Roger will be appearing at a UCSD colloquium on Wednesday, February 3, to discuss the results of the HMI project.

The event will be held in the Media Center / Communications building on campus (map here), and the nearest parking is just across the way on Muir College Drive. He’s scheduled to speak at 12:40PM in room MCC 201.

Here’s the official blurb:

How much information do Americans consume? At the start we have to define information, consume, and much.  All three definitions are unavoidably controversial. …

I will present and discuss our results, most of which are available in our report at hmi.ucsd.edu. We didn’t have strong expectations of what we would find, but we were surprised anyway. Overall, growth in bytes has been only about six percent per year. This is surprising because it appears to contradict Moore’s Law. On the other hand, there is no visible saturation in hours of consumption, which now average almost 12 hours per capita per day using our definitions. Computer games are the biggest source of bytes, although there are measurement problems that make our estimates uncertain. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled in share of words from 1980 to 2008, because of the Internet. Yet TV, radio, and other non-computer sources provide more than 75 percent of hours of consumption.

The broader significance of our results is not very clear, at least to us. There are enough different measurement methods to provide evidence for almost any broad generalization about “progress” or lack thereof. Nonetheless, I will make some assertions in hopes of stimulating discussion. I’ll also mention some related research that Jim Short and I are undertaking.

See you next Wednesday!