Living in Digital Worlds

7 Challenges of the digital public space

Bias

 

 

 

 

 

In Chapter 4, we describe the ‘sea of information’ that surrounds us. But while it is tempting to think that this information sea is made up of equal, impartial, objective facts, this is not the case. It is also not a randomly aggregated collection: the digital space, private or public, is curated. It needs to be, because there is simply so much of it – otherwise it would be useless because nobody would be able to find the information that they needed. The fact that we can now sort and reference large amounts of information is one of the major advances that has led to the advent of the information age (as coined by Castells, 2011) and is what gives digital computing systems their power. ...