Digital Diversity

The Internet plays a fundamental role in encouraging everyone to be him- or herself, share personal opinions, and be unique. Millions of various forum posts, tweets, pictures, and other content are available online for everyone to access. Therefore, the Internet is the right place to seek diversity. Digital population has created so many outstanding products, yet many practices favor uniformity and keep within the limits of the stated rules and regulations. It seems that the digital diversity era is coming to an end.

Good evidence of this is easily found when you start using your search engine. It operates a certain way, considering popularity as the main criteria of the search. The relevance of the pages is determined by the amount of traffic that is generated. This means that individuals have access to pages that are simply more popular in terms of the majority’s judgment, rather than to the information they are actually interested in. Therefore, many people end up learning common data picked by the others.

Another problem arises from the fact that popularity does not ensure the quality of the information. When a person looks for specific content, they often get a customized results. They get the recommended pages that others believe to be interesting, helpful, or fun. More and more users cannot reach educational and professional information because they are not able to find it. Simple explanations are enough for most people, and they do not allow others to learn more. Therefore, the collective intelligence of Internet users becomes the standardized way of thinking.

Millions of users from all over the world edit some great digital projects these days, namely open source encyclopedias. They do amazing jobs and allow their personal input to increase digital diversity. On the other hand, smaller ideas do not have chances to develop. Distinct data today is not rare in the sense that its numbers are small, but because they are hardly accessible to others. Very few people know where they can find the desired data, and search techniques do not help much.

It appears that to maintain diversity, people need to help the minority of unique individuals to find ways of presenting themselves in the digital world. They can encourage many other users to think in different ways, and help them find their individual places within the online community. Digital diversity can be described as citizenship within the Internet. Let every person have a native country, and allow free travel around the globe!