Narratives

The rise of digital natives and their relationship to the internet raises questions with regard to digital information quality that are considerably distinct from quality conflicts in offline situations. Consider the following narratives for an illustration of such issues:

TVNewser

When people in the television news business want to catch up with the newest gossip in the industry, they turn to a blog called TVNewser. TVNewser was created three years ago by Brian Stelter, then an 18-year old digital native studying at Towson University. Brian initially concealed his identity so that his growing audience would take him seriously. People thought that he was a bald disgruntled 40-something executive and obsessively checked his blog to keep up with the latest news.

Today, Brianâs identity is revealed but the whole industry still pays attention to his blog. In the meanwhile, Brian is a senior majoring in mass communication and the editor of the student newspaper. By 9 am, he is awake and blogs about the newest gossip and events in the news media industry from his apartment as well as in class, the student union, and his desk in a corner of the newspaper office. Brian has earned the grudging trust of many of his readers, who e-mail him hundreds of Tipps a day that often translate into scoops. The biggest TV executives, such as Jonathan Klein, president of CNNâs national news division, look at this kidâs Web site all the time. Despite his youth and inexperience, Brian is generally thought of as a reliable reporter in the industry.

Source: Bosman, J.: The Kid With All the News About the TV News, in: The New York Times, 11/20/2006.

Dr. Google

My children have in recent weeks decided that they have leprosy, irritable bowel syndrome and Lyme disease.

âIâm contagious,â my 9-year-old said, looking up from the laptop on which she had just typed her symptoms one morning last week. âI shouldnât go to school with strip throat.â âItâs strep throat,â I said, not looking up from my breakfast. âAnd you donât have it. So go get dressed.â

In the old days, children dreaded a visit to the pediatrician, where getting a shot was always a possibility. But now that Dr. Google makes house calls, mine spend hours online typing queries into search boxes to investigate symptoms â âMom, does this image of ringworm look like the thing on my leg?â â before printing out proof that they should not be required to walk the dog in the cold. Nobody is really sick at my house; the suspected ringworm turned out to be nothing more than an elastic mark from a sock. But my children definitely are exhibiting the symptoms of a new syndrome. By taking their symptoms online without the benefit of stethoscopes, much less medical degrees, they are following in the footsteps of plenty of grown-ups. As a host of recent studies show, a growing number of people â as many as 40 percent of the 39,000 adults surveyed for a 2006 Consumer Reports study â are researching their medical conditions online.

But those people are getting mixed results. According to the same survey, 41 percent of primary-care physicians reported that patients arrived in their office armed with bad information they found on the Internet. The American Medical Association, which warns that Web sites with inaccurate information may confuse people or even endanger their health, cautions patients not to consult Dr. Google instead of a real M.D.

Literally citation from: Amilias, C.: Visits to doctors who are not in, ever, in: The New York Times, 05/24/2007.

Rewriting History

Mr. Seigenthaler Sr., a U.S. journalist and former political aide, has read an entry about his biography on Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia where everybody can contribute. He was shocked to hear that he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General, who Seigenthaler had worked for as an assistant. The false information had been on the site for several months and an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites.

What is the value of Wikipedia and the nature of online information in general? To what extent is online information reliable? And who is accountable for bad quality information on the internet?

After his defamation, Mr. Seigenthaler found that his biographer was anonymous. He came to know that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws do not reveal the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material.

Sources: Tech Chanel: Wikipedia to highlight quality issues, 2006. Seelye, K.: Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar, 12.06.2005.

Divided Opinions on Wikipedia

âI was at a college graduation ceremony yesterday, and when one of the student speakers mentioned Wikipedia the graduates broke into applause. "Now we can finally admit that we use Wikipedia for research," the speaker continued. That brought another round of cheers from the kids as well as some futile boos and hisses from parents and faculty." (Nicolas Carr)

Depending on your lights, Wikipedia is either one of the noblest experiments of the Internet age or a nightmare embodiment of relativism and the withering of intellectual standards.

