CIMA Media Blog

Academic and media discourse have long considered the democratising potential of the Internet, and its impact on political engagement. This talk gives an overview of the empirical evidence that supports those claims, paying special attention to what users do online that helps strengthen their political involvement. The talk will start by considering research linking Internet use with offline participation; it then discusses the mechanisms that might be mediating this association, with a focus on the role played by informal interactions and networks. Users expand their social circles online, and peripheral contacts or casual relationships become more consequential. These informal networks activate three mechanisms that are relevant to understanding political engagement. First, they widen exposure to information; second, they encourage public discussion and deliberation; and third, they support new forms of association. This talk concludes with a consideration of what makes online communities successful at activating political engagement, and how their effects can spill over into offline politics.

The traditional economic problem is one of allocating scarce commodities in the face of infinite desires. Now, in the rapidly emerging information economy, digital goods are anything but scarce; the bits and bytes that make up a news story or music recording can be infinitely and perfectly reproduced at low or zero cost. This wealth of content has given renewed importance to a particular kind of scarcity: the scarcity of attention. This talk will examine the central role of attention in online markets and its economic implications for businesses and consumers. It discusses the centrality of attention in the business models of a broad spectrum of online enterprises, and show how such considerations shape pricing and consumers' end experience. It also examines the role of search engines as important gatekeepers of attention and explains how economic tools are being used to make the online search industry more effective in this function.

The Internet has fundamentally changed how research is done; from astronomers making vast amounts of data about galaxies available, to literary scholars crowdsourcing the annotation of novels. What impact do these and other changes in research have on the role of academic knowledge in society, and on how the public engages with this knowledge? Contemporary academic research can be found online alongside a range of other sources in searches for information.

This talk will discuss the Semantic Web and the ways that it will transform a range of human activities. The premise behind the Semantic Web is that it is a Web, which 'knows' information about its own content, can reason about that content, and can provide more useful services. The Web of texts and images does not have any more knowledge about its own content than a television does about what it is showing. Increasingly targeted and intelligent searches will be possible when content can be accessed more directly, rather than though the search strings of words we currently use.