Am in the US, where I gave a lecture in an interesting conference called “Information Growth. Is it what you think it is? – How much information 2009 summit”, organized by the Global Information Industry Center at UCSD. The summit was held to present first results from the “How Much Information?” (HMI) research program, which is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seven hi-tech companies.
The research program works to quantify the amount of information that flows into the homes and workplaces of people in this day and age, and to understand how it is divided between different modalities (Cable, Live TV, Radio, Computer data, Books, Videogames, etc); and how all this changes over time. This was an interesting experience, because it addresses the flood of information from a rather different perspective than my usual one. Of course, that’s why I was invited to speak there: to give a different POV. My talk was called “All information is not created equal”, and it looked at different aspects of what makes the information – any information – more or less valuable, and in some cases outright harmful, to the end users that consume it.
Meanwhile I had fascinating discussions with other attendees, and took in much new knowledge. The actual amounts of information being delivered, stored and consumed are huge, thanks in large part to video and gaming content; the average American consumes 34 Gigabytes of information per day. The raw numbers are of interest to hardware and networking manufacturers; but the implications to individuals and to society are perhaps even more interesting. Understanding where the time “saved” from declining book reading goes, how different age groups differ in their information consumption patterns, and how the “digital divide” is penalizing people lacking ready access to this digital feast, are just some of the important questions involved. Expect some of the insights of the day, once I digest them more fully, to appear in future posts on this blog.
Oh, and I also went to see the Babbage Difference Engine in action at the Computer History Museum…
