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Selected Recent Presentations and Publication

Thought of the month ...

April 2010: The world is changing, or better: rapidly transforming in a revolution leading from a product-based society to an information-base society. This raises many questions, among which the following questions are of central concern:

  • Who controls access to information and information channels?
  • How permanent is information?

In order to answer these questions, we need to look at how information is made available today. Where do people turn if they need information? Increasingly, people are turning to the internet. The speed at which information is made available through the internet is unparalleled by any other print media. TV news may still be faster, but I expect a near future where the internet will be faster. One day after Chile was violently shaken by a 8.9 earthquake, I googled the earthquake, and for the first time for such a recent event, the first hit was a Wikipedia article on this earthquake. Having an entry in an encyclopaedic system less than 24 hours after the event indicates the speed of how web-based information systems can be and will be updated.

The Web is rapidly developing into a major source of information, and this trend very likely will continue. Therefore, we can focus the two questions on the Web:

  • Who controls access to the Web?
  • How permanent is information on the Web?

Let me first reflect on the second question: Some information on the web is clearly transient, creating a lot of broken links over time. Some sources may disappear because the owners decided so. There are no standards for what should be kept and how traceable information should be. History can easily be rewritten. Fake entities can be created easily and may gain considerable influence after short times on-line. Those who own the information can change it whenever they deem necessary. There is no archive making sure that tomorrow we will still know what a web page stated today. History has become soft ...

Burning books - the attempt to get rid of undesired thoughts - at least produced some visible smoke. In the future, removing web pages from a server, blocking access to parts of the web, or slowly changing the contents of web pages will not produce any smoke, smell, noise, ... We don't need to carve information into stones to make it permanent, but the current development towards a web-based plastic record of the past will lead to a future where nothing reported about the past can be trusted, unless we come up with a reasonable system to archive relevant parts of the Web.

Reflecting on the first question requires to look into the information giants like Google. I will do so in my thought of the month in May. Here I just would like to mention that a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia opened the door for companies to restrict access to information (read the commentary ...). Potential implications of such decisions reach much wider than just within economic areas.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.