PIK Week 11: Information Poverty

Information Poverty has traditionally been understood as access to resources and education. It has been predicated on the belief that if access to information resources and education is made available, people will inform and educate themselves. Thus, the economically poor have commonly been associated as a group of people who are ‘information poor’.

My first reaction when I came across this view was that it made sense and was even noble in a sense. However, during this week’s lecture, Dr Olsson pointed out that it was in fact a very neo-liberal idea (putting the weight of responsibility on the shoulders of the individual) based on the enlightenment period principles of the ‘Perfectible Man’.

Hersberger conducted his research on homeless persons and examined how a lack of access to information technology doesn’t affect how homeless persons access their basic information needs. Hersberger identified that the primary information need of the homeless parents in his study was information about social service resources. He found that the majority of homeless parents interviewed did not view the Internet as a major source of needed information. In the paper, he refers to an earlier study he undertook with Pettigrew which found that the social networks of homeless families were small, ranging from 2-21 contacts and had a tendency to deliberately keep their social networks small to prevent contacts that encouraged negative behaviour.

I find this revelation very interesting as I can draw many connections to other thinkers at this point. Castells referred to the ‘fourth world’ as the spatially unrestricted status of sub-populations who are socially excluded from society. Could we not characterise people in the ‘fourth world’ as people who are a part of small, individuated social networks disconnected from the internationally interconnected network of global society? Fowler and Christakis argue that the real digital divide rests in the fact that in an increasingly interconnected world, people with many ties become even better connected while those with few ties may get left farther behind. They argue that: “To reduce poverty, we should focus not merely on monetary transfers or even technical training; we should help the poor form new relationships with other members of society”. It would thus be interesting to see research in this area focus on the internet not as a source of information per-sea, but as a tool with which the socially excluded may build wider and stronger networks with those who are more privileged.

Aleph Molinari, founder of the Fundación Proacceso has come up with a unique and rather successful solution to bridging the digital divide. His organisation created the ‘Learning and Innovation Centre’ which is a network of strategically located community centres that bring education through the use of technology to the socially disadvantaged. The model ensures that the technology is being used for educational purposes, and facilitates the social setting for such an educational focus to occur. His centres have reached over a hundred thousand users and can be considered a working model for bridging the digital divide. He gives details of his work in the following lecture:

Aleph Molinari makes use of ICTs in a way that maximises social networks between its participants. 

The Gurstien reading for this week is highly critical of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) for many reasons, one of which being that it does not view the internet as a ‘network of networks’ with the ability to engage and enable interaction across physical and cultural boundaries. He also criticises the WSIS’s lack of a bottom-up approach (approaches similar to Molinari’s model).

Gurstien argues that some of the most significant possible applications and goals of ICTs would be:

•        Supporting local economic development
•        Supporting social justice
•        Supporting political empowerment
•        Ensuring local access to education and health services
•        Enabling local control of information production and distribution
•        Ensuring the survival and continuing vitality of indigenous cultures 

 Although I agree with Gurstien here, and like the idea that ICTs must be deployed with social goals in mind, I think it’s important to note that every suggestion he makes here is dependent on the formation of networks between people. His argument can essentially be reduced to ICTs being used for the sole purpose of strengthening, interconnecting and empowering the social networks of the digitally divided. Gurstien does allude to this in the reading:

“The key element in all of this is not "access" either to infrastructure or end user terminals (bridging the hardware "divide"). Rather what is significant is having access and then with that access having the knowledge, skills, and supportive organizational and social structures to make effective use of that access and that e-technology to enable social and community objectives.”

To finish off this week’s post I’d like to cover the Chatman reading. Chatman adopts an inductive process of reasoning for her theorising which is informed by several research projects she has undertaken . However, I’ve been able to draw some connections of my own to different theories I’ve visited in some of my previous posts.

She makes a distinction between Cosmopolitan and locally focused groups, where the former group is characterised as socially mobile and exposed to many networks and the latter being constrained to a closed network (small world) which I felt was a different way of characterising some of the different network architectures I came across in Christakis and Fowler’s book.

 Within social networks, she distinguishes between insiders and outsiders. This seems to resemble Granovetter Weak and Strong ties theory, however, Chatman seems to stress the importance of worldviews which gives people reason to become secretive or deceptive in the way they interact with their weak ties. Again, with reference to social networking architecture, outsiders can be characterised as those people who are positioned at the edges of a network (who are also the most informative in terms of the diversity of information they have to offer). The Insiders on the other hand would be positioned centrally in the network (using their greater understanding of the norms within a network to enhance their own social roles and establish the norms for everyone else through their influence).

Chatman tries to explain how information aids in forming a worldview and argues that information is a performance. This immediately reminds me of a Foucauldian discourse perspective and Potter and Wetherell’s concepts of repertoires (especially when she makes use of the word form).

Chatman’s theories are heavily embedded in her own research, so I draw such connections to existing theory with caution. Her concept of ‘Life in the Round’ does sound new to me however. “Life,” she argues, “indeed, for most of us, is business as usual. It’s not methodical, but it is close enough”. She goes on to explain it as a life in which certain things are implicitly understood and as composed of a normal language, worldview and codes. She describes it as a life with a high level of imprecision and accepted levels of uncertainty.

This is an interesting theory, one in which an ideology and shared norms within a group becomes so pervasive that it no longer needs to be expressed through discourse or precises language – it just is. It would be interesting to see if such a theory can be extended to broader phenomenon such as the subtle pervasiveness of Ideology in its advanced stages. 

References

Castells, Manuel (1999) Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Discussion Paper No. 114.

Christakis, Nicholas A. & Fowler, James H. (2011) Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives – How You Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, Do. Back Bay Books, London.

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

Chatman, E. A. (1999). A theory of life in the round. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(3), 207-217.

Hersberger, J.A. (2003) Are the economically poor information poor? Does the digital divide affect the homeless and access to information? Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 27(3) September: 44-63.

Gurstein, Michael (2003) Effective use: A community informatics strategy beyond the digital divide First Monday, 8 (12) http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1798/1678