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our voracious appetite for information and entertainment

The study suggests that, on average, most Americans consume 11.8 hours of information a day.

Most of this time is spent in front of some sort of screen watching TV-related content

computer, which we interact with for about two hours a day

Most of these experiences happen simultaneously

a huge increase in the number of bytes we consume related to video games

Gaming saw the biggest leap in the number of bytes we consume and the amount of time devoted to this platform.” This isn’t just first-person shooting games but also includes lots of analytical games like Bookworm, Tetris as well as social networking games.

if you add up the amount of time people spend surfing the Web, they are actually reading more than ever

from 1980 to 2008, the number of bytes we consume has increased 6 percent each year, the researchers said, adding up to a 350 percent increase over 28 years

Farmville is designed to draw you back in small doses scattered throughout the day. In Harvest Moon you plant crops and keep yourself busy while in-game days pass, in Farmville you plant crops and harvest them on a real-world schedule

bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and "adopt" the adorable little self-promoter

Farmville bestows ample amounts of beginner's luck on anyone who's just starting, but gradually puts the brakes on their pace of progress until going from level 23 to 27 will mean doubling all the experience you've earned up to that point.

In order to quit Farmville you'd have to make a conscious choice after harvesting your fields to not re-plant them, or else leave all your currently planted crops to die. Some of my friends have even handed out their Facebook passwords to get their friends to babysit their farms for them when they're on vacation

Farmville does seem consciously designed around that goal: it virally spreads itself throughout your social network as innocently as it can, and subtly convinces players that it's more worthwhile to pay actual money than spend all their time farming to get ahead, and tempts them with decorations you can't achieve any other way.