We watch 11,000 years of online TV in a month: Is the human race doomed?

A few numbers for you to mull over if you can tear yourself away from watching Youtube and playing Angry Birds –

It seems we all spend waaay too much time watching Youtube videos and playing Angry Birds.

PREPARE FOR THE TRUTH

1) In one month (April) – Britons watched 11,000 years worth of online video. Each of us sees on average 7 minutes of online footage everyday. The main video source was Youtube, with iPlayer, Vevo and Facebook being the next big video destinations.

2) Globally, we spend 2 million minutes a day playing Angry Birds, or 46 years a month.

The stats are less mind-boggling for Angry Birds – and we are talking globally here. But considering this is just one app among thousands, it is indicative of the amount of man, and woman-hours spent on gaming apps. Both figures do go to show we spend a lot of time fucking around.

These are the sort of figures that cause the worriers among us to worry that the human race will never get anything useful done ever again because we get too easily distracted by videos of cats and silly games about pigs.

Clay Shirky’s influential theory of “Cognitive Surplus” – postulated that thanks to the internet, humans beings would spend their spare time putting together useful collaborative projects like Wikipedia. Figures like these do give a bit of perspective to this. Just think what we could achieve if we didn’t spend so much time watching Lady Gaga parodies..

We are spending a lot of our spare time doing markedly unuseful things as this Nieman Journalism article confirms.

I’m just glad I haven’t seen the statistics for time spent playing Farmville. That would depress the most optimistic among us…