Du signe à la trace : l'information sur mesure

Abstract

The digital environment is forcing us to re-think the models on which media studies and information science are based. Theories of signs, messages and documents need to evolve towards reflections on traceability. Traces are paradoxical objects: linked to the personal yet detachable, automatic yet malleable, they bear\rwitness to the inextricable links between the technical and the political in the digital sphere. In an age of "customized information", personalization makes people more active, and also exposes them\rto profiling, to the point where identity is being redefined as a collection of traces which we must learn to\rprotect, and also to manage. This new economy based on digital "footprints" is overturning the hierarchical relationships between stock and flow, and between content and interaction. As we ourselves recycle the traces that others have left, we are having to find our way through the shadowlands of digital citizenship. Over and above privacy protection, what is at issue are the memories, but also the forgetting, that bind us to each other.