TY  - BOOK
AU  - Shaheed Nick Mohammed
PY  - 2012
CY  - New York, United States of America
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 9781453905340
TI  - The (Dis)information Age
T2  - The Persistence of Ignorance
DO  - 10.3726/978-1-4539-0534-0
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1051103
N2  - The (Dis)information Age challenges prevailing notions about the impact of new information and media technologies. The widespread acceptance of ideas about the socially transformative power of these technologies demands a close and critical interrogation. The technologies of the information revolution, often perceived as harbingers of social transformation, may more appropriately be viewed as tools, capable of positive and negative uses. This book encourages a more rational and even skeptical approach to the claims of the information revolution and demonstrates that, despite a wealth of information, ignorance persists and even thrives. As the volume of information available to us increases, our ability to process and evaluate that information diminishes, rendering us, at times, less informed. Despite the assumed globalization potential of new information technologies, users of global media such as the World Wide Web and Facebook tend to cluster locally around their own communities of interest and even around traditional communities of geography, nationalism, and heritage. Thus new media technologies may contribute to ignorance about various «others» and, in this and many other ways, contribute to the persistence of ignorance.
KW  - Society, Information Age, Ignorance, Social Change, Globalization, New Media
LA  - English
ER  -