I’m excited to announce a new paper by my colleagues Sam Stern and Giacomo Livan (they’ve been so kind to include me as a co-author as well, for some ideas I contributed early in the paper’s development). It’s entitled A network perspective on intermedia agenda-setting and it’s in this month’s issue of Applied Network Science. You can read the whole paper online by clicking through..
The paper looks at using network science to study the influence on media sources on one another. Its findings are intriguing, and I think its methodology could be an important part of something that I’m trying to point towards in the latter chapters of Rage: that we can have a real science of how a healthy, diverse ecosystem of information distribution can be created.
I believe that by using science, like that in this paper, we can shape the algorithms that influence the information we receive, such that they promote the diversity and mixing of the information we receive and share, we can help make the world a better place for all of us. I think this is how we start to fulfil Rage’s subtitle and stop the Internet making bigots of us all.
Regardless of that big agenda, I think the paper is a fine contribution to the scientific literature, and I congratulate my fellow authors.