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Second issue 02 / 2003

Table of Contents

Research & Reports

Information and digital illiteracies - Main obstacles and consequences for scholarly communication

by Alicia Springer, Alan Springer, Christian Yom & Tim Chen

After description and review of various information and digital literacy concepts the paper develops an own opposite literacy framework. We named this framework the 'information and digital illiteracies' concept.
Following the proposed concept, our research tracks and evaluates common scholarly communication models as there are email, www, electronic journals, listserver, webbloggs and peer2peer-networks. Our realworld experiment with two Top-Biomedical research groups in UK identified main systematic and individual obstacles in webbased scholarly communication. Our framework invokes scientometric and cybermetric methods.
The data evaluated in the study reinforces the conclusion that each of the six ip-based media lacks quality information with the consequence of information illiterate scholars.

Read more about the study. here

by Dominik Sommer

Aware of the increasing flood of information over internet and intranet and the caused rise exerted by it of conscious-purposeful or unconscious-vague incorrect information, this article ask the question to what extent and why in vertical information processing within organizations incorrect information are institutionalized.
With Sherifs survey design, called the "autokinetischer Effekt", is experimentally shown, that updated incorrect information can be explained by social circumstances, since their bottom-up reception is appropriate beyond of subjects, because they are evenly socially conditioned. Tested in experimental simple group and individual situations within a simulated formal organization situation the faculty of judgement on different layers of hierarchy - between superiors and their subordinates. The test focussed on social limitation while information processing.
The result is that superiors, if they act in an organizational context rear-employ their own faculty of judgement, if they are confronted with the statements of their subordinates. Socially conditioned incorrect information are institutionalized in organizations on vertical bottom-up information paths. One reason lies in the legitimacy projection of information.

Read more about the article. here

Everbody's at the firing line: Information Warfare and the Battleground Internet - notes on some current developments

by Jurgen Lubke & David T. Young

In it's first part this essay describes the establishment of the Internet as a major medium for public information access in terrorist and war situations during the last years.
In the second, we point out, that there are some distinct tendencies that the public got even more attentive and feel more competent on dealing with developments like those starting in Iraq during the march 2003 since that time. Every voice can speak and can be heard in cyberspace, so there seems to be a real freedom of speech beyond any national bias and borders.
This actual war in Iraq might be the first "global" war with full interactive participation of the public via the "free" and "neutral" medium called Internet. It is easy to foreknow, that there will be an enormous spread of disinformation in the mass media and in more private communication platforms and biased Websites, set intentionally for tactical reasons as well as unintentionally as a result of unawareness and ignorance. So the question will be, how to deal with the information coming from the frontlines. How will it be camouflaged? What resources can someone believe in and up to which degree?
Another major question to be thought about, is how to estimate the range and methods of attempts of censorship or even just filtering the information flow at the internet.

Read more about the essay. here

Don't trust your eyes - a laboratory study investigating consumer behavior on the net

by Ally Thomas & Nathan Birke

Responding pictures of secondhand goods or used vehicles, which are offered in the Internet e.g. with Ebay deceive frequently over the true quality of a commodity away. Even if directly beside an illustration defects are specified, the stimulus for buying the good is disproportionately strongly promoted by photos.
In our laboratory study which runs over a period of 3 months we logged the Internet purchase behavior of 859 persons with a customized XMosiac 10.5 browser. We can show in this study that during identical description of a product the preference was given to the article with a photo, in 87 percent of the cases. In addition it turned out that not only the quality but also the quantity of the photos are crucial for the success of the purchase. Products with several photos were more frequently bought than such with only one photo. Lack in a product description mentioned are more easily ignored by good illustrations. We can significantly show that a worse product with photo can be sold thus better than a better without photo.

Read more about the study. here

Breaking News

Automatic Tracking of Warblogging

The IEIBI has developed a meta crawler that investigates disinformational Web content by downloading and analyzing each document and then parsing the content for disinformation. The 'DISINFO Sniffer' analysed over 3 gigabytes of web pages data, especially from a set of international Warblogging sites. The statistical characteristics of the analyzed Warblogging Web documents and their hypertext links are examined and evaluated.

Read more about the 'DISINFO Sniffer'. here

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