This is the web page of Plymouth State University’s Information Environmentalism Project, started in Cathie LeBlanc’s Fall 2021 section of IS1115: Tackling a Wicked Problem.
The description of this class is:
Disinformation is false information which is intended to mislead. Journalists and social media companies have struggled to determine what their response to disinformation campaigns ought to be. Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly divided in their beliefs about which information is true and which is “fake news.” This divide makes it difficult for us to even have conversations with each other about the problems of the world. We will explore the wicked problem of disinformation by asking questions such as: Where does disinformation come from? Why is it effective? How does it spread? Does it have common characteristics that we can identify? And most importantly, what, if anything, can we do about it?
We are taking on Mike Caulfield’s challenge to take action to clean up our information environment. Our information environment is polluted. It is full of falsehoods and half-truths. But like people who clean up the trash along a highway, we will take action to clean up the trash in our information environment. We will research various claims and post our findings on a class web site. In addition, we might clean up Wikipedia pages, answer questions on Quora or StackExchange, and/or create explanatory YouTube videos. There are probably lots of other actions we can take to clean up the information environment. This web site is just the start of our work.
