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CHAPTER 1
Searching for Information (Policy)
Informationâalong with the technologies that enable access, sharing, search, and all the ways we use and interact with informationâis so central to everyday activities as to have become nearly an invisible part of life. As we write this book, studies indicate that the average American checks her phone eighty times a day. Thatâs once every eighteen minutes in a twenty-four-hour period. Presuming someone sleeps eight hours a night and does not check her phone in that period, the rate becomes once every twelve minutes during the sixteen waking hours. Most people rely on social media platforms for their news, to communicate with friends, and to find answers to questions, along with the general entertainment of searching for videos of goats wearing pajamas1 or baby wombats frolicking.2
And it is not just phones. Information is now literally everywhere. Homes are filling with Internet-connected smart appliances, such as refrigerators, baby monitors, thermostats, picture frames, mirrors, and security systems, as well as appliances that are designed to run many of the operations of the home via connectivity. If you have a question, you only need to speak it into the ether, and the device will respond. It also monitors and records what everyone says in your home, raising all kinds of privacy and security challenges, but most users do not worry about such things because they place greater priority on the convenience these devices offer. Did you know that a robot vacuum maps the ownerâs house and reports those data back to the company (Knight, 2015)? Most owners of these devices probably do not.
Underlying all these things that provide information access and automate life are countless decisions that you never have to think about. You probably expect Wi-Fi to be available everywhere you go, and youâre probably bummed, if not genuinely surprised, when it is not. Yet, the presence of Wi-Fi requires a huge amount of technological infrastructure and accompanying investments of time, money, and resources. Ubiquitous Wi-Fi also depends on many decisions being made by governments to supportâor at least not interfere withâits availability, along with companies prioritizing it as part of their business strategies, offering these services and building and maintaining the necessary infrastructure.
It is clichéd to say that information is everywhere, but it is also true. People have never had greater access to or ability to share information, which also makes it easier to take it for granted. Information can seem as evitable as breathing out and breathing in. Yet, it is actually only available to such an extent due to policies, laws, regulations, and financial decisions from many levels of government, international organizations and agreements, and business interests, among other players.
This book is written to help you understand everything that occurs to create the policy environment in which information and information technologies exist and the roles that they play in your life. This area is known as information policy. It is not necessarily the best name in terms of capturing all that it encompasses, but it is a name that has existed for decades as information and communication technologies have gone through mind-bending evolutions from landline telephone service to broadcast television to the browsable Internet to the mobile technologies of today. And though it is most tangible to discuss in terms of specific technologies, it is actually far broader. It includes issues of the ways in which you have the rights to express yourself and to access information, how much privacy you have for your information, protections for the ownership of new information, and countless other issues that are not dependent on specific technologies.
You are certainly well acquainted with the first word in the term. Information is a term you hear myriad times a day, but you may not think about how much it really means. Information, in a broad sense, is everywhere and always has been. It is not even limited to humans. As long as trees have existed, they have relied on informationâin the form of temperature, chemicals in the air, sunshine in the sky, and water in the groundâto make decisions about how to invest their energies to promote long-term survival. Animals that hunt have always used informationâin the form of scent, sight, sound, and tracksâto stalk their prey. And even before any means of writing were invented, humans were using other means of communication to collect and share information. To continue to be alive is in many ways dependent on successful use of information.
Human inventiveness and ingenuity in the past five hundred or so years, however, have greatly changed the ways in which information can be collected and shared and how much is available to access. Before the invention of writing, information exchange was limited to people who occupied the same physical space.3 Writing allowed for information to spread more widely, and the printing press accelerated how many times and places the same information could be shared. The Internet made information infinitely shareable and connected the whole worldâfor better and for worseâin ways that were previously impossible.
The way you think about and interact with information now would be utterly inconceivable for people even twenty years ago, much less five centuries ago. Hunter-gatherers certainly would have had an easier go of things had drones with cameras been available to help them find food. For all but the slightest fraction of human history, information was essential to life but highly limited. Now it flows forth in quantities well beyond what anyone can handle or make sense of. Rather than being a problem of paucity, it is now a problem of overload.
Technologies have developed with such great speed in the past few decades that we have not had the chance to adapt to them. Or, at least, to adapt to using them well. The information available online is often utter nonsense. Yet, many people believe what they see, no matter how foolish it is, because they lack the information literacy skills to determine what is good information and what is not. Near to where one of the authors of this book lives, a member of the city council of Washington, D.C., Trayon White, recently made a series of statements and even posted videos discussing his belief that wealthy Jewish families have machines that control the weather, simultaneously displaying bigotry and idiocy (Jamison, 2018; Jamison & Straus, 2018). But he read this nonsense online somewhere and decided to believe it. Similar ridiculousness happens all the time with many astounding and awful bits of misinformation, with this case really only being notable for the fact that the believer of the misinformation is an elected official in the government of the capital of the United States.
So, when we say information, it is not a simple thing. It means there are issues of access (whether or not you have it) and literacy skills (whether or not you can accurately assess the validity of information). There are issues of how to keep track of and sort through all the information now available. There are issues of all the investments that need to be made and need to continue to be made for information to be available at the levels it isâcables, towers, Wi-Fi hot spots, server farms, satellites, and so on. Information being everywhere requires a huge number of decisions and actions and investments.
That is where the second half of the term comes in. Policy, at least in this context, is meant to capture the decisions and actions and investments that occur to create and shape the environment in which information is made available. From the perspective of a government, it means enacting laws to enable and expand information and technology innovation or to set parameters on how information can be used. It means drafting policies and regulations that implement the laws. It means making decisions about how to support or limit business interests in these areas. It means determining what research to fund in these areas. It means negotiating international agreements that set standards for information across national boundaries. Again, none of these are simple things.
