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2. Assessing National Information Ecosystems
- Author:
- Alicia Wanless, Samantha Lai, and John Hicks
- Publication Date:
- 02-2025
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- Often driven by misunderstanding, fears abound over how new technologies will change an information ecosystem.1 They might, and they might not. Either way, it’s extremely difficult to know what those changes will be without first understanding what an ecosystem was like before the introduction of those new technologies. In other words, to know how a system has changed, one must first know what constitutes the system and its prior state. This paper proffers factors that can constitute baselines for assessing national information ecosystems that can be measured across decades, geographies, and cultures. Assessing these factors over time and comparing them among countries can foster understanding of the impacts of new regulations, conflicts, and technologies. Perhaps more importantly, such an approach offers an objective analysis of information ecosystems, which is much needed in these politically charged times. The framework can also be used to identify existing gaps in knowledge, guiding policymakers and researchers on funding and research priorities to establish baselines of national information ecosystems. As those baselines are established and maintained, comparative analysis between ecosystems can generate insights on policy interventions to redress threats within them.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology and Information Technology
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
3. A CERN Model for Studying the Information Environment
- Author:
- Alicia Wanless and Jacob N. Shapiro
- Publication Date:
- 11-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- After the Second World War, European science was suffering. Scientists were leaving Europe in pursuit of safety and work opportunities, among other reasons. To stem the exodus and unite the community around a vision of science for peace, in 1949, a transatlantic group of scholars proposed the creation of a world-class physics research facility in Europe.1 The grand vision was for this center to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Their white paper laid the foundation for the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which today supports fundamental research in physics across an international community of more than 10,000 scientists from twenty-three member states and more than seventy other nations.2 Together, researchers at CERN built cutting-edge instruments to observe dozens of subatomic particles for the first time. And along the way they invented the World Wide Web, which was originally conceived as a tool to empower CERN’s distributed teams. Such large-scale collaboration is once again needed to connect scholars, policymakers, and practitioners internationally and to accelerate research, this time to unlock the mysteries of the information environment. Democracies around the world are grappling with how to safeguard democratic values against online abuse, the proliferation of illiberal and xenophobic narratives, malign interference, and a host of other challenges related to a rapidly evolving information environment. What are the conditions within the information environment that can foster democratic societies and encourage active citizen participation? Sadly, the evidence needed to guide policymaking and social action in this domain is sorely lacking. Researchers, governments, and civil society must come together to help. This paper explores how CERN can serve as a model for developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment (IRIE).3 By connecting disciplines and providing shared engineering resources and capacity-building across the world’s democracies, IRIE will scale up applied research to enable evidence-based policymaking and implementation. Where CERN “exists to understand the mystery of nature for the benefit of humankind,” IRIE will exist to understand the mystery of the information environment for the benefit of democracies and their citizens.4 While the laws of physics change slowly, the conditions within the information environment are little understood and changing rapidly through the addition of new technology. Additionally, studying the information environment will require analysis of personal and at times sensitive data of internet users, increasing the need for international collaboration. As CERN did by inventing new collaboration tools, IRIE will leverage those same technologies to unlock the collective genius of researchers and practitioners from a variety of fields to strengthen democracy, alongside interested citizens who contribute their own data and expertise. While there are obvious differences between the field of physics and those emerging to study the information environment, aspects of CERN’s development can guide the creation of IRIE, an institution that can uniquely address the growing needs of researchers.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Research, Collaboration, Information, and CERN
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus