The problem

55% of people across the world are depending on social media and search engine to consume information. （Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 2019）. Although the original intention of Internet was to share knowledge and promote equity, nowadays digital content feeds are largely controlled by only several big entities, which are largely driven by economical incentives. Therefore, it has resulted in following problems:

  1. Proven risks of leaking sensitive personal information;
  2. The digital community ecosystem is overloaded of seductive information that attract people to consume commodities they may not need at all, thus casuing a huge waste of resources and great damage to the earth environment;
  3. Radical perspectives and false information can be spread so quickly that the publics opinion can be easily manipulated(Lewandowsky,2020; Aral，2020);
  4. The dissemination of fragmentated information further prevents people from thinking deeply and learning systematically.
  5. People tend to get addicted to temporary amusements instead of thinking independently and objectively. Besides, algorithoms unitentionally form the “information cocoon room” which further narrows people capability to embrace the diversity

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Current efforts

To ease above problems, current public efforts include but not limited to:

  1. The government make laws of web governance, such as GDPR;
  2. The engineers develop tools that can help label information source and content quality to empower online autonomy;
  3. Many EU users decide to stop using social media apps such as Facebook;

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My question

So, what else can we do? To be specific, instead of passively consuming fragmented, false and addictive information, how can we foster a virtuous lifecycle of digital environment which:

  1. Protect and respect personal privacy;
  2. Reduce unnecessary resource waste;
  3. Maintain the digital autonomy;
  4. Accelearate the capability of learning and growing;
  5. Encourage independent thinking and diverse cognition;

References

Lorenz-Spreen, P., Lewandowsky, S., Sunstein, C. R., & Hertwig, R. (2020). How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online. Nature Human Behaviour. doi:10.1038/s41562-020-0889-7

Aral, S. (2020). How we can protect truth in the age of misinformation. TED Talks. https://www.ted.com/talks/sinan_aral_how_we_can_protect_truth_in_the_age_of_misinformation?language=en
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Digital News Report 2019 out now. (2019). Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/digital-news-report-2019-out-now