The Web as a Digital Reflection of Reality

The web is increasingly relied upon as a reflection of reality, which raises a number of key issues not yet fully recognized or articulated, warranting further study. This new digital reality and the unprecedented capabilities it embodies in terms of searchability, aggregatability, temporal persistence, and so on, give rise to great challenges in the areas of Digital Identity Management, Social Impacts, Currency and Accuracy of Digital Data, Distorting Factors, Legal Issues and Implications, among others, that are only just becoming recognized and articulated. This paper reports on a panel exploring these issues and speculating creatively on how they might be addressed in IS academic research by adopting a fundamental information processing approach to design, incorporating analogs from evolutionary biology, for example. When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the "human essence," the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.