Katharina Leyrer

Information intermediaries on the Internet, such as search engines and social network sites, are criticized: it is feared that their selective, personalized choice of information causes distortions and weakens the autonomy of users. The discussion often ignores the fact that the pre-selection of information by intermediaries is not a phenomenon of digitization, but is also carried out by traditional intermediaries such as journalistic media offerings, publishers or libraries. This paper therefore addresses the questions: How do the selection logics in traditional intermediaries differ from the selection logics in Internet intermediaries? How does digitization change the autonomy of users in relation to information intermediaries?