1,720,973 research outputs found
Contagion: the chaos of the digital ether
No full textThe utopian ideals of social media were perhaps always naively optimistic, but they have never looked more dead. Sharing, collaboration, user-generated content, folksonomies and digitally mediated communities were meant to drive a renaissance of liberal humanist values, providing a new socially-constructed foundation for truth and value to supplant the political grand narratives of the twentieth century (cf Lessig, 1999; O’Reilly, 2010). Instead our technologically mediated culture has fallen into a slough of digital despond where truth has been devalued and meaning diluted. Misinformation and disinformation proliferate at an alarming rate, with individual and state actors alike harnessing the power of social media to disrupt the public sphere (Tredinnick, 2023). Everyday social media services have become sites of largely unchallenged political extremism. Bots recirculate content and drive engagement at the expense of significance and meaning. What is emerging is a kind of chaos of the digital ether, where clashing and conflicting signals undermine social media as a useful medium, and threated the integrity of political and social institutions. Amid the chaos something fundamentally useful has been lost
Epistemic decay: generative artificial intelligence and the recombination of culture
Full text linkGenerative Artificial Intelligence is a transformational technology that augurs profound socio-cultural change on a scale that may ultimately surpass the impact of the Internet and the World Wide Web. But although offering clear benefits and opportunities, its rise has also been met with anxiety about its near and long term effects. We have previously addressed in Business Information Review for example the impact of generative technologies on professional roles (Tredinnick, 2017) and the ethical implications of artificial intelligence (Laybats and Tredinnick, 2024). There has also been widespread alarm at the growing use of AI in the creative industries (Amankwah-Amoah et al., 2024; Bender, 2025) particularly advertising, publishing and the media. In addition, apocalyptic fears attend to the anxiety of a coming technological singularity, the point at which machines will surpass humans intelligence, initiating a snowball effect of every increasing machine capabilities and ultimately dominance (Shanahan, 2015).
Some of these perceived risks are no doubt overstated; while significant challenges and some structural transformation will accompany the wider use of generative technologies there will also be new opportunities and emerging markets. However, one potential risk has garnered less attention despite being perhaps the most immediate of them all. Generative artificial intelligence may be contributing to a gradual erosion of the epistemic foundations of our technologically and scientifically dependent culture. This possibility arises not from their apparent ability to create new knowledge, nor from the quality and reliability of the outputs that they produce, but from the ways in which generative applications have become implicated in a progressive recirculation of material culture. Successive generations of generative technologies may bring improved accuracy and fewer hallucinations, but these iterative improvements may have little or no impact of the problem of epistemic decay. This editorial explores the profound threat posed by generative artificial intelligence to our long-term understanding of what we believe we know, and what steps we can take to mitigate those risks
The transformative power of technology in the modern workplace
No full textTechnology has become an integral force in shaping our lives, especially within the professional sphere. While technological advancements have long influenced how we work, we are now witnessing an unprecedented era of rapid change. The emergence of smart environments, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive organisational agility and competitiveness, and the adoption of immersive technologies are profoundly transforming human experience and communication in the workplace. In our issue for December, we have several papers focusing on the effective use of technology to enhance environments, develop skills and develop connectivity to knowledge and the sharing of knowledge
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Post-truth, information and emotion
Full text linkOver recent months a vogue phrase has emerged in domestic and international politics: post truth. We are living it is suggested in an age where politics no longer functions through rational discourse. The facts of the matter are of secondary importance to free-floating opinion. Instead, truth is replaced by demonstrative arguments that appeal to the electorate on a more visceral and emotional level. Associated in particular with the Brexit referendum campaign and with the recent US presidential election, the post truth political discourse is perhaps best exemplified by Michael Gove’s claim on Sky news that “people in this country have had enough of experts” (Gove, 2016). It is characterised by a wilful blindness to evidence, a mistrust of authority, and an appeal to emotionally based arguments often rooted in fears or anxieties
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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