“Real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you.”
―
information & society
When we want to find the essential characteristics in the contemporary world, what can we mark as the keyword? I suggest that it is information. We would use it as a unit to explore our society.
We are surrounded by information. We are almost overwhelmed. Any topic that we can look at is described in many approaches by scientists, journalists, or experts. It is possible to find thousands of articles or interviews about anything we want. But there is the danger.
It’s difficult to find what is valid and reliable!
We need to process the sources and work on it before we create our opinion about the topic. There are more sources: scientific literature, journalism, art, political propaganda or business-purpose documents When we need to absorb scientific conclusions, we have no chance to read all the reviews that were written and all the facts that were collected about the topic. We also have no opportunity to check the integrity of all these survey’ data. We should do it when it is our job, and our responsibility is to dig out reliable facts from this “informational jungle” and mediate our results.
However, we also need to find our stand as regular citizens because we should manage our behaviour on this basis.
One of our options is to find someone we can trust and who did the work instead of us. It may be a doctor, a journalist or an expert in the field who took all the sources, read them and claims the conclusion which can be received. There are many people doing this job. The goal of this game is to find those who provide the most reliable facts available, not just part of them, which can be convenient for their analysis, but all of them. Interpretation of the existing data is always dangerous. It is not only a suggestion but also a seed which can fall into arable soil. If we want to navigate in a sensible direction, we need to check every seed to prevent the expansion of aggressive weeds in our garden.
There is a study focused on a strategy of seeking information in academic research.
Shen, Y. (2007). Information seeking in academic research: A study of the sociology faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Information technology and libraries, 26(1), 4-13.
It is available online here:
https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ital/article/view/3284/2897
"Informational Jungle"
Saturnin started this project during the COVID-19 pandemic because we saw the essential role of information in societal well-being. During the pandemic crisis, we saw people confused and divided. People had different strategies for dealing with the information they received about the virus, suitable protection, measures, medicaments, tests and vaccines. We decided to reveal the plan of how people treat sources of information and how the sources gain trust from them.
We did a few interviews, focusing on a few questions that should demonstrate the interviewees’ strategy in reading and thinking of the sources.
- The first question is how they feel that the virus is dangerous.
- The second question is what they think about measurements
- The third is if they see any consequences in the future.
interviews
Mr Hercules is an experienced scientic with a long track of commercial scientific resarch in media studies, psychology, and highly educated in chemistry, physics and physical science. He is also engaged with statistics and still working as an independent contractor in data analysis, data mining.
Mr Draco is a sought-after chiropractor and nutrition specialist. He studied philosophy, anatomy, medical care and statistics. He also educated in holistic health care and chinesse medicine.
Next interviews are coming….
Literature review
This is not the only place where is this topic discussed. There is a brief review which was written by others about this topic.
This project is paused at the moment.