Radical Information Literacy

Reclaiming the Political Heart of the IL Movement

Andrew Whitworth

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781843347484
• eBook ISBN: 9781780634296
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What would a synthetic theory of Digital, Media and Information Literacy (DMIL) look like? Radical Information Literacy presents, for the first time, a theory of DMIL that synthesises the diversity of perspectives and positions on DMIL, both in the classroom and the workplace, and within the informal learning processes of society. This title is based on original analysis of how decisions are made about the relevance of information and the other resources used in learning, showing how society has privileged objective approaches (used in rule-based decision making) to the detriment of subjective and intersubjective perspectives which promote individual and community contexts. The book goes on to analyse the academic and popular DMIL literature, showing how the field may have been, consciously or unwittingly, complicit in the 'objectification' of learning and the disempowerment of individuals and communities. Alternative ways of conceiving the subject are then presented, towards a reversal of these trends. - Synthesises key theorists of digital, media and information literacy and information behaviour - Includes the field of 'community informatics' - Conducts a bibliometric analysis of a broad spectrum of writings on digital, media and information literacy, analysing the connections between them and the frames of DMIL within which they are located

Part 1

Deconstructing IL

Outline

Part 1: Deconstructing IL

1 Basic concepts and terminology

2 The early days of IL

3 The diversity of IL

4 The institutionalising of IL

Part 1:

Deconstructing IL

“I need some information!”

“Sam, this is information retrieval, not information dispersal.”

Sam (Jonathan Pryce) and Jack (Michael Palin) in Brazil [dir: Terry Gilliam]

1

Basic concepts and terminology

Abstract:

This chapter introduces key concepts and clarifies terminology, setting the scene for the discussions of IL which follow. It presents information as a specifically human property, one that links the subjective and personal, and intersubjective, collective realms. It explores the nature of dialogic and monologic approaches to meaning-making, recognises the importance of context and the existence of inequalities and irregularities in information landscapes. It discusses the role played in information exchange by creations such as artifacts, organisations, and communities, and the different ways these embody dialogic and monologic forms of thinking.

Key Words:

Dialogism; monologism; intersubjectivity; context; information landscapes; artifacts; communities; cognitive authority

This book, like all academic works, adopts a particular perspective on its subject. It takes a specifically sociopolitical view of IL, being concerned with relationships and dialogues between conscious human beings who act within the world and transform the world as a result. ‘Information’ is a concept with diverse definitions (Bawden 2001;Cover and Thomas 2012) and it is possible to view information purely technically, as a mere property, transmitted via a network or system. This technical view therefore also considers information a property of biological systems, even of the universe as a whole. To study information literacy, however, it is necessary to focus on information as a human property. Information can be generated through some kind of interaction with non-human environmental elements, but most is generated through interactions with other people, within a variety of contexts. It is by contextualising, through active cognitive work at a particular place and time, that raw data becomes information and, in turn, develops into knowledge. Information, knowledge, and communication are enmeshed with one another. Thus, information is essential for learning, and the consequent transformation of the world.

Interpretations of the world are necessary in order to interact with it, and these interpretations originate with cognition. Linell (2009, 14) defines cognition as: “intelligent or non-random coping with the world (in perception, thinking, acting and preparing to act etc.)”. It involves interaction with the world, though not always with people at each and every moment. In this process, it is not information processing that is central, but meaning (Linell 2009, 221); cognition is therefore the making of meaning or sense.

Yet to consider human cognition as solely an individual, and thus essentially biological, property is a fallacy. For a start, it is difficult to deny the notion of an “extended mind” (ibid, 146–7), seeing cognition as dependent on not only the human brain but various tools, props, artifacts, texts and technologies. The enhancement of human cognition, through the ever-improving design of supplements like these, is the basic driver of information science. And, once one looks beyond the individual human brain and its biochemical operations as the sole basis of cognition, one is also forced to acknowledge that ‘mind’ (as opposed to ‘brain’) is a relational phenomenon. The human mind is a point of interaction – of dialogue – between various systems (Linell 2009, 147). In monologic views of cognition (ibid, 45): “There is no active role for recipients. They only have to understand, that is… retrieve and reconstruct the sender’s intentions.” ‘Literacy’ in this perspective can be seen as those cognitive processes, in the recipient, which ensure the message is received as the sender intended. But the dialogic view sees meaning as constructed during communication, rather than existing prior to the communication (ibid, 38). That is, messages or utterances (Linell 2009, 238–9; Bakhtin 1986; chapter 6 below) “do not ‘contain’ meaning… but they prompt people to make meaning” (Linell 2009, 224).

The dialogic view of communication therefore posits that knowledge formation is not subjective (that is, a matter of information absorption and cognition at the personal level), but intersubjective, created between people who draw on and transform informational resources from the world as they do so. Indeed, it is this ongoing use and transformation of resources in which intersubjective knowledge formation can be viewed as residing. The idea of a collective mind, or ‘noösphere’, does not have to be a mystical phenomenon (cf. Teilhard de Chardin 1959, Misztal 2003). Instead, the noösphere, though intangible, is real and continually constructed by the activities of the thinking organisms (people) and the environments that it penetrates (Samson and Pitt 1999; Whitworth 2009, 3–10). Just as the process of biological reproduction works to sustain and evolve the biosphere, so the processes of communication sustain and evolve the noösphere. As Linell (2009, 361) says:

The dialogical stance… does not posit an abstract, spiritual or Cartesian mental world; on the contrary, it insists that meanings cannot occur unless there are human beings with their bodies, brains and minds acting in the external world. This holds… to cognitive processes in thinking, imaging etc., which are distributed over brain, body and world.

Thus, the world of information is not some mystical ‘out-there’ phenomenon. It is created by us, exists within us, but is also encoded into the tangible world in bodies, acts, texts, technologies and social relations. Knowledge is intentional (Linell 2009, 241): “never disinterested; rather, it is always the product of particular groups of people who find themselves in specific circumstances in which they are engaged in definite projects.” And knowledge is “dependent on communication between individuals for its genesis, evolution and maintenance, and for its disappearance; knowledge wilts away if it is never communicatively sustained across generations” (ibid).

***

Intersubjectivity allows for the distribution of knowledge, but this distribution is not necessarily smooth. Knowledge can be “unequally accessed by different people” (Linell 2009, 82). This inequality can arise for many reasons including differences in status, literacy, familiarity with a context, and so on, and revealing the nature of such inequality is the fundamental purpose of this book, and of radical IL. However, at this stage, this ‘lumpy’ distribution can be considered in a more abstract way; as the fundamental characteristic of the noösphere, and the basis of the ideas to be explored in this section: that is, context and the information landscape.

As Calhoun (1992, 37) says, the noösphere is: “a field of discursive connections…. In nearly any imaginable case there will be clusters of relatively greater density of communication within the looser overall field…” In the most general sense possible, these clusters are the various contexts in which every one of us exists and from which we draw the resources we need in order to engage in activity and practice. Dialogism “implies a thoroughly contextual theory of sense-making” (Linell 2009, 361), and Linell (ibid, 16) draws a further distinction between realised contexts, that is, those aspects, or resources, made “communicatively relevant by participants in situ”, and contextual resources, that is, “various meaningful phenomena which are (in one sense or another) accessible and could potentially be made relevant”. Both realised contexts and contextual resources include concrete situations, observations and perceptions of these, texts, background knowledge, artifacts, and social representations all of which contain “potentialities to evoke particular types of discourses, actions, attitudes etc.” (ibid, 242).

Lloyd (2010, 2) describes information landscapes as “the communicative spaces that are created by people who co-participate in a field of practice”, and it is this metaphor which will be adopted in this book to name the various contexts within which these practices occur, whether they are located in a workplace (as Lloyd tends to use the term), in a university, school, or among friends and family. Because the noösphere and information are intangible, we are almost obliged to use metaphors to describe it: indeed, these metaphors are “really almost our basic vocabulary for talk about thinking and learning” (Wilson 1983, 3). Yet the idea of a ‘landscape’ remains a productive analogy for thinking about how to describe information in context. All tangible, geographical landscapes are comprised of the same basic elements (water, rock, life), but the number of possible combinations and forms of these elements give rise to their incredible diversity: each landscape is essentially unique. However, general forms (mountain landscapes, deserts) still exist and can be described. Landscapes are also shaped by activity at the micro-scale, iterated again and again to bring about large-scale transformations over longer periods of time. All these things are equally true of information landscapes. The landscape is also something one experiences and explores, an engagement which “allows [one]… to map the landscape, constructing an understanding of how it is shaped” (Lloyd 2010, 2). Exploring, and mapping, an information landscape “requires the act of becoming informed”; that is, to form an idea about the relevant resources within the landscape and “to understand and make judgments about these activities in the context of what is considered acceptable practice by others who share the same contextual space” (ibid). From this it can be stated that (ibid):

(T)he process of becoming information literate requires the whole person to be aware of themselves within the world… to experience information through the opportunities that are furnished by the landscape or context; to recognise these experiences as contributing to learning; and, to take into account how the context and its sanctioned practices, sayings and doings enable and constrain information use.

The information landscape does not represent the totality of human existence: we still engage with the world at an even more fundamental level of bodily need and visceral experience. But it can be argued that anything with informative potential is part of the landscape, including not just textual information but other people (and their own bodily needs and experiences) and created artifacts and tools. These two particular ideas need more exploration.

The notion of ‘community’ is important for the argument developed here, and that term is used in preference to ‘group’, which, though it refers to a collective, does not capture the idea of connections between members in the same way. A community may be defined in many ways: as people who live in a particular village, neighbourhood, city or other geographical location; as the worshippers of a particular religion; followers of a particular sports team (Whitworth 2009, 17–18); colleagues in a workplace, with shared learning needs (a community of practice (Wenger 1998)); learners on the same course; even sufferers from the same disease. The common factor is that, within communities, things are shared. People are not members of the same local community simply because they live in the same town, but because of shared perceptions, a common view of issues (Clarke 1996, p. 24):

A community is a set of shared relations understood internally more than it is a set of objective behaviours. In a significant sense it resides in the imaginations of the members of that community. In building a shared identity a community comes to have a set of shared intentions and dispositions about its past, its general account of its origins, of its place in the cosmos, of paradigmatic figures and personage...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of tables
• About the author
• Introduction
• Part 1: Deconstructing IL
• Part 2: Reconstructing IL
• Bibliography
• Index