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Power used to be about whose army won, he said; in an information age, it is as much about whose story wins.

Soft Power Information

Post-Normal Science in a German Landscape

This essay explores the management and creation of ignorance via an exploration of the landscape of eastern Germany, which has seen profound social, political, and technological changes over the past several decades. Like in many places around the world decision makers in eastern Germany are seeking to reach a future state where seemingly conflicting outcomes related to the economy and the environment are simultaneously realized. The management of ignorance is an important but often overlooked consideration in decision making that the concept of “post-normal science” places into our focus of attention.

Post-Normal Science Ignorance Information

I was invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this week to outline my notion that it is possible, amid the reverberating noise and distraction, to use the Web and other emerging communication tools and networks to make the world a better place.

Here’s my talk, “Building the #Knowosphere: How new ways to share and shape ideas can help build durable progress on a finite planet”:

Information Noise Communication Science Journalism

This paper focuses on Information Warfare—the warfare characterised by the use of information and communication technologies. This is a fast growing phenomenon, which poses a number of issues ranging from the military use of such technologies to its political and ethical implications. The paper presents a conceptual analysis of this phenomenon with the goal of investigating its nature. Such an analysis is deemed to be necessary in order to lay the groundwork for future investigations into this topic, addressing the ethical problems engendered by this kind of warfare. The conceptual analysis is developed in three parts. First, it delineates the relation between Information Warfare and the Information revolution. It then focuses attention on the effects that the diffusion of this phenomenon has on the concepts of war. On the basis of this analysis, a definition of Information Warfare is provided as a phenomenon not necessarily sanguinary and violent, and rather transversal concerning the environment in which it is waged, the way it is waged and the ontological and social status of its agents. The paper concludes by taking into consideration the Just War Theory and the problems arising from its application to the case of Information Warfare.

War Technology Ethics Information New Media Traditional Media

From state-sponsored cyber attacks to autonomous robotic weapons, twenty-first century war is increasingly disembodied. Our wars are being fought in the ether and by machines. And yet our ethics of war are stuck in the pre-digital age. 

We're used to thinking of war as a physical phenomenon, as an outbreak of destructive violence that takes place in the physical world. Bullets fly, bombs explode, tanks roll, people collapse. Despite the tremendous changes in the technology of warfare, it remained a contest of human bodies. But as the drone wars have shown, that's no longer true, at least for one side of the battle.

War Technology Ethics Information New Media Traditional Media

technology, despite its benefits, can add new pitfalls to an already grueling process. “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments” in cities, Mr. Bloomberg said.

“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” he said. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”

Social Media Media Information Overload

Secrecy is a kind of dead weight on sound and accountable government, in much the same way that excessive and irresponsibly incurred public debt is a dead weight on the effective functioning of our market economies. Secrecy should be cut back to a minimum.

Government Secrecy Censorship Open Government Open Information Information Divide Wikileaks Ethics

Education Information Language

Students here might be increasingly turning to the Internet as a source of information but a study has raised red flags on their information literacy - or the ability to manage the information, such as discerning its authenticity and using it ethically.

Information Literacy Internet

Correlation Causation Life Information Overload Health Medicine Science

In our amazingly fast digital world, the collection of data has become very powerful.  The power in numbers to help a client operate more efficiently, to help a lawmaker make a critical vote that will impact her constituents in countless ways, or even how an individual buys a car or house – all of these decisions are shaped by data gathered, analyzed, and acted upon.  I like to think of it as data provides wisdom to make more powerful decisions.
 
The power in data comes from the analysis itself.  It just cannot be a set of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. What do they mean?  Where are they from?  What do they mean in relationship to one another?  What trends do you see?  What trends don’t you see?  How does your data compare to some baseline?  These are all types of questions that must be asked by those that want to use data to further their business, government, and/or personal decision making skills.  The really cool thing about data analysis is that it is an incredibly creative and exciting process. 

Data Information Decision

When you think about what information be skeptical of, that decision can't begin and end with "corporate interests." Yes, those sources often give you bad information. But bad information comes from other places, too. The Fukushima accident was worse than TEPCO wanted people to believe when it first happened. Radiation isn't healthy for you, and there are people (plant workers, emergency crews, people who lived nearby) who will be dealing with the effects of Fukushima for years to come. But the fact that all of that is true does not mean that we should uncritically accept it when somebody says that radiation from Fukushima is killing babies in the United States. Just because the corporate interests are in the wrong doesn't mean that every claim against them is true.

Corporation Data Bias Information Capitalism Reality

Eli Pariser is making noise these days as the author of "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You". His new book, which was released earlier this month, argues that the latest tools being implemented by the likes of Google and Facebook for making our Internet experiences as individual as possible are taking us down some very unsavory paths.

First, of course, Pariser explains the dynamic we all face online today: that no two people's Web searches, even on the same topics, return the same results. That's because search engines and other sites are basing what they send back on our previous searches, the sites we visit, ads we click on, preferences we indicate, and much more. Not to mention the fact that we are more and more shielded from viewpoints counter to our own.

But while the results are no doubt geared to what we're most interested in, they come at a price--in terms of lost privacy, more ads, and even being followed by certain types of ads no matter where we go online.

Internet Polarisation Fragmentation Information Search Engine Optimization Social Media Persuasion Rhetorics

Information is more easily accessible now than ever before, and smart, motivated people can sidestep traditional routes to obtain knowledge and disseminate it.

Information Internet Education Knowledge Censorship Research

Minuscule literacy rates and prevailing poverty may not be conditions particularly conducive to publishing entrepreneurship, but they were no hindrance for Monrovia’s The Daily Talk, a clever concept by Alfred Sirleaf that reaches thousands of Liberians every day by printing just once copy. That copy just happens to reside on a large blackboard on the side of one of the capital’s busiest roads. Sirleaf started the project in 2000, at the peak of Liberia’s civil war, but its cultural resonance and open access sustained it long after the war was over. To this day, he runs this remarkable one-man show as the editor, reporter, production manager, designer, fact-checker and publicist of The Daily Talk. For an added layer of thoughtfulness and sophistication, Sirleaf uses symbols to indicate specific topics for those who struggle to read.



The common man in society can’t afford a newspaper, can’t afford to buy a generator to get on the internet — you know, power shortage — and people are caught up in a city where they have no access to information. And all of these things motivated me to come up with a kind of free media system for people to get informed.” ~ Alfred Sirleaf

Medium Message Newspaper Poverty Information

Because electronic information seems invisible, we underestimate the resources it takes to keep it all alive. The data centers dotting the globe, colloquially known as “server farms,” are major power users with considerable carbon footprints. Such huge clusters of servers not only require power to run but must also be cooled. In the United States, it’s estimated that server farms, which house Internet, business and telecommunications systems and store the bulk of our data, consume close to 3 percent of our national power supply. Worldwide, they use more power annually than Sweden.

Data Cost Information Saturation

Information Language Data History Science

The Web is chockablock with blog posts and other material about climate change, of course, but picking your way through that to the actual science, or even to reliable write-ups on what the science means, is no easy task.

Climate Science Politics Science Internet Information Data

Internet Data Visualization Information

Religion Interpretation Information