Information Services and Digital Literacy. In Search of the Boundaries of Knowing

193 Pages·2012·5.004 MB·English

by  Isto Huvila (Auth.)

Information Services and Digital Literacy
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Information Services and
Digital Literacy
In search of the boundaries
of knowing
I H
STO UVILA
Oxford Cambridge New Delhi
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First published in 2012
ISBN 978-1-84334-683-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-78063-349-7 (online)
© I. Huvila, 2012
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Acknowledgements
The work for this book started sometime in early 2007 when I was
writing a research project proposal with my colleagues on what was then
the relatively new phenomenon of Library 2.0. The research was
supported in the beginning by that project, ‘Library 2.0 – a new
participatory context’, funded by the Academy of Finland. Since then I
have continued the research on information use and social media at the
Department of Archival, Library & Information, Museum & Cultural
Heritage Studies (ALM) of Uppsala University in Sweden. Many of the
ideas of this book have been developed in a number of papers and
presentations published and held during the last five years.
I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues at the Department
of ALM in Uppsala for providing a home for my work, for company
during the countless long and productive coffee breaks, and for forgiving
my occasional absent-mindedness when I have been absorbed in my
work. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Library 2.0 project,
project director Gunilla Widén, Kim Holmberg, Maria Kronqvist-Berg
and Outi Nivakoski at Åbo Akademi University for detailed discussions
on the nature of the culture of participation and information in the age
of the social web. I extend my gratitude also to the colleagues at my
other home department in Sweden, the Division of ALM and Book
History at Lund University. In addition, I am grateful to many other
colleagues with whom I have had an opportunity to discuss my research
and work.
For the help with the manuscript, special thanks to Kim Holmberg for
insightful comments on the introduction, and all of you in Lund for
commenting on the book proposal: Olof Sundin, Jutta Haider, Sara
Kjellberg, Johanna Rivano Eckerdal, Hanna Carlsson, Birgitta Olander
and Fredrik Hanell. I would also like to thank people at Chandos for
their help, interest and faith in this project. Finally, I would like to thank
my family, especially the three of you at home, my most stern critics and
commentators on all matters in life.
vii
1
Introduction
Abstract: Despite the rapid emergence of information and communication
technologies (ITCs) and the declaration of the dawn of new information and
knowledge societies, we still have questions that cannot be answered. Why
cannot search engines and other information technologies provide us with
answers to all conceivable questions? Or can they? Do we lack the
appropriate skills and competences to search for information or are we just
deluded into thinking that we are incompetent? The central hypothesis of
this book is that the fundamental problem of being informed in the age of
the social web and the culture of participation is that we don’t know the
premises of how we know and how the ways of interacting with information
affect our pursuits and their outcomes. It is difficult to say how much we
know and especially thorny to figure out what we don’t happen to know.
This first chapter asks what limits our knowing, what the borders to our
knowing are, and how the landscape of knowing relates to two predominant
strategies of making sense of it: information services and digital literacy.
Keywords: ordinary knowing, information, social web, boundaries
This book aims to look at the assumptions and realities of how people
find information in the age of the social web. There are many popular
debates about participation, accessibility, the privileged position of
digital information and the consequent emergence of a particular yet
often ill-defined ‘digital information culture’, knowledgeable younger
generations and a digital divide between rich and poor, youngsters and
the elderly. Despite the new technologies, people still have questions,
problems and worries that they cannot answer. Why do search engines
and other information technologies not provide answers to all conceivable
questions? Or do they? Do we lack the appropriate skills and competences
to search for information or are we just deluded into thinking that
we are incompetent? And why do many traditional ways of finding
answers – walking to a library or asking an expert – sometimes feel far
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Information Services and Digital Literacy
too demanding? Something has changed in how and what information is
sought, where and when, and by whom.
Change in itself is nothing new, but there are particularities that have
made the change different and in some ways more radical than the
change that has been around for decades. Technology and especially our
assumptions of how technology works for us have changed. People have
changed their behaviour and expectations of how and where to find
information, and information culture has also changed. Finally, the
information we are seeking and using, and its form and origins, have
changed radically in the course of digitisation. This book is about those
changes and how they augment and constrain the ways in which people
know things, when and how it is difficult to know things, and when they
might want to have some help or need new competences to cope with the
changing landscape of information.
We are in the middle of a huge flow of information, and it is moving
faster than ever before. We are trying to cope with it by using new
technologies, learning digital literacy competence and hurling ourselves
into the stream, picking up what we can and leaving the rest aside. The
new technologies of information retrieval can make information
searching a very pleasurable experience. It is easy to be immersed in the
activity of browsing titles and finding unexpected things. Similarly, it is
rewarding to be able to find a satisfying answer to almost any kind of
question in a few seconds.
The central hypothesis of this book is that the fundamental problem
of informing and being informed in the age of the social web and the
culture of participation is that we don’t know the premise of how we
know, and how the ways of interacting with information affect our
pursuits and their outcomes. Information seeking and finding is always
a question of crossing and expanding boundaries between our earlier
experiences and the unknown. We make excursions from everyday life to
the sphere of science, journalism and even celebrity gossip in order to
make sense of what is going on. Until well into the late twentieth century,
ordinary people had limited opportunities to change the geography of
the information sources available to them. They had access to a limited
number of people and books, and only local newspapers. It was relatively
clear where information could be found on different topics, what
information channels were available and which sources were likely to be
reliable. There have always been things we did not know about, but we
could find out about them using a limited number of sources, whose
boundaries were fairly clear. First, people could ask their friends, family
and colleagues. The verity of the answers could vary, but because the
2
