[Sighfis-l] response to call for panels

[Charles Brownson]

The note which Shawne sent out was supposed to have this attachment but being a Word document it was scrmbld... at least my copy was. So here it is again.

I had written to Shawne:

I have an idea for a something-or-other which I doubt would meet the requirements for a "theoretical development" and it certainly is not formally conducted research, but it is nevertheless something I would like see explored. It has always seemed to me that the notion of "information community" is not well-formed. I attach an outline of some remarks or speculations. Do you know of someone else in the SIG who is interested in this with whom an alliance might be made? Submitted as such as a paper I doubt it would survive review, and would be a waste of time, but perhaps you disagree. Framework for a panel?

Here is the text:

Remarks on the concept of information community

Charles Brownson, Director of Library Services
Arizona State University East
brownson at asu.edu

10 November 2003

It seems to me that we should not take for granted the existence of information-seeking behavior, or regard it as something like a tropism. That this is something which needs to be explained is suggested by remarks such as Luciano Floridi's prefatory statement to his 1996 book on skepticism, that "human beings have very little interest in knowledge for its own sake, and hence that its growth is to be seen as the mind's inevitable reaction to a reality of which it cannot bear very much."1

Given that, the supposed existence of "information communities" also requires to be shown, and our assumptions concerning them may prove upon scrutiny to be merely facile or convenient. In an unpublished paper on reading the electronic library
http://gautier.east.asu.edu\eeco\orbit4\storytim.htm
I proposed four structuring principles which we might imagine as drivers for information-seeking behavior, and which are thus ad hoc definitions for an information community. Briefly, they are:
a) a physicist's or engineering view of an information community as a self-organizing system
b) an ecologist's view, with information as food and community composed of environments, niches, species, and so forth
c) a psychologist's community, structured by learning theories
d) an anthropological model based on cultural systems

What is it that makes a "community" in each case? What is it that causes people to clump together in that way? And what assumptions about people, knowledge, and the nature of information does each narrative imply? The question is not which model is correct but which one we might privilege, and that not only for a particular distribution of warm fuzzies but pragmatically. A narrative acceptable as a basis for policy needs to be complex enough to adapt to circumstances,  with plenty of explanatory power, and not just morally and politically acceptable.

The four examples form a self-destructive series which exposes part of the problem. One might complain that the engineering and ecology narratives are mechanistic and reductive, and the engineering story is uncomfortably essentializing as well. The psychological narrative, which might be thought to personalize the issues and so counter this objection, turns out in its emphasis on inherent personal qualities to be Nietzschean and vulnerable from another quarter. The cultural system narrative seems to escape these objections. However, cultural systems also work by sorting and exclusion. A system is warm and fuzzy only if you're inside it, and to join you need cultural capital.2 People are induced to accept this state of affairs by the attractions of the story it tells about itself, by the desire to join up. Snobs and sentimentalists, one might think, taking the engineering point of view, with insufficient attention to the value of the information (inherent value to the engineer, possibly ascribed value to the ecologist) - and so la ronde. 

Is there a structuring procedure (mode of analysis) which can accommodate this?

Notes:
1 Scepticism and the Foundation Of Epistemology (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1996) xv.
2 I have explored this question briefly elsewhere, in Charles Olson's Librarian.

 <<community.pdf>> 


Charles Brownson, Director
ASU East Library Services
brownson at asu.edu
480-727-1974 | fax 480-727-1077

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