The digital structural change of the public sphere has radically changed the way we communicate and brought us new challenges – from disinformation to information overload. News literacy, including digital literacy, is thus the new foundation of the knowledge society. We help to implement it from politics to civil society.
»Knowledge is knowing where it is written.« (Albert Einstein)
The "digital structural change of the public sphere" has thrown a few basic principles of public sphere overboard. Whereas journalists used to be the full-time gatekeepers of the information that reaches us via the news, today, from Twitter to YouTube, everyone can create their own media space – or even create and distribute news from it. The new gatekeepers are joined by social media platforms whose algorithms sort the information according to attention-economical factors.
As a result, digital public spheres have become more preconditioned than analog ones. The ability to separate information from disinformation, to fact-check fragments of information that reach us via social media, or to assess the trustworthiness of a source is now left to the users. But this also means that they need completely new skills and abilities in order not to drown in the flood of information.
To ensure that the road to the digital knowledge society succeeds, there is a massive need to catch up in terms of both analog and digital information and news literacy. We help educational institutions, politics, media and civil society to make this leap by creating and implementing knowledge concepts that give citizens the necessary tools to navigate successfully through the information flood.
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If you want to find out for yourself how news-competent you are, you can do so in the news test we helped develop for the study, which was created together with the design studio nach morgen.
Digitization offers completely new opportunities for knowledge processing and networking that we as a society can use. This also means leaving the attention economy behind and, for example, placing strategic social megatopics on resubmission. To achieve this, science and journalism need to move closer together to think in terms of joint information platforms.
A media order that emphasizes the remoteness of the media from the state, seeks to secure diversity, protects public-law systems from market power, and seeks to prevent monopolies of opinion as well as economic cartels is still a good foundation for a modern or even technically revolutionary media world. We think future-proof concepts that protect and further develop this foundation.
How to deal with populism? Which measures help against disinformation and hate speech? How can we increase the resilience of our society by having better strategies in hand to respond to the challenges of the digital information society? futur eins helps journalists, politicians and citizens and provides them with concepts and tools on how best to deal with populism and disinformation.