Introduction
answer was provided by a real person who was part of the social network
of the questioner, the answers were likely to be relevant within their
shared social context. From a social point of view, this is far more
important than whether answers are exactly correct.
The second broad category of sources was edited works, such as edited
and published books, television programmes and newspapers, or in
earlier centuries the local priest, who acted in northern European rural
communities as the principal source of news from the outer world. Once
again, as we know from the facts presented in the press, not all the
details provided in edited works are necessarily correct, but they are
usually accurate enough. At the same time the information, true or false,
is relevant, because it is shared by a relatively large group of people. The
information is false only if its inaccuracy is apparent within the particular
community. Information is wrong if it cannot be corroborated in
practice. It is perfectly safe to purport and believe that distant seas are
inhabited by sea monsters, but if someone suggests that a local river is
the home of a dragon, and it is apparent that no dragon has ever been
sighted there, the piece of information is (in practice) false, unless
otherwise proven.
We have not had time to get used to the relatively sudden and profound
change in the number of sources of information available to us. There are
almost unlimited opportunities for people to choose the information
sources they like to read or access, and to shape their personal information
environment in the way they think is best. The cycle of developing and
adopting new innovations has become so fast that our idea of the
landscape has had no time to settle. The emergence of a generic culture of
participation as a prototype of a multiplicity of participatory cultures –
based on an equally generic social expectation that people will take part,
communicate, contribute and interact – catalyses the distortion of
landscape and adaptation before people can absorb it. The roots of
participatory ideals are in the global societal and economic changes of the
second half of the twentieth century (Smith, 1997), but the appearance of
paradigmatic change has been underlined as a series of changes at the turn
of the millennium were manifested in different areas of knowledge, from
education to business and cultural institutions (e.g., C. Anderson, 2006;
Spiranec and Zorica, 2010).
Everyone, not just the early adopters, uses Facebook and Twitter before
they know what they are all about. A Swedish survey concludes that even
if the ratio of active and passive users of Twitter is skewed and the number
of active tweeters is not growing substantially, the service has had a
comprehensive impact on the public debate in the country (Brynolf, 2011).
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Information Services and Digital Literacy
A similar effect was observed in Finland when the annual Independence
Day reception of the president of Finland (#linnanjuhlat) trended on
Twitter in December 2011. Similar, even if occasionally somewhat
indecisive, evidence has been presented about the role of other types of
social media technologies (Christensen, 2011). We may not be well
enough acquainted with the landscape of digital information to know
how we know, where the boundaries are, how to cross them and what
the consequences are of our behaviour. We are working with digital
media, search engines and social information networks, but our sense of
successful and satisfactory information use may be peripheral to the aims
of our pursuits. At the same time, the social web lacks the earlier stable
contexts of origin and relevance of information.
This book builds on the economic theory of knowing and interactive
choice described in Russell Hardin’s How Do You Know? (2009) and the
notion of boundary objects and crossings initially developed by Susan
Star and James Griesemer (1989). My proposition is that information
seeking and use is largely a question of crossing and expanding
boundaries between our earlier experience and the multitude of existing
fields of knowledge, systems of representation and contexts of knowing.
The starting point of this book is my general belief in a certain contextual
rationality of action, which I share with Hardin. The rationality is not
that of most philosophical schools or the rational choice theory. It is the
everyday rationality of a moment. People usually make sensible choices.
Many actions are perfectly sensible at the moment an individual chooses
to make them, even if they might be considered utterly nonsensical a
moment before or after they are made, and if nobody else could
comprehend their validity. Arguably there are two primary reasons why
rational decisions can be irrational: the connection between choice and
outcome of an activity is indeterminate, and people make decisions based
on (objectively) inadequate knowledge.
The fundamental problem is that we don’t know those things we could
and should know; nor do we know whether some of the things we do
know we did not need to know, in which case we may have spent time
knowing something that has little relevance, or which we could have
asked someone else about. In this context, the principal challenge of all
information providing institutions and individuals – whether the
provision is direct or indirect and whether the institutions are companies,
libraries, museums, archives, book or media publishers, journalists,
information or knowledge managers, or information systems designers –
is to know how to help an information seeker to cross relevant
boundaries. It is very good to ask how to do this, but the question is not
4
Introduction
inherently answerable by people as information seekers, because we are
only slowly accommodating ourselves to the new, rapidly emerging types
of information provision. It is not self-evident for information providers,
either, because of the multiplicity and diversity of boundaries and
boundary crossings that influence our premises of knowing. It is
legitimate to ask: what are these boundaries and crossings?
In this book I try to sketch some of these borders and to understand
how the landscape relates to the two predominant strategies of making
sense of it: information services and digital literacy. The next chapter
introduces the notions of boundaries and the economics of ordinary
knowing. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the notions of information
services and digital literacy, used here as proxies to epitomise two
fundamentally different approaches to address the presumably negative
effects of the boundaries of knowing rather than as direct representations
of daily practices with the same names: information services and digital
literacy. Chapters 4 to 7 discuss the boundaries of ordinary knowing and
how they are conceptualised in the contemporary landscape of
information. The final chapter revisits the two strategies, addressing the
negative effects of the boundaries of knowing (information services and
digital literacy) and looks more closely at how we tend to conceptualise
the boundaries of ordinary knowing and find an effective means to break
through them.
We are going to make an excursion into the landscape of information
in contemporary culture and its technological and social underpinnings,
and evaluate and rethink the role of the standard instruments of helping
others in their quest for information in the light of boundary crossings
and our tendency to economise in our information seeking and use.
5