The Information Animal

This episode Dr. Heidi Tworek joins us to explain why "unprecedented" is often the wrong word for today's information challenges, and why infrastructure and business models matter as much as content.

Heidi is a Canada Research Chair, professor of history and public policy at the University of British Columbia, and director of UBC's Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Heidi's research traces how new communications technologies have shaped democracy, from German efforts to use radio to influence global politics across the Kaiserreich, Weimar, and Nazi eras, to today's debates over platforms, submarine cables, and digital sovereignty. They discuss:

• Why a historical lens lowers the rhetorical temperature and pushes policymakers to think in decades, not election cycles
• How government structures shaped whether the UK and US saw German propaganda as a broadcasting problem or an espionage problem, and what that means for siloed mandates today
• The limits of awareness-raising as a response to foreign interference
• Why most of what we "know" about technology and elections comes from a handful of English-speaking democracies, and what South Korea, Brazil, and Japan reveal instead
• The difficulty of establishing causality in communications
• Paper books, digital formats, and whether the historical record will survive

The Information Animal Podcast draws on ideas from a book of the same name, exploring modern and historic information ecosystems. This limited series covers concepts like information competition and how an emerging field of information ecology can help us understand the human relationship to the modern information environment. 

The series is hosted by Dr. Alicia Wanless, who is the director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aims to foster evidence-based policymaking for the governance of national information ecosystems. Alicia is also the author of The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality published by Hurst and OUP.

Dr. David Scales from Weill Cornell Medicine joins The Information Animal podcast to discuss the importance of information to humans and society, and how Information Science can help us understand these relationships.

David is an internal medicine hospitalist whose training in sociology, epidemiology, and medicine grounds his work on how structural factors shape health information environments. In addition to serving on the board of Questscope and providing medical assistance to Syrian refugees in Jordan, he co-founded a CHW program in the Levant, now serving as its research and program advisor.

The Information Animal Podcast draws on ideas from a book of the same name, exploring modern and historic information ecosystems. This limited series covers concepts like information competition and how an emerging field of information ecology can help us understand the human relationship to the modern information environment. 

The series is hosted by Dr. Alicia Wanless, who is the director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aims to foster evidence-based policymaking for the governance of national information ecosystems. Alicia is the author of The Information Animal: HumanThe Information Animal podcast to discuss the importance of information to humans and society, and how Information Science can help us understand these relationships.

Dr. Libby Hemphill from the University of Michigan joins The Information Animal podcast to discuss the importance of information to humans and society, and how Information Science can help us understand these relationships.

The Information Animal Podcast draws on ideas from a book of the same name, exploring modern and historic information ecosystems. This limited series covers concepts like information competition and how an emerging field of information ecology can help us understand the human relationship to the modern information environment. 

The series is hosted by Dr. Alicia Wanless, who is the director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aims to foster evidence-based policymaking for the governance of national information ecosystems. Alicia is the author of The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality.

Watch past episodes.