Age of Access? Grundfragen der Informationsgesellschaft

Recent years have seen a rise in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the mind. However, relatively little emphasis has been placed on attention, its functions, and phenomenology. As a result, there are a multitude of definitions and explanatory frameworks that describe what attention is, what it does, and how it works. This volume proposes that one way to discuss attention is by utilizing an integrative multidisciplinary framework that takes into consideration aspects of attention as a means of accessing the world and as a mediator of experience. It brings together contributions from cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology in order to shed light on these aspects of attention. By including both theoretical and empirical approaches to attention, this volume will provide (1) an innovative framework for examining attention as something that mediates experience and (2) new perspectives on foundational and defi nitional issues of what attention is and how it contributes to our ability to access the world. By drawing together different disciplines, this volume broadens the concept of attention. It opens up a new way of looking at attention as an active process through which the world is disclosed for us.

Thanks to the digital revolution, even a traditional discipline like philology has been enjoying a renaissance within academia and beyond. Decades of work have been producing groundbreaking results, raising new research questions and creating innovative educational resources. This book describes the rapidly developing state of the art of digital philology with a focus on Ancient Greek and Latin, the classical languages of Western culture. Contributions cover a wide range of topics about the accessibility and analysis of Greek and Latin sources. The discussion is organized in five sections concerning open data of Greek and Latin texts; catalogs and citations of authors and works; data entry, collection and analysis for classical philology; critical editions and annotations of sources; and finally linguistic annotations and lexical databases. As a whole, the volume provides a comprehensive outline of an emergent research field for a new generation of scholars and students, explaining what is reachable and analyzable that was not before in terms of technology and accessibility.

Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, “relevance” has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different fields discuss relevance and relate it to the challenges of “irrelevance”, which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background.

The augmentation of urban spaces with technology, commonly referred to as Media Architecture, has found increasing interest in the scientific community within the last few years. At the same time architects began to use digital media as a new material apart from concrete, glass or wood to create buildings and urban structures. Simultaneously, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers began to exploit the interaction opportunities between users and buildings and to bridge the gaps between interface, information medium and architecture. As an example, they extended architectural structures with interactive, light-emitting elements on their outer shell, thereby transforming the surfaces of these structures into giant public screens. At the same time the wide distribution of mobile devices and the coverage of mobile internet allow manifold interaction opportunities between open data and citizens, thereby enabling the internet of things in the public domain. However, the appropriate distribution of information to all citizens is still cumbersome and a mutual dialogue not always successful (i.e. who gets what data and when?). In this book we therefore provide a deeper investigation of Using Information and Media as Construction Material with media architecture as an input and output medium.

In today’s digital age, online and mobile advertising are of growing importance, with advertising no longer bound to the traditional media industry. Although the advertising industry still has broader access to the different measures and channels, users and consumers today have more possibilities to publish, get informed or communicate – to “co-create” –, and to reach a bigger audience. There is a good chance thus that users and consumers are better informed about the objectives and persuasive tricks of the advertising industry than ever before. At the same time, advertisers can inform about products and services without the limitations of time and place faced by traditional mass media.

But will there really be a time when advertisers and consumers have equal power, or does tracking users online and offline lead to a situation where advertisers have more information about the consumers than ever before? The volume discusses these questions and related issues.

In an era in which social integration is increasingly predicated on digital participation, barrier-free access to the Internet and key information systems has become vital for equal participation in social life. This volume presents the basic theory and practice of designing barrier-free information systems, which are a key element of an inclusive information society.

The relationship between people and information is central to many academic disciplines. The information sciences have always, and in recent decades particularly intensively, investigated how people relate to information and how they search for, find and use it. Nevertheless, for this discipline as well as for anthropology, epistemology, cognitive research, economics and sociology, human information behavior remains a fundamental question that has still not been resolved. This volume is the first to comprehensively present the current state of knowledge from a wide variety of perspectives. ‘Information behavior’ proves to be not only a "fundamental question of the information society", but also a central condition of human existence and society.

Accessibility is never a given – it degrades over time and must be recreated or maintained. Diverse mechanisms govern the accessibility of information over time, including social trends, processes of loss, preservation, and recovery. This book develops an interdisciplinary view on the long-term accessibility of information.

Contemporary discussions about the knowledge society often neglect spatial aspects of accessibility to information, even though it has been long recognized that access is not assured solely by technical connectivity. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores the contribution to information access made by institutional information providers, such as libraries and archives.

The Internet has not only transformed our verbal communication but has also changed all methods of recording, transmitting, and managing information. The subject of this volume is the interaction between technological development and communicative practice, as well as its socio-cognitive dynamics. This anthology, which contains contributions by experts in the fields of social psychology, communication studies, and linguistics, undertakes a critical discussion of interaction in the age of technology. In doing so, it makes an important contribution to scientific discourse about processes of convergence between technology, culture, and society, using the example of the Internet.

Constant developments in information technologies make it necessary to take a detailed look at the subject of ‘Information and Society’. In recent years many scholars and politicians have considered the question of how information is and should be distributed. The volume looks, for the first time, at the phenomenon of information justice from the perspective of various disciplines, thus defining a new field of interdisciplinary research. It deals with matters of accessibility and information ethics, access to information for various elements of the population, as well as a number of practical areas, with regard to the fundamental approaches to the (just) distribution of information (libraries, electronic media).

Access to information is also shaped by its economic conditions. This edited volume examines these conditions according to different media systems such as newspapers and with respect to systematic factors such as political conditions. It addresses a wide audience, from library and information science to economics.

We have made ourselves comfortable in the information society: information is available on demand, everywhere, at any time. Simultaneously, we are seeing the resurgence of populism and radicalism, violence and uninhibited communication. This book asks whether there is a construction flaw hidden in the notion of the information society itself and in the practices associated with it that fosters populism and radicalism.