Problems of Digital Information Quality

Does our conception of “the more, the better” that is derived from an offline world still apply to the digitally connected world? This conception is based on the idea that people can take better decisions based on a set of diverse information sources among which they have a choice. However, in these days the lack of diverse information is not a threat anymore to most western societies. Information is no longer solely provided through a small number of hieratically and centralized structured media companies. Today, everybody has a voice in the internet and can contribute his thoughts to the online world. Thus, the problems in these days have shifted:

• How can users filter and organize the huge amounts of digital information in a meaningful way? How can they prevent to experience information overload?

• How can we prevent information asymmetries that hinder users to take fully informed decisions? How can we enable users to distinguish between high and low quality information?

• How can we enable users to find, re-find and understand information that suits to their particular interests, and contexts? [add French example]

• How do we deal with the fact that experts that pre-select information have widely disappeared (e.g. editors of a journals, music producers? How do we deal with new and unregulated intermediaries (e.g. search engines)?