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Digital Ecology is about understanding information ecosystems.
Information ecosystems are constituted by information flows being processed through various media. Information has become widely digitized and turned into a resource to be exploited, produced, and transformed in a similar way as material resources.
Information technologies as the key means of production of value are playing a major role in shaping the ways of communication as well as all aspects of individual and social life. During the last decades information has become the most important factor for cultural, social and economic development.
Digital ecology aims at understanding the production, distribution, storage, accessibility, ownership, selection and use of information in technologically determined environments.
A key ecological issue concerns the preservation and increase of the use value for humankind at large and the non-commercial properties of information as opposed to the exchange value. This includes the question of cultural diversity and the quality of life in an environment increasingly based on digitized information.
Economic forces and political interventions endanger the information ecosystem of the infosphere. In both cases the chance of pluralism and the variety of cultural
expressions offered by information and communication technologies are being lost.
Digital ecology seeks to preserve and increase the cultural diversity and quality of life in the information ecosystem.
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DIGITAL ECOLOGY