The Landscape of Information Dysfunction: A Visitor’s Guide
Herbert Lin
DOI : 10.65701/7r1n6v3k9c
Corresponding authors:
herblin@stanford.edu
Abstract
Modern society faces a rapid increase in the volume, speed, and complexity of information flows. This overview outlines the information environment’s technological, informational, and cognitive dimensions; the principal actors that shape it; and the types of communicative activities and dysfunction that emerge. Beyond mis-, dis-, and mal-information, we catalog additional problematic forms and describe actor-specific drivers of dysfunction. We consider how platform incentives, citizen cognition, and government behavior interact with accelerating technologies to degrade deliberation, and we situate four companion papers within this broader landscape.
