Information

Micky Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367897765
• eBook ISBN: 9781000407938
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a comprehensive, easy-to-understand introductory guide to information, offering students the critical tools they need to shift their positioning from consumers and users to creators and critics.

Searching, accessing, and using information are central to most daily lives. Yet, many users are not able to define what information is, identify who controls information, and create information to achieve a common good. In this book, Micky Lee teaches readers to critically interrogate key issues such as the categorization of information and knowledge throughout history, what digital divides are, why information is gender and race biased, how governments and corporations control citizens and consumers, as well as how we can resist unbalanced power relations. Readers will not only be able to relate these issues to "old" technologies, such as writing and printing, but will also be able to examine futurist technologies through the lenses of these enduring issues.

A thoughtful and comprehensive overview, this is an ideal book for students and scholars of media studies, information and society, and communication and technology.

1
INTRODUCTION

WHAT DO WE DO WITH INFORMATION?

INTRODUCTION

We search for, use, and create an abundant amount of diverse information every day. Our interactions with information shape who we are, our relationships with each other, and the society in which we live. Since information plays such a prominent role in our lives, we need to examine what it is, what we do with it, and what it does to us. To unpack these big questions, we will use a daily life example to show why they matter.

Let us sit in a subway train and observe what commuters do with information. Even within a short subway ride, we interact with an abundant amount of information. Some read a physical book, others surf the web on their smartphones, yet others get a head start with work on the laptop. Some stare at the ads inside the subway, others may simply observe their fellow commuters. The commuters are so engrossed in the information of their choice that they rarely pay attention to the conductor’s announcements and almost never engage fellow commuters in conversations. Out of the commuters’ earshot, information exchanges take place to ensure a smooth subway ride: train conductors communicating with each other and computer-automated traffic signals instructing the drivers to go or stop. In addition, there is some information that the commuters already know by heart, such as the subway map and train frequency.

The information with which we interact is as diverse as it is abundant: some is analogue (such as words on a page), some digital (such as words on a webpage) (Floridi, 2010); some is constantly updated (such as stock prices), others not (such as subway map); some is initiated by the users (such as surfing the web), some initiated by technologies (such as traffic signals).

Despite our constant interactions with information, we rarely stop and think too much about information until the systems break down. For example, during a power outage, we cannot access the Internet at home so we resort to analogue information, such as books and board games. In another example, after the two bombs exploded in Boston Marathon in 2013, there was such a frenzy of online communication that it was impossible for onlookers to call their loved ones or check the Internet for news.

When information systems work again, most may feel a sense of relief, but may also lament how much we depend on online information. Many feel burdened by information overload and seek to manage their interactions with information. Ironically, some solutions are phone apps that promise to select and organize information better! In addition, we worry that the amount of screen time will make us lose human connections with others, so we use apps to count screen time and to remind us to go offline. If information does bring convenience to modern lives but also creates problems, then we need to dream up a better way to interact with information so that it enriches our lives without controlling them.

To dream of a better way to interact with information, we need to question who made the decisions about information, how and why they did it. We need to understand how these decisions made our interactions with information appear to be natural and inevitable. More importantly, we need to understand who decides the way that we interact with information and why they have the power to do so. These are big questions and we will return to the commuter example again.

Subway trains run on a time schedule. Passengers know that scheduled trains are necessary for us to plan our commutes to work. However, we need to ask what kind of society would need a train schedule and how the train schedule constitutes this kind of society. The train schedule is a recent invention in human history—humans had coped for centuries even without any fixed schedule. However, the train schedule became necessary when the train became a major method of transportation. To avoid train collisions, companies had to plan. The implications of time schedules, however, are broader. For one thing, they rely on standardized time, which in turn validates why schedules are necessary (Preda, 2009). If time had not been standardized, then trains would have still collided with each other even if they run on schedule. Standardized time means time is no longer fluid and subjective, locals would rely less on the sundial but more on the church clock that is set to standardized time. When time became something objective, it could then be counted, estimated, and rationalized (Grossberg, 1996). Therefore, we could count the hours left at work, we could estimate how much time it takes to commute, and we could decide whether some tasks are worth the time. While these all sound natural and inevitable, who benefits when time is made objective?

Standardized time and more precise time-keeping devices are imperative to industrialization (O’Carroll, 2008; Winchester, 2018). In pre-industrial time, humans worked on farms on a more fluid schedule. While farmers had to observe the hours of the day and the seasons of the year for their farming activities, they did not have to count the hours that they work. However, when they moved to cities and worked in factories, counting work hours became imperative because their wages were calculated based on the duration of time for which they worked. Accounting for time benefits factory owners more than workers because they could calculate more accurately how many labor hours to buy. In contrast, workers could not stop working even if they produced more than enough. Nowadays, few in developed economies may work in factories, but many have dead-end jobs that pay an hourly wage with few benefits and little prospects. Similar to factory workers, workers in these dead-end jobs are expected to arrive at the workplace on time and not leave early. To these workers, trains that run on time are extremely important because constant lateness could make them lose their jobs. Is there another way to see information so that how much one makes is not calculated based on time?

If we are going to imagine a society in which we interact with information differently, we ought to design another system that ensures work is meaningful. For example, a lot of childcare workers are paid by the hour, but what parents seek is not the time that they are on the job, but the care that they provide. If this is the case, their wage should be determined by the positive social value that they create, not merely the time that they spend on the job. In other words, what matters to parents is the quality of social goods provided by the childcare workers, not just the number of hours that they work.

