PIK Week 10: Information in Everyday Life

This week’s topic focuses on our relationship to information in everyday life – it is a specific and unique area within the field of Information science itself. I find this rather odd, as I would think that our relationship with Information in everyday life should be the main focus of the field, given that the other areas (like information seeking behaviour in academic and professional contexts) are but one part of our lives and our relationship to information.

This area covers an important phenomenon that is largely ignored by Information Behaviour research: Leisure. During this week’s lecture, Dr Olsson raised the importance of thinking about leisure as discursive action. Leisure activities (especially those with other people):

·         Contain a specialised language

·         Foster community through interaction with others (social networking)

·         Give people a sense of identity

·         Allow people to learn

·         Establish conventions and social norms

Drawing from my own experience, I felt that a mention of the Brony phenomenon is appropriate here. Bronies are a large and growing following of 14 to 39 year old men who are fans of the ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’ cartoon show. The show follows the stories of six main ponies and contains simple moral messages about love, kindness and friendship. The formation of the fandom reveals a lot, not only in how information is shared and disseminated within the context of leisure activities, but also about how discourse functions within online communities.

I even conducted my own pseudo-research with Australian Bronies by asking them in what ways they think their community practices leisure. 

The Brony following began in the image boards of 4chan. 4chan users (at least in the more extreme sections of the image board) can be characterised as people who constantly challenge societal norms, who have been exposed to a myriad of disturbing imagery where it is not uncommon for them to come across countless images and discourses about violence, hatred and obscenity on a daily basis. In many online communities (including the users of 4chan themselves), 4chan is regarded as one of the deepest and darkest recesses of the internet.

Images relating to the My Little Pony show were originally posted on the cartoon section of 4chan’s image boards. However, some people, in an attempt to ‘troll’ some of 4chan 's more violent and obscene image threads, began to post ponies in them.

They would for example, post something like this in a thread with countless images of violent pornography:

 

Eventually people from the board who found this amusing caught on, begun to watch a few episodes of the show, and realised the show was fairly entertaining . The contagion of Pony images escalated through 4chan’s social network. This caused polarisation on the forums. The users of the imageboard made Bronies the object of their abuse and were met (in most cases) with the values of love and kindness proported in the show. The ensuing discourse become so agitated that 4chan moderators begun to delete and ban users for posting ponies in threads.
 

Eventually, 4chan (a site where it is acceptable to post almost anything short of blatantly illegal content like child pornography) banned and censored (for a certain amount of time) all pony related content. Of all the content on the image boards, cute content about love, kindness and friendship was simply too extreme for 4chan moderators to allow.

Despite (or possibly in spite of) this, the Brony fandom continued to grow, and the internet is now full of endless content; images, music, videos, crossovers and volumes of fan fiction relating to ponies. 

 

Such continuous content creation and activity has served to build a strong social network between Bronies with a fandom that holds its own conventions and that rivals well established fandoms out there like the Trekkers and the Marvel universe fandom.

What interests me about this fandom is the way in which power dynamics and Ideology function in rearranging the structure of social networks and (in the case of the bronies’ departure from 4chan) severing them completely. Such a focus is key to understanding how information is disseminated within and between different social networks, and how a knowledge base or a certain set of values maintains power with a socialised network of subjects.

This is particularly why I found Pettigrew’s study for this week so interesting. The aim of her study was to investigate the role of the community health nurse as an information provider in the social networks of the elderly. She refers to Granovetter, an insightful social network theoretician who outlines that an individual’s network consists of relationships that can be described as weak ties or strong ties. He proposed that weak ties are more valuable then strong ties for the flow of new information and other resources within a personal network. An acquaintance or distant friend, for example, is more likely to have interacted with different individuals and therefore more likely to have access to different information. Family or close friends on the other hand, tend to interact with the same people and thus are more likely to pass around existing information. Furthermore, he argues that strong ties work as information validators, reinforcing new and existing beliefs or values. These theories really do well to shed light on how social network structure is formed. 

I feel Pettigrew’s major contribution here is her concept of information grounds and the importance of context in the way that such network connections function. In her study about seniors and their interaction with nurses, she identifies four major contextual features in which information sharing was occurring. 

o   Clinic Activities

o   Physical Environment

o   Nurse Situation

o   Senior Situation

However, Pettigrew doesn’t seem to lend weight to any one contextual feature. Could it not be argued that clinic activities hold much more weight in facilitating information exchange than physical environment? Further, it would be interesting to develop Pettigrew’s theory to determine how one can gauge the importance of a contextual feature with regards to its efficacy in facilitating information exchange. 

I found this week’s Tuominen reading even more appealing. Tuominen uses discourse analysis to identify culturally dominant moral assumptions which significantly influences the way people exchange information. He refers to Potter and Wetherell’s concept of interpretative repertories which are ideal-types captured from the on-going flow of interaction between two people. The focus of discourse analysis is precisely in the connection between two nodes (people) of a network and the approach takes into account the role of ideology and its influence on level of information flowing between a dyad (based on the afore mentioned repertories). I’d like to draw a parallel here between the conflict that Tuominen identifies between the virtue repertoire and the anxiety repertoire and the conflicting repertoires held within 4chans image boards.

The ideal user of 4chan’s more extreme image boards is one who is anonymous, desensitised, entertained by the obscene and apathetic/cynical in the way they interact with other users. The subject position offered by the ‘Brony’ repertoire (where the subject is entertained by ‘cuteness’, is empathetic and possesses an optimistic attitude) conflicts strongly with that of the ‘4chan’ repertoire. It is no wonder then, that when the dominant discourse informed by the ‘4chan’ repertoire faced a counter-discourse informed by the ‘Brony’ repertoire, strict oppressive actions were taken to censor pony related material (analogously, if patients in a hospital, informed by the anxiety repertoire, opposed the hegemony of the established hospital discourse, doctors might authorise sedatives or relaxants to be used on patients in a physical manifestation of power). This exercise of power demonstrates a restructure of the social network, and ultimately centralises an authority figure’s position in the network by reinforcing the repertoire that informs their discourse (but conversely, may also build resistance for those who sympathize with the person affected). In any case, such exercises of power are useful in allowing people to identify Ideologies, and reveal the location of power.

References

Pettigrew, K. (1999). Waiting for chiropody: contextual results from an ethnographic study of the information behaviour among attendees at community clinics. Information Processing and Management. 35: 801-807.

Tuominen, K. (2004) ''Whoever increases his knowledge merely increases his heartache.' Moral tensions in heart surgery patients' and their spouses' talk about information seeking.' Information Research , 10(1) paper 202 Available at http://informationr.net/ir/10-1/paper202.html