Re-visiting our Concept of Users

I welcome the opportunity to revisit the topic of my 2009 article, analysing the assumptions that underpin prevailing approaches to the concept of ‘information user’ in contemporary information research and professional practice, as I feel this is a topic which will always be relevant to information researcher and professionals. The aim of my original article was to challenge some prevailing ideas and assumptions associated with the user-centred paradigm (Dervin & Nilan, 1986) by drawing on emerging social constructivist perspectives on the relationship between people and information. I feel that the seven years since then have made the question of how we understand this fundamental question even more important.

One of the most important things we can learn from these social constructivist approaches is that, as information professionals and researchers, our view of the world, our ways of making sense of our professional and research practices and of the clients we interact with are always the products of social construction, influenced by theories and approaches prevalent in our professional, academic and cultural environment. As a consequence, information researchers and professionals will always need to revisit these approaches, and question their appropriateness in a changing environment. Our thinking, as information professionals and researchers, and in society as a whole, has inevitably moved on in the seven years since my original article came out, so this provides an opportunity to briefