I had defined this term very simply in my first post as a situation where one is unable to attain a specific component of information based on their information need. In fact, there are a plethora of social aspects that characterize information poverty and I realized my initial premise that Information poverty is primarily about access is flawed.
Some of the aspects that serve to enable information poverty are:
· Individuation – Where a person will be secretive and self-protective due to a perception of distrust of those around him (alienation theory).
· Avoidance/disinterest – Where people are simply not interested in or have reason to avoid engaging with information.
· Social Norms and Normative behavior – Social rules that dictates a person’s behavior. Driven by mores and the rules of a social world, normative behavior provides a predictable routine and manageable approach to everyday reality.
· Social types – How a person is classified within a social situation determining both ones access to information and their ability to use it.
· Over-identification – Where people identify strongly with a certain type of identity.
Chatman states that the theory of information poverty explains the way in which people define their experiences in order to survive in a world of distrust. Chatman notes that given this situation people may very well be aware that there is valuable, relevant and useful information – but pursuing the information is not seen as worthwhile. Chatman also identifies some of the aspects that will allow people to cross information boundaries:
1) When the information is perceived as critical.
2) When there is a collective expectation that the information is relevant.
3) When a perception exists that the ‘life in the round’ is no longer functioning.
Again, I’d like to stress that I find this theory very significant given that the field of information science seems to have a multitude of answers for questions of ‘how and why we do know?” but very little by way of ‘how and why we don’t know?’. The theory of Information Poverty seems to at least to begin to address this.
This week’s reading on Savolainen draws a distinction between information behavior and Information Practice. Savolainen identifies that information behavior primarily draws on the cognitive view point and that this contrasts with the Social Constructivism that Information Practice draws upon. The two have very different ontological and epistemological origins as they draw on different metaphysical perspectives. While the umbrella term 'information behavior' is founded in enlightenment objectivism, Social Constructivism rejects this view in favour of a view that sees Truth as partial and identifies that meaning is negotiated through relationships within existing discourses and power relations - hence the term 'information practice'.
Savolainen cites Stephen Feinman and his colleagues to further define information behavior as “specific actions performed by an individual that are specifically aimed at satisfying information needs”. This can be juxtaposed against his citation of Volosinov who defines Information practice as assuming that the processes of information seeking and use are created socially and dialogically. Volosinov also argues that Discourses are ideological in the sense that they win over speakers by formulating positive associative content for concepts which act to legitimize themselves.
Savolainen concludes that the major difference within the field wide discourse is that information behaviour is primarily seen to be triggered by needs and motives, while the discourse on information practice focuses on the continuity and habitualization of activities affected and shaped by social and cultural factors. He stresses the importance of self-reflexive and critical approaches to researchers’ own discursive formations and normative viewpoints.
For the final part of my post this week, I would like to touch on Dr Olsson’s work: Power/Knowledge: the Discursive construction of an Author and focus strongly on the Foucaldian underpinnings of this work. Olsson uses the method of discourse analysis after interviewing several people in the field about Dervin to determine that not only were they involved in meaning making based on the aboutness of information, but also that an integral part of their constructive processes was the credibility of one’s message. The research showed elements of Foucault’s ‘Author Function’ at play and that participants constructive processes were involved with the related components: the construction of meaning and the construction of authority. Essentially the research reinforced the idea that the meaning of a work is not determined by the author, but is rather socially constructed and re-constructed by the reader or the community of readers (who possess their own discourses) given a particular socio-political and historic context.
In the study, Olsson uses a Focauldian perspective which sees the concept of discourse as a complex network of relationships between individuals, texts, ideas, and institutions. Each one of these “nodes” can have an impact, to varying degrees, on other nodes, and on the dynamic of a discourse as a whole (indeed Foucault argues that any given discourse will give rise to a counter-discourse).
Here we can see the importance given to the role of language for this position - language isn’t just about conveying thought, it structures the way we experience and shapes how we see the world. I can see how, in the context of constructing social reality this focus on language and its role in shaping our social understanding of our world is very important. However, I’m not so certain about extending this position to an external reality.
Indeed, for Foucault, there is no universal understanding that is beyond history and society. At first I interpreted Foucault's position here as meaning that there is no external position of certainty, that there is no truth outside of inter-subjective truth (which clashed with the third assumption I made in an earlier post about reality and existence being external to people). However, what Dr Olsson clarified to us in class was that Foucault’s argument was not that it was certain that there is no external position of reality but rather, that if there is an externally based reality, we cannot know that reality. This position in fact works quite well with my own assumptions that reality and existence is undefinable and cannot be known through consciousness in its entirety.
Another important aspect of Foucault’s thought that appears in Olsson’s work was the dynamic between Knowledge and Power. Foucault challenged the traditional Western conceptions of power by challenging the Freudian and Marxian strategies of locating power in the realm of a repressive, centered, and ultimately debilitating mode of oppression. He constructed knowledge and power not as a separate entity but rather as interrelated products of the same social process. Foucault argues that power produces knowledge and that there is no knowledge that does not presuppose power relations. He essentially constructs power and knowledge as an inductive process. Olsson quotes an interesting excerpt by Foucalt:
“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere. . . Power comes from below; that is there is no binary and all encompassing opposition between ruler and ruled at the root of power relations . . . no such duality extending from the top down”
Essentially, discourse communities are imbued with power given that they hold an accepted truth within their discursive context. I must admit here that I’m not quite sure about what Foucault means by ‘power comes from below’ and that there is ‘no binary/all encompassing opposition between ruler and the ruled’. What I would like to do in a later post if I get the chance is to contrast this idea with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the hope of arriving at a better understanding.
What I would like to visit here however is the Foucauldian concept of biopower. To begin this visitation however, I’d first like to elucidate a Foucauldian term; the ‘technology of power’. Foucault characterizes Discipline by a complex bundle of power technologies.
For Foucault, power is exercised with intention. Instead of analyzing the difficult problem of who has which intentions however, he focuses on what is intersubjectively accepted knowledge about how to exercise power. He identifies that power presupposes freedom in the sense that power isn’t enforced, but rather makes people behave in other ways than they would have originally done.
He analyses the link between power and knowledge by outlining a form of covert power that works through people rather than only on them. Foucault argues that discourses gain power as more people accept the particular views associated with that discourse as common or assumed knowledge (the process by which truth is normalized). Or put another way: Panopticization.
As state apparatus come to terms with the internet and its capability for surveillance, Foucault’s idea of the Panopticon and how it is used as a technology of power has never been more relevant. I predict that the digital rights and privacy movement is set to become a significant counter-discursive power in its own right, as my favorite rapper Robert Foster would attest to:
Whereas discipline involves technology of power deployed to make individuals behave (to be efficient and productive workers for example), Biopower deploys technology of power to manage populations or people as a group (to ensure a healthy workforce for example). It relates to the government's concern with fostering the life of the population. Given the context of the modern era (where power must be justified both rationally and politically), Biopower is utilized by an emphasis on the protection of life as opposed to the threat of death, on the regulation of the body and on the production of other technologies of power. Biopower can be manifested through regulation of customs, habits, health, reproductive practices, family and well-being.
Sources:
Chatman, E. 2000. 'Keynote Address: Framing Social Life In Theory And Research.' Information Seekng in Context: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Research in Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts; 2000 August 16-18; Goteburg Sweden. L. Hoglund.
Fillingham, L.A. 1993, Foucault for Beginners, Writers and Readers Publishing, London.
Foucault, Michel 1984 'What is an Author? In Rabinow, Paul (1984) The Foucault Reader London; Penguin Books, 101-120.
Foucault, Michel 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 195-210.
Olsson, M. 2007 Power/Knowledge: the Discursive construction of an Author. Library Quarterly . 77 (2), 219-240.
Savolainen, R. 2007 Information Behaviour and Information Practice: Reviewing the 'Umbrella Concepts' of Information-Seeking Studies. Library Quarterly. 77 (2), 109-132.
Wikiversity 2012, Wikiversity, viewed 6 September 2012, <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Foucault>
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