hours):

This could be webinars, training videos, online tutorials, etc.

Professional Listening (2 Hours):

2 hours = 120 minutes. 120/45 = 2.66. So roughly 2 to 3 professional podcasts.

Daily Count:

• Professional:

78,000 words (reading)

2 hours of video (watching)

2–3 podcasts (listening)

• Personal:

29,250 words (reading)

• 1.5 hours of video (watching)
• 2 podcasts (listening)

Total:

• 107,250 words total.
• 3.5 hours of video.
• 4–5 podcasts.

Impact:

• The inclusion of professional content significantly increases the daily intake.
• It reinforces the need for efficient information processing and summarization tools.
• The amount of words read is now over 100,000. That is a very large amount of information.

Now Compare All Or Any of the Above Scenarios to the Content Being Churned Out Daily

a) Text Output (Daily):

• This is a tough one to pin down precisely, but here’s a breakdown:
• Social Media: Billions of posts and comments across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Blogs/Articles: Millions of blog posts and news articles are published daily.
• Emails: Hundreds of billions of emails are sent every day.
• Overall: It’s estimated that trillions of words are generated daily.
• To give a more specific example, WordPress users alone publish around 2.50 million blog posts every day.
• It’s incredibly difficult to get a single, precise number. However, considering social media, emails, articles, and books, a conservative estimate would be in the quadrillions of characters daily. To put this in perspective, if we take the average word length to be 5 characters, we are talking about hundreds of trillions of words. Let’s get some perspective on those hundreds of trillions of words:
• Average Novel Length: We’ll go with an estimate of 80,000 words per novel.
• Target: For simplicity, let’s round it off to 100 trillion words.
• Calculation: 100,000,000,000,000 words / 80,000 words per novel = 1,250,000,000 novels.
• Therefore, 100 trillion words = 1.25 billion novels.

To put that in perspective:

If each novel was 1 inch thick, 1.25 billion novels stacked on top of each other would reach approximately 19,726 miles high.

b) Videos Uploaded (Daily):

• YouTube alone sees over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
• That’s 30,000 hours every hour.
• Therefore, 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube alone every day.
• On TikTok, about 34 million videos are uploaded daily, which is about 272 videos every second. Add to these videos on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and we can safely estimate that billions of hours of video are uploaded daily.

c) Podcasts Published (Daily):

• There are millions of active podcasts.
• It is estimated that tens of thousands of podcast episodes are published every day.
• This number is constantly growing.

d) Newsletters Published (Daily):

• Estimating newsletter volume is challenging due to the decentralized nature of email.
• However, considering the millions of businesses and individuals using email marketing platforms, we put this figure at over 300 billion emails that are sent and received daily, including daily newsletters.

Phew, so, there you have it, folks! We’ve taken a wild ride through the digital data jungle, dodging content avalanches and wrestling with the sheer, mind-boggling volume of information that hits us every single day. It’s a crazy world out there, a non-stop, 24/7 content circus!

Now, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed, maybe even a tad dizzy. But hey, that’s the digital age for ya! It’s a whirlwind of words, a tsunami of videos, a symphony of podcasts. And while we might not be able to drink from the entire firehose, we can sure try to sip strategically.

The bottom line? We’re living in a time of unprecedented information abundance. It’s a challenge, sure, but it’s also a chance to learn, grow, and create like never before. So, go forth, explore, and find your own rhythm in the digital dance. And remember, when the data deluge gets too intense, take a deep breath, step away from the screen, and maybe go outside and hug a tree. You’ve earned it!

(These calculations were derived using Google Gemini 2.0 Flash, along with human inputs from research papers and other sources. While we’ve made every effort to ensure accuracy, keep in mind that LLMs can sometimes err.)

And here’s a little back-door marketing:

If you’re among the millions experiencing the challenge of digital content overload, consider our service, “Synopsis”. Our team of experienced human content miners, editors, and researchers can help you navigate the vast landscape of information. Simply provide us with your areas of interest — politics, business and finance, world affairs, sport, aviation, metals and mining, or any other — and we’ll deliver concise summaries of the key developments. We offer flexible delivery options, allowing you to receive updates at your preferred frequency and in your preferred format. All this while you play golf, go fishing, or do whatever it is you do in your free time.