Questions Raised From these Narratives

Is the internet a reliable source of information?
Can non-professionals really create high quality information? Why should they?
Does the creation of low quality content by a vast number of amateurs dilute high quality online information?
What role do offline credentials play in online situations?
Can the abuse of offline brands harm the overall credibility of the internet?
Can young, vulnerable information receivers be appropriately protected from low quality information?
Who are the overall winners? Who are the loosers?

What Is Information Quality?

Information quality refers to information that is fit for its intended use. E.g. correct, complete, unbiased, and coherent information would be considered as high quality information.

A general definition of the term âinformation qualityâ is not suitable as the quality of information depends on the respective circumstances and the affected individuals.

A number of normative and descriptive criteria can constitute a general framework to evaluate the quality of information in particular contexts. Sample:

Source: Eppler, M., Helfert, M., Gasser, U.: Information Quality: Organizational, technological, and legal perspectives, 2004.

How Does the Internet Foster High Quality Information?

The internet has fundamentally changed the way how digital natives create, distribute, access and use information.

Creation: Everybody with a computer and internet access can be a publisher on the internet. Information is no longer created by a small group of hierarchal organized professionals but by integrating the a large number of digital natives. Digital information on the internet is mostly not reviewed by institutional reviewers such as newspaper editors.
Distribution: Information can be distributed in real-time. No time verlust through printing
Accessibility: With almost no cost, you can access information. You only need a computer and internet. Digital information is accessible. It is more fluent.
Use: Digital natives are not only passive receivers of information, rather they actively engage with actual topics and deal with it by transforming, derivative, creative, artful way.

Consider our âdigital creatorsâ chapter for deeper insights into these issues.

This structural change fosters the production and access of high quality information in numerous ways:

Amount of high quality information: As more people engage in creating information, digital natives can access more information and have a choice among different types and qualities of information.
Diversity of information: The integration of many people from around the world in the information production process allows digital natives to get insights into different viewpoints, reflect on sensitive issues from various perspectives and autonomously develop balanced opinions.
Scope of information: In the age of digital natives, information is no longer produced to meet solely main-stream demands (e.g. best-seller movies). The access to a broader audience via internet also fosters the production of less-mainstream information (the long tail). The publication of information is no longer pre-filtered through professional intermediaries, such as professional editors.

What Are the Dangers?

Attention Deficit Disorder/Cognitive Overload

From an cant you pay attention anymore/2008-1022_3-5637632.html interview with psychiatrist Edward Hallowell

Q: What is ADT?

A: It's sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it's a condition induced by modern life, in which you've become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you're doing so much or trying to do so much, it's as if you're juggling one more ball than you possibly can.

Q: Are some people just better at multitasking than others?

A: No one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing. When it looks like you're multitasking--you're looking at one TV screen and another TV screen and you're talking on the telephone--your attention has to shift from one to the other. You're brain literally can't multitask. You can't pay attention to two things simultaneously. You're switching back and forth between the two. So you're paying less concerted attention to either one.

I think in general, why some people can do well at what they call multitasking is because the effort to do it is so stimulating. You get adrenaline pumping that helps focus your mind. What you're really doing is focusing better at brief spurts on each stimulus. So you don't get bored with either one.

Q: Do you think this is a generational thing? Kids now are growing up with e-mail, cell phones and so on. Maybe they'll be able to cope better than we do?

A: I think maybe they'll be more adept with these tools when they get to the workplace, but I think the same principles will apply. How you allocate your time and your attention is crucial. What you pay attention to and for how long really makes a difference. If you're just paying attention to trivial e-mails for the majority of your time, you're wasting time and mental energy. It's the great seduction of the information age. You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you're not. You're just treading water.

From Seven, Life Interrupted, Seattle Times (2004)

"'We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before,' says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder. 'I think that's why we're seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death.'

This is of particular interest when it comes to children who have grown up in the fast lane where Web pages that take more than five seconds to load are considered lame. Is the speed and ease compromising their attention spans? Their perspective? Their humanity? Even their work ethic? Or are we just threatened that they will lap us old fogies?