The ways in which these processes work and different interests are weighed can produce very different outcomes in the policy area. For example, privacy has become an ever more important aspect of information policy, as technologies have increased the ability to gather information about individuals. In the United States, the policy decision was to rely primarily on corporations to regulate their own information collection about consumers. This approach to privacy is often called notice and consent: companies tell you what they do with your information, and you can either acquiesce or stop using the product or service, though in many cases a lack of alternatives may not make that so easy to do. In the European Union (EU), however, the policy decision was to put the power in the hands of consumers themselves to dictate the amount of information to give to corporations. Not surprisingly, corporations serving residents of the United States have much more information about their customers than do corporations serving residents of the EU. In the United States, consumers get convenience and accurate recommendations of what might interest them, while in the EU, consumers get a much higher degree of privacy. This large difference is due entirely to the way in which the different governments have created information policies related to privacy. And, because of the structure of the EUâwhich is designed to facilitate what the members call their four freedoms of movement of people, capital, goods, and servicesâthese protections apply in all EU member nations and to all EU member citizens.
Discussing information policy can quickly feel overwhelming because so many different areas are impacted by information decisions. One of these impacts is the sheer costâinformation decisions usually have huge financial implications. Consider once again the example of Wi-Fi. To make connectivity more available and convenient, a massive network of telecommunications infrastructure is required. That infrastructure is constructed and maintained at great cost to governments and businesses, which means funds allocated to it do not go to address other issues. Roads are not repaired, firefighters are not hired, homeless shelters are not built, but Wi-Fi is plentiful (Mackenzie, 2010; Koepfler, Mascaro, & Jaeger, 2014). And, on the other side, this plentitude leads to economic growth as well as rapid technological innovation and significant social change.
Information policies also intersect with policies of many other types. Have you ever wondered about the consequence to the environment of your Internet use? Probably not, but itâs big.4 Data stored in the cloud is located somewhere. Every video, tweet, game, instant message, search, and other kind of online activity is processed by and stored on physical computers somewhere in what are called server farms. These farms are each filled with tens of thousands of computers that require power, give off heat and gases that hurt the environment and contribute significantly to global warming, and have to be frequently replaced, filling landfills (which is where your discarded technologies also go) with toxic technology components. Server farms are numerous and enormous, so the cumulative negative impact to the environment by the Internet makes it one of the biggest users of energy and biggest sources of environmental degradation. Bitcoin mining alone now expends as much energy as many individual nations, including ones like Ireland and Australia. But the Internet makes money for lots and lots of companies, and people really like to use it, so it gets priority over ecological concerns. Therefore, in this context, decisions of information policy have massive impacts in the area of environmental policy. And just imagine if all the time, money, and ingenuity that went into building the networks had gone into studying how to abate global warming.
Finally, it gets a bit hard at this point to even identify areas that do not have something to do with information technology. Applications for jobs and schools are done online, and few jobs or educational programs do not require the use of computers in some way. When you travel, you probably buy and receive your tickets online. In fact, you may well pay all your bills online. The financial sector and the utility grids operate through the Internet. Issues of access, literacy, expression, security, transparency, accessibility, and so much else are truly issues of information policy.
It is worth remembering, though, that while the scope of information policy has expanded greatly with recent technological advances, it is not a new idea. Although the term was not used in the 1700s, information policy issues are at the heart of the documents that created the foundation of the United States. The Declaration of Independence notes the lack of access to legal information in the colonies as a key grievance. The Constitution establishes the Post Office as a means of information dissemination. The Bill of Rights begins with a First Amendment that is devoted to protections related to information access and exchange. Many of the issues that were the central challenges of information policy then remain so now; there is just much more information and technology to consider today.
FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATION POLICY FOR INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS
Clearly, based on the preceding short overview, no book could cover the entire landscape of information policy in a comprehensive manner. Fortunately, this book is written about information policy for information professionals, which narrows the focus considerably. Even at that, the activities and impacts of information professionals and information institutions are heavily shaped by information policy, so we still will not be able to cover everything as comprehensively as we wish that we could. Nevertheless, we do believe that the book will give you the tools you need to understand the big issues of information policy and the ways in which they impact information professions and institutions. Further, the book is designed to prepare you to better engage with policy processes and advocate for information policy decisions that will better serve your patrons, institutions, and the values and ethics of the information professions.
Information policy issues have impacts at a number of levels. Take cybersecurity, for example, and its intersections with broader concepts of privacy and security. For individual users, cybersecurity is vitally important for their devices, programs that they use, and their activities online to protect personal information and control of their devices. The individual may focus on cybersecurity as a privacy issue, but it is still cybersecurity at the most individual level. For corporations and public institutions, cybersecurity is a major concern as they seek to protect their networks, their data, and their reputations. For governments, cybersecurity is a vital issue of national defense and national security, such as protecting the utility grids in a country or ensuring operations of government agencies. And, for information professionals, it is an issue of their work, as they teach others to be better able to protect their own privacy and security.
With these various levels and types of impacts of policy in mind, the goal of this book is to provide a thorough introductory and reference text for the myriad information policy issues. By exploring information policies as issues shaping the activities of individuals, communities, institutions, and societies, this book is intended to not just give context to information policy but to ready information professionals to navigate policy issues in their work, improve their ability to react to and craft institutional policies in response to information policy, educate patrons about relevant information policy issues, and be stronger advocates and activists for improved information policies.
Because they are part of a field dedicated to making information widely available and helping others to use informa...
