Search engines transformed the first decade of the millennium. Recommendation engines revolutionized the second decade. Neither in their current form are sufficient for addressing misinformation. They focus on discovery and primarily rely on relevance. But they are not particularly helpful at many other important information tasks, particularly contextualization.

We need better tools to help people quickly contextualize media that they come across online. This is especially important for supporting busy everyday people needing to rapidly make sense of the misinformation-laden text, images, and videos shared in group chats and online platforms.

Contextualization engines can help do the media literacy grunt work for you, SIFT-ing through the internet to identify what you might want to know to better understand what some ‘media object’ means.Just as people now use the term ‘Googling’ to describe using any search engine to find information about some keywords; we might use the unique term contextify to describe using a contextualization engine to make sense of a media object.

Author: Aviv Ovadya | 2021