Featured - Information Matters

In today’s fast-paced world, many teenagers and young adults in their 20s and 30s seem glued to their screens. They stream videos, scroll social media, and read e-books on devices. This raises a big question: Are physical libraries dying out because young people aren’t visiting them to read books? This review looks at the past, present, and future of libraries to argue that no, this isn’t the end. Instead, libraries are changing to stay relevant, blending old-school charm with modern tech.

Featured Translation

September 17, 2025 Zhuoren Jiang

From “Elusive Policy Styles” to Measurable Indicators: How AI Helps Us Understand Government Governance

What if artificial intelligence could help us measure how governments make decisions? This article explains KOALA, a new AI-driven framework that turns abstract “policy styles” into measurable indicators, showing how expert knowledge and machine collaboration can make the hidden logic of governance visible.

Education Featured

September 10, 2025 Bayor Odelami

What the Release of ChatGPT‑5 Means: A Leap Forward or a Step Too Soon?

On August 7, 2025, OpenAI officially launched GPT‑5, marking a watershed moment in the evolution of AI. But is this a giant leap forward, or a stumble in the rush to innovate?

Featured Original

September 3, 2025 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

When the Gates Open: Ghost Month and the Hauntings of the Web

At its core, Ghost Month is about infrastructures of connection. The gates of the underworld are said to swing open, allowing for traffic (spiritual, emotional, social) between realms. It is about networks: between the living and the dead and also between generations, between households and temples, between earthly desires and cosmic orders. And here is where I want to ask: what if we read the internet itself as a kind of ghost gate? What if the lag, glitches, hidden circuits of our digital infrastructures are not simply “errors” but hauntings, reminders that our networks, too, are spectral spaces where living and nonliving, human and machinic, constantly mingle?

Featured Opinion

August 22, 2025 Ponego Letswalo

Can AI Have a Conscience? A Look at Ethics in Machine Learning

Can AI have a conscience? Of course, today’s AI isn’t a sentient being with feelings or guilt. It won’t lose sleep over a tough decision. But as artificial intelligence plays a bigger role in our lives, we do expect it to act responsibly. In essence, we want AI to follow ethical principles, a sort of programmed “conscience” so that it helps society without harming it. This is the crux of AI ethics, an increasingly important topic now that machine learning systems are making decisions that matter.

Featured Original Translation

August 22, 2025 Saleh Lzeik

Rebranding Social Media: Hello, Scroll Media

We still call it social media, but it hasn’t been social in years. What started as a space for connection and conversation has morphed into something quieter, stickier, and far more behavioral. People don’t open these apps to talk anymore. They open them to scroll. That shift in intent changes everything. I call this new reality Scroll Media.

Editorial Featured

August 13, 2025 Chirag Shah

Is AI the New Plastic?

AI is the new plastic because our relationship to it is proving just as short-termist. There isn’t enough evidence to suggest that we are planning, as a planet, for AI’s long-term risks. We’re governed mostly, in fact, by what AI is doing now.

Featured Translation

August 12, 2025 Melanie A. Kilian

Right Answers to Wrong Questions: How Misconceptions Lead to Confidence and Task Failure

Typos, blurry terms, missing details – search engines, such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo, have learnt to recognize and deal with unclear search queries. “Did you mean …?” is a counter-question most of us internet users may have gotten once from these tools after entering a search query. So, these systems have our inaccuracies covered, right? And we can explore the search results and relax? Well, it is not that easy.

Education Featured

August 6, 2025 Jasmine Wemigwans

Looping the Red Thread of Information: Painting a Path of Indigenous Knowledge

As a mixed Ojibwe woman from Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, I carry both pride and a sense of responsibility in how I represent my identity through academic and artistic spaces. I recently graduated from the Master of Information in Library Science Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. My goal is to become a full-time librarian who integrates Indigenous knowledge into library and information systems. I am excited to share my painting with the Information Matters community as one way to contribute an Indigenous perspective in our shared field. This acrylic self-portrait, funded by an Ontario Arts Council bursary, reflects the concept of the “Red Thread of Information” (Bates,1999) and visually embeds my Anishnaabe worldview. The piece invites viewers to reflect on how identity and information phenomenon can be fused together into creative expressions.

Featured Original

August 5, 2025 Magnus Igbinovia

Through a Filtered Lens: How Information Retrieval Bias Shapes Users’ Information Consumption

Everyone is interacting with information systems to access, retrieve, and subsequently use information for diverse purposes. What if the information we are consuming to make life-staking decisions has been filtered by an invisible hand? Like the lens of a camera, the invisible hand filters what information we receive, decides for us what is most relevant to our search queries, what is emphasized in our search results, and the ranking order of the information we receive. Unfortunately, this invisible hand is with a “closed fist” (devoid of openness, clarity, and understanding) and is highly subjective.