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

Chandos Information Professional Series

Information Services and Digital Literacy

In search of the boundaries of knowing

Isto Huvila

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction

Abstract:

Chapter 2: Knowing what we know

Abstract:

The economy of ordinary knowledge

Boundaries of knowing

Conclusions

Chapter 3: Information services and digital literacy

Abstract:

Information services

Digital literacy

Conclusions

Chapter 4: Technologies of abundance

Abstract:

Networking

Personal information technology

Usability

Convergence

The consequences of technology

Conclusions

Chapter 5: The culture of participation

Abstract:

Communal and individualist participation: ‘talko’ work and ‘broadcast yourselfism’

Commercialism and freedom

Roles and rules of participation

Economy of participation and non-participation

Conclusions

Chapter 6: The ‘new’ user

Abstract:

Learned or born

Behaving differently with information

Reading differently

Users and non-users

Identity

The making of a ‘new’ user

Conclusions

Chapter 7: Information

Abstract:

The form of information

The emergence of information

Qualitative and computational viewpoints

A pig in a poke?

Abundance and scarcity

Conclusions

Chapter 8: Information services and digital literacy as boundary objects

Abstract:

The pieces that do not fit

Across the boundaries

References

Index

Copyright

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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.

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 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 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). 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 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 7discuss 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.

2

Knowing what we know

Abstract:

This chapter describes a theoretical framework for conceptualising the practices of ordinary knowledge, how we know things in our ordinary lives, and the boundaries of knowing. The framework is based on Russell Hardin’s theory of ordinary knowing and the notion of boundary objects developed by Susan Star and James Griesemer. Its premise is that the decisions we take make sense at the moment we make them, but at the same time what we can know perfectly is limited by many types of boundaries. The choices are not necessarily easy or effortless, but we feel they are sensible. The boundaries that limit our knowing can be technological, social and even physical. Those between different knowledge communities hinder the possibility of us knowing things but at the same time create a comfort zone, which makes things understandable for us. In the pursuit to be economic in our knowing, to focus on knowing relevant things, we can be unable and often unwilling to traverse many of the boundaries, which are volatile. They are plastic enough to adapt to the needs of specific communities but at the same time robust enough to traverse boundaries and make them recognisable and understandable on the different sides of the boundaries. The boundaries can be bridged using so-called boundary objects, which reside between different communities of knowledge. In addition to trying to span and cross the boundaries by ourselves, we can try to help others to cross their boundaries either together with them as peers, or as ‘experts’ with a different horizon of capabilities and limitations. The help can be given by teaching, guiding or coaching others to cross a particular boundary, or by helping them to learn where the boundaries are and how to cross them in general.

Key words

knowing

knowledge

boundary objects

boundaries

The economy of ordinary knowledge

People know in many different ways. Knowing is based on science, institutions, religious beliefs and practices, and cultural and moral judgements among many other sources. Most of the time things are plainly known. It is very difficult to explain how and why some things are known or not known outside the scope of epistemologically rigorous knowledge systems based on a premise, albeit a theoretical one, of the existence of a super knower as Hardin (2009) suggests. Explanations of knowledge have a tendency to become either very simple, similar to Friedrich Hayek’s (1945) reasoning that prices are sufficient signals to coordinate human activity, or extremely complex, as in models with a large number of variables and explanations (e.g. Jakubik, 2011). They tend to be based on an assumed influence of individual factors (such as price) or on highly complicated models that are difficult to use in practice. Research shows that even experts of specific fields have significant difficulties in explaining why they happen to know certain things they know (Bouwman et al., 1987). The difficulties of providing rational explanation pertain even to such heavily regulated areas of work as policing or theoretically rigorous areas of knowledge like science (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). The observation that in ordinary everyday life contexts of work and leisure people do not know why they know or don’t know is seemingly trivial, yet it is almost always ordinary knowledge rather than specialist knowledge that affects how people decide to act and behave in their daily pursuits. We very seldom have real opportunities to rely on advanced specialist knowledge when we make decisions in our daily lives.

Although they lack epistemological diligence, the economic theories of knowledge have tried to address the fundamental question of knowing and decision-making in ordinary life. The question is: how do we behave when we know? In this context the notion of behaviour should not be understood as behaviour in a behaviourist sense, but rather in an everyday sense of doing things. The premise of knowing is that the ideal state of possessing complete knowledge is not a practical reality. Our knowledge is limited and mostly we do not even know how. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has argued that in contemporary reality, which he calls ‘liquid’, uncertainty has extended to the aims of human activity. In the absence of traditional supreme societal authorities, knowledge is limited by the inability not only to achieve goals, but also to identify what is the significant nature of the goal.

In economics, the notion of information asymmetry (Rosser, 2003) refers to a situation in which one of the parties is more knowledgeable than the others. The typical context of analysing information asymmetry relates to transactions and financial decision-making. The principal models of information asymmetry explain the situations of adverse selection (Akerlof, 1970) and moral hazard. Adverse selection refers to decisions made on the basis of hidden or suboptimal knowledge of the real conditions of the other party. An example could be a decision to rely on what is a seemingly trustworthy social web service for safekeeping personal data while in reality the chosen web service provider would silently supply third parties with the