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?

Does our conception of âthe more, the betterâ 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)?

What Are Possible Solutions?

We have come historically close to an important policy goal of our democratized information society. Thanks to the internet we have reached a state where information is created and accessed through multiple and diverse information sources. At the same time, this achievement raises new concerns in terms of quality issues. How can we ensure that users do not only have potential access to high quality information but can really harness and process such information? Addressing such concerns means taking measures on several layers. We are convinced that regulating information in its totality or setting uniform top-down quality standards are not appropriate ways to deal with information quality issues as it would endanger the openness and sustainability of the net. Information quality is complex. It requires consideration of different contexts, dimensions, and individual informational needs. Therefore, possible solutions should be reflected from various perspectives, including market, code, norm, and law perspectives.

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?