Little is understood about the Information Age's effect on this generation, but it is a burgeoning area of research. Ratey wonders if kids would read 'The Red Badge of Courage' to complete their homework or simply comb the Internet for essays explaining it all for them."

From Jiang et al.: We weren't made to multitask (2004):

"It's readily apparent that handling two things at once is much harder than handling one thing at a time. Spend too much time trying to juggle more than one objective and you'll end up wanting to get rid of all your goals besides sleeping. The question is, though, what makes it so hard to process two things at once?

Two theories try to explain this phenomenon: "passive queuing" and "active monitoring." The former says that information has to line up for a chance at being processed at some focal point of the brain, while the latter suggests that the brain can process two things at once - it just needs to use a complicated mechanism to keep the two processes separate. Recent research from MIT points to the former as an explanation.

Yuhong Jiang, Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher, in a study (...) examined the brain activity involved in multitasking. They gave people two simple tasks. Task one was identifying shapes, and for some subjects, task two was identifying letters, for others it was identifying colors. The subjects were forced to switch from one task to the other in either one and a half seconds or one tenth of a second. When they had to switch faster, subjects would take as much as twice as long to respond than when switching more slowly.

Using MRI technology, Jiang, Saxe and Kanwisher examined subjects' brain activity while performing these tasks. They observed no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished."

Digital amnesia: somewhat counter-intuitively, huge amounts of information are simply forgotten or cannot be read anymore after some time; Stewart Brand: âInformation lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first.â; "digital dark age"

Reliability of new navigators: how to dissect relevant from irrelevant information? (see wikipedia cases)

"Digital me": fragmentation of audiences, implications for DNs' understanding of democracy (cp. Sunstein's Republic.com)

Alternative ways of framing the problem:

Attention as a scarce resource: problem can be framed as attention shortage, rather than information overload; how to allocate one's attention efficiently? (Franck, Goldhaber)

Adaptation to a new signaling environment: It seems that it is not necessarily the sheer increase in the amount of information and the diversity of sources that are the problem. For example, if someone put me in a helicopter and dropped me off in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, I would most likely suffer from severe information overload, too. Thus, another way of looking at the phenonemon could be through the lense of signaling theory. The adaptive challenge would be less in the tidal wave of information, but rather our ability to adequately interpret signals in online environments and differentiate reliable from deceptive signals. Judith Donath of MIT's Media Lab is writing a book on that approach.

What Are Possible Solutions?

(from Urs' essay draft)

Markets

- Reputation systems

- Quality labels, trustmarks

Social Norms

- Codes of conduct for bloggers, transparency

- Policies and guidelines at Wikipedia, Netiquette

Code

- Rating, filtering (ICRA, content advisor)

- Meta-data: tagging as a collaborative way to organize information according to folksonomies, (i.e. emergent grassroots taxonomies), see, e.g., Weinberger: Why Tagging Matters

- Specialized software to find content on hard drives, see Metz, PCMag: Conquer Information Overload (2003) (example of Jim Crowe, promoter at Atlantic records)

- Syndication, content aggregators, see Bradbury, FT: Might RSS Help To Solve Your Web Mess?

Law

- Disclosure standards in health regulation (quality standards, procedural requirements, etc.)

- Truth-in-advertising regulation

- Right to correct wrong information

Behavior/Learning (training the dot in the middle)

- Accelerated learning techniques to improve speed and comprehension, e.g. speed reading, see Fifield, FT: Cut through acres of type to the fast lane (2004)

Miscellaneous ideas

Can increased collaboration aka Web 2.0 be interpreted as a response to information overload? If passive consumption becomes increasingly difficult and partly even unfeasible in view of an ever more diverse and abundant information environment, then web 2.0 strategies like tagging, remixing, mash-ups, and shared bookmarks can be regarded as essential tools to autonomously structure one's information environment. This reveals an interesting paradoxon of today's Internet: the very technologies we see at the heart of the information overload problem simultaneously provide us with the tools to combat it.