Information Integrity

Catalog description

How do we decide what information to trust? How do artificial intelligence and online media support or degrade our decisions? What does society need, beyond technology, to make good decisions the norm? Society depends on individuals making sound rational decisions on what information to trust. Those decisions depend on information integrity. The Internet is hardly the first information technology to disrupt society. History documents the mechanics of information integrity through a repeating pattern of new technology exploited by creators and destroyers of reliable information. After establishing basic context, this course will survey technologies that have transformed and disrupted society, from the invention of writing, to the book, the printing press, economical newsprint, the telegraph, and broadcast media on to the Digital Age. Lectures and assignments will explore the harms, real and imagined, of new information technologies. We'll recognize how society adapted, and practice applying these insights to the management of modern information systems.