Cross-Cultural Blog

In short, information connoisseurs are people who have great access to information, in their relative social and cultural contexts. As shown in the diagram above, they are well poised on one side of the line of information asymmetry, as opposed to those suffering from a poverty of information on the other extreme side of the line of information asymmetry.

From my trips to the Green and Jackson Business libraries, I have discovered numerous excellent books. One of them is The Social Life of Information, by Brown and Duguid. Beneath its innocent-looking plain blue cover, I discovered a wonderful treasure trove of information over its dog-eared pages. Brown and Duguid assert that many of us now "exult in the simple volume of information that technology now makes available", constantly cheering "the disaggregation of knowledge into data", overemphasizing the actual value of words such as "quadrillion", "terabyte" and "megaflop". Essentially, Brown and Duguid frown upon the treatment of information as merely information -- they attempt to persuade the reader that information also has a social life. They claim that:

...some of the people driving us all hard into the future on the back of new technologies appear to assume that if we all focus hard enough on information, then we will get where we want to go most directly. This central focus inevitably pushes aside all the fuzzy stuff that lies around the edges – context, background, history, common knowledge, social resources. But this stuff around the edges is not as irrelevant as it may seem. It provides valuable balance and perspective. It holds alternatives, offers breadth of vision, and indicates choices.

Extending from this notion of the social life of information, I postulate that in the provision of information to rural areas (e.g. in Africa) to alleviate poverty, it is not actually the information itself that is useful, but rather the social context which surrounds the information. It is the social infrastructure that supports the provision of information that is useful, that drives any possible economic growth, that carries with it the surprising potential to drive Africa and other rural regions out of their poverty. In other words, information in all its abstractness and complexity, ceases to be a meaningful entity in isolation from its social fringe.

-- update below --

I'd like to say thank you to both Bec and Steph from the University of Sydney for commenting on my entry. Steph, I completely agree with you that when I devised my research project (and wrote this blog entry), I was also inevitably seeing things from an information connoisseur's perspective. Indeed, those who may have less access to traditional (or perhaps 'conventional' would be a better word) forms of information may have access to other types of information. At this point in time I feel compelled to highlight that my mention of Africa as a rural area was rather generalized -- there are many other places in the world which are similarly rural and underdeveloped (I hesitate to label them as 'undeveloped').

In any case, even those perceived by information connoisseurs as having the condition of 'information poverty' may not actually be suffering from information poverty; notably, each such group and individual would almost certainly have better access to localized information -- information which may ultimately prove to be much more critical and essential as compared to 'general information' (i.e. whatever that can be found on the internet).

In this aspect, this 'information asymmetry' which we speak about may not actually be a one-sided asymmetry: there may be no clear dichotomy between those with more information and those with less information. This asymmetry may instead be more accurately perceived and understood as a kind of uneven multidimensional "information map", in which different people and different groups of people have different levels of information. Speaking in cultural terms, borrowing the words of Adams and Smith in Electronic Tribes (an illuminating collection of articles on digital culture), information distribution both globally and locally may be better represented as heterarchies (webs and networks) instead of hierarchies (strict vertical subsets).

Adams and Smith further comment that:

"Tribe members are empowered within the tribe, through collective responses and through projecting identities into the tribal network. Tribalism may reduce hierarchy and inequality. Tribes have fluid boundaries externally [...] Tribes are not amenable to centralized control and persuasion. Tribes may not have historical reality beyond being a conceptual and political artifact of [...]"

If we can view this "information domain" using the lens of culture, we may also be able to further extend the notion of culture and subculture to it as well. I shall certainly consider this possibility. In addition, I shall definitely continue my project with the understanding that even those who are, in the Western sense, considered 'stricken' with information poverty may have localized (and other forms of) information which may be useful to them. A related question is whether this information may also be able to propel them into societal 'well-being' (again, a very Western understanding of wealth, power and a 'high' standard of living). I may explore this tangent if I find it central to my primary research questions!