Information Has Value

"Information Has Value" examples:

• Monetization: Influencers earn money through ads, sponsorships, and views (value of creating engaging or entertaining information)
• Stealing content: Reposting another creator’s work without credit shows the importance of intellectual property rights
• Paywalls: Being asked to subscribe after reaching your limit of free articles (value of journalistic reporting)
• Subscription costs: Streaming services, paid tiers on social media platforms, apps, etc. (value of access to entertainment, specific services)
• Targeted ads: Companies collect data from your online activity to create personalized ads (personal information has value in a digital economy)

We're so used to these things it's easy to forget how much they impact how we find, evaluate, and use information.

This guide covers two topics that have a huge impact on the value of certain information: generative AI and algorithms. Navigate to the sections for each using the side bar to explore their impacts.

The other two sections, evaluating information and digital privacy, contain tips and tools for navigating our digital environment.

Paywalls

Have you ever tried to read an article online and were asked to subscribe instead? Many general newspapers and magazines (written for the general public) rely on subscriptions to pay their journalists and researchers. By paying to go to school at HPU, you also pay for access to many of these sources... but not always in the same way you would if you had an individual (vs. institutional) subscription.

Scholarly Articles

Beyond materials for a general audience, scholarly journal articles are even more specialized and more expensive. While there are more Open Access (OA) titles available, where the author pays for the article to be freely available, the majority of academic publishing is inaccessible to the average person. Among other factors, academic publishing companies charge so much for access to this content because of the specialized, professional nature of the work.

The pages below are news aggregators, which either summarize news reported by other sources or collect the daily headlines from other news sources on one page. They're a useful way of examining current news from many different perspectives.