To imagine a better society would require us to assume a different position to interact with information. We cannot approach information from those of end users and consumers, instead we need to see ourselves as information critics and activists. Moving from a passive to an active position would help us understand how power relates to information by asking who can decide for whom how to interact with information. In addition, as critics and activists, we ask why: Why is power structured in such a way that some can make the decision while most of us cannot? If we are able to assume an active position from where we ask who, how, and why, we will find out why our interactions with information appear to be natural even though it is not. In the following, I argue that a critical perspective will aid us in this transformative process.

A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE TO INFORMATION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT DOES

In order to explain why information is centralized yet taken for granted in our daily lives, we will use a critical perspective to examine information in this book. This perspective highlights the underlying political, economic, cultural, and social contexts under which information is produced, distributed, and consumed. Production refers to the process of creating information; distribution refers to the dissemination of information from the producers to the consumers; consumption refers to the final stage when users interact with the information for different purposes.

A critical perspective argues that information is not external to politics, economy, culture, and society. Information does not precede any society, it is not a “thing” that exists before humans organize themselves politically, economically, and culturally. In fact, humans need information to form political communities, conduct economic exchanges, and create cultural goods. Therefore, we argue that information constitutes society. How and what information is produced, distributed, and consumed forms specific kinds of society. In some societies, only a small number of people can produce and distribute information, these societies are usually called closed societies. In other societies, many people can produce and distribute information, they are called free and open societies. While an open society is seen to be better than a closed one because it allows for a freer exchange of information, we must reject the view that an information-rich society is naturally better than an information-poor one. What it means is that a society with many information producers is not naturally more advanced, progressive and democratic than one with few producers. The quantity of information produced and exchanged should not determine how good or bad a society is because we also have to question what kinds of information are out there.

Information is not politically, economically, and culturally neutral (Segev, 2010). What it means is that someone somewhere at some points decide what kinds of information to produce, how to circulate it, and who will consume it. These decisions are always motivated by political, economic, or cultural reasons. Advertisers, marketers, celebrities, journalists, politicians are social actors who are able to sway public opinion, but most of us—through daily activities such as posting on social media, chatting with friends—can also influence the opinions of a few people. We may ask our friends to change their consumption habits or persuade them to take political action.

Another reason to explain why information is not neutral is because information is always embedded in technologies through which it is produced, distributed, and consumed. Information can not exist on its own without technologies. Some technologies are low-tech (such as paper and pen), others high-tech (such as an algorithm that processes a large quantity of information). The technologies that enable the production, distribution, and consumption of information also gives meanings to information. For example, some high-end boutiques ask sale associates to hand-write thank-you notes for customers. The use of paper and pen is supposed to show customers that the sale associates genuinely care about them as people. As a result, we are likely to remember a hand-written thank-you note than an email. Because the meanings of information are embedded in technologies, information does not have a universal and monolithic characteristic, the technologies that produce it always constitute how it is understood and used in specific contexts (Babe, 1995).

A Boston Example

To illustrate how information constitutes society and why information is not neutral, let us consider what information may mean to a Boston resident who lived 200 years ago. If we compare lives then and now without using a critical perspective, some may simply conclude that lives then were worse because there was not much information. If we use a critical perspective, then we will need to understand how information constituted a society two centuries ago.

A Bostonian who lived in 1820 had little information to seek and process, and the variety of information was limited as well. Some might have got news and gossips from family members and acquaintances, others might have relied on publications to learn about the outside world. Some contemporary Bostonians may envy this kind of life because the earlier residents probably did not suffer from information overload and constant digital interruptions. They may also envy the earlier residents for their more meaningful and long-lasting personal relationships because they sought information from one another.

However, when we consider who were more likely to produce, circulate, and consume information, we will notice that only certain people were allowed to do so. Those who could do so probably already had some power in society because of their professions or wealth. The limited information sources was a problem because it was difficult to verify how accurate information was. This meant that the information source was of great importance: if the source was deemed credible, then the information would be deemed accurate. In turn, credibility of the information source would have been seen as identical as social power. Therefore, educated male elites who had more social power would have been seen as the only legitimate information sources in Boston. Women, servants, former slaves, and uneducated populations were excluded from information production because they were not believed to be credible sources.

The question then is: How does an unbalanced access to information production constitute unbalanced power relations in society? How are both kinds of power imbalance mutually reinforced so that they were maintained? Two centuries ago, education was reserved for a small number of people; there was no formal education institutions for women, non-whites, and immigrants. As a result, these populations were not considered to be literate enough to run the government or to conduct businesses. When these populations were banned from participating in public life, they were deemed to have little need for information for they were not in charge of decision-making. The exclusion from education, public life participation, and decision-making all reinforced a belief that certain populations were intellectually inferior; this belief in turn became an explanation why they did not need information access or formal education. The false belief of intellectual inferiority justified why inequalities between gender, race, and class needed to maintain; such inequalities both manifest and explain an unequal access to information.

Even though most Bostonians of today would not agree that certain populations are naturally more intellectually inferior and they may not approve blatant inequalities, we have to be cautious to claim that information access is now equal because of more egalitarian social relations. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates why information access is still unequal because of unequal social relations. The pandemic has disproportionately affected immigrants and communities of color. At the earliest stage, most of the public information was disseminated in English (Gamboa, 2020) even though Spanish-speaking communities were hit harder by the virus. The abrupt closing of schools also left low-income children—many of them living in immigrant households or communities of color...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: What Do We Do with Information?
• 2 Defining
• 3 Searching
• 4 Accessing
• 5 Using
• 6 Creating
• 7 Conclusion: Can We Do More with Information?
• Index