today I have, for various reasons, been thinking about information ecologies

[kaberett]

Almost entirely courtesy of recessional, at least this framing of it. I do not have anything insightful or original to add, but perhaps I can interest you in:

On information ecosystems as a concept: have overviews from wikipedia and Information Matters (which I have not vetted further); and another on JSTOR, which I haven't actually even skimmed in its entirety because it's definitely bedtime. Broadly:

A practical approach to low-pressure but widespread countering of disinformation.

Assessing information sources, complete with demonstration: tumblr discusses SIFT (plus origin).

And, of particular relevance to me this evening, the value of consistently removing wretched stickers, and optionally replacing them with something constructive.

Comments

[recessional]

Doing the preemptive addition of "yes, there are definitely limitations to using this framework to talk about systems of information and knowledge and it should not be applied too literally; at the same time it has advantages of conceptualization and is a very useful way to think about these things when you're high-level conceptualizing how information-access and information-seeking and information acceptance and all those other things work."

The only thing that I would add which I alas have not actually written anywhere else publicly: do not underestimate how little most people know; how badly impoverished their information ecosystems are. You know this xkcd thing about experts? If you're in our host kaberett's comments here, when it comes to information literacy, you are already in that box, assuming that everyone knows about quartz, when for reasons of access, training, capacity, personal energy, exhaustion, unfamiliarity and social surroundings actually an awful lot of people know nothing about quartz.

(obv you know this, I am just adding out of scrupulosity . . . )

[silveradept]

The information professional here sees the method, and nods, and also knows full well that the art of sniffing out bullshit and convincing others that it's bullshit is a tricky business, with seemingly artistic components and a familiarity borne of use of knowing which tools are most likely to be useful, and where to go sniffing around to see if you can find a useful truth or even an origin source. This used to be easier when there was a robust journalistic apparatus, and when newspapers were eager to show their biases and their slants, instead of pretending they didn't have them, but there's still some magic in the ol' search engine wizardry and selection and placement of materials.

Which is to say, yes, freely, I am in the experts category, and the most difficult part of my job is always and consistently finding a way to bridge and explain my expertise to someone who does not have it and does not have years to devote to study.

(Also, the idea of having fliers to put up and preferably fliers to put up in places where you can delete vile stuff and replace it with cute cat stickers or your own materials is good for people who don't like being confrontational, but do like being able to poke their local disinformation operation in the eye.)

I don't particularly like any of those definitions of an information ecosystem, but that's because I'm not sure that I want to go in that direction for my conceptualizations. I much prefer conceiving of information as signals-over-networks (which still allows for potential evolution and changing of the signals or the networks to adapt for better cooperation or for adversarial resistance) than in trying to borrow a term from biology, even if it does help describe some of the complexities of studying those signals, their origins, and the networks.