The Internet is a great invention and a powerful tool. It has a large and increasing influence on our daily lifes, as well as on our opinion- and decision making processes that eventually affect the quality of our living. It is as much an opportunity as a danger. Self-organized structures on the internet are presently (still) operating mostly in legal vacuum, and these do interfere with our political systems.
The increasing connectivity of our world on a global scale, and the faster and more easily available information have the potential to significantly affect the basis of our decisions on political questions, as well as the processes to reach them, offering new forms of activism, citizenship and politics. This increasing connectivity also has the potential to focus more and more attention on the fads, the trivia and the headlines of the day, on the expenses of investing thought on long-term goals and in-depth studies. Such developments need monitoring and correction when in conflict with our societies' long-term goals.
One important aspect is that badly ordered information is no information. It is not only necessary that information be available, it also has to be found. More than that, it has to be found easily as the average person does not have time (or does not wish to invest the time) to sift arbitrary amounts of data. Especially in an age of increasing attention deficit, the first few pieces of information obtain large relevance.
This delegates a lot of power to online search tools that structure the information citizens obtain. In their paper “Googlearchy:
How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics
on the Web”, Hindmany, Tsioutsiouliklisz and Johnson argue
“[T]he knowledge that the global structure of the Web is governed by a power
law distribution suggests a very specific danger - a result we call `googlearchy'. The
Google search engine ranks results based on the number of inbound hyperlinks that
a site receives. The suggestion is that this phenomenon may extend beyond just a
single search tool, no matter how prominent -that a handful of heavily-linked sites
may dominate political information on the Web, even for those who rarely use a
search engine. Rather than `democratizing' the dissemination of information, the
prospect of googlearchy suggests that citizens may continue to get their political information from only a few sources, even on the apparently limitless information vistas of cyberspace.”
The bottomline is that some technogical developments happen automatically, typically those that create short-term pleasures like entertainment or financial profit. Other developments, those necessary for ensuring that long-term goals can be achieved, need to be scientifically addressed and put in place. Identifying these developments and the ways to put them in place is a main aim of the Lightcone Institute's research.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 27 July 2008 )
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