Microsoft Researcher Calls for Information Literacy

While governments and other organizations are stepping up efforts at providing more information for public consumption, they should also provide tools to allow people to interpret this data, argued a Microsoft social media researcher.

"Information is power, but interpretation is more powerful," said Danah Boyd, speaking at the at the O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Expo, being held this week in Washington, D.C. "We want this information out there. We want people to make informed decisions. But we also want to give them to tools to interpret what we see," she said. Speaking before an audience of mostly government executives and supporting contractors, she had stated that it is not enough to provide information to the people -- as government agencies are doing -- because tools must also be provided to aid in the interpretation process. "We need to think not just how we want to make data available but how to help people process it," she said. Such skills will not come about simply "because people have access to information," she said. Without such tools, information can be misused.