i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

One common criticism of traditional “authoritative” approaches to organizing and publishing information is that the organizers often exclude the perspective of ethnic, cultural, and intellectual minorities. In recent years, commentators like David Weinberger have touted online media as a solution to this problem, pointing to the accessible self-publishing tools and distributed categorization available to Internet users. Increasingly, however, these tools have also been criticized for helping “the rich get richer” while minorities are left out of the online discourse.

• Explain why minority voices might be excluded by
  • traditional authoritative information organization approaches
  • social categorization systems like Digg or del.icio.us, and
  • Google’s page ranking and relevancy algorithms. 
• Make a clear argument for which of these information organization and retrieval approaches you feel is best at bringing minority viewpoints to appropriate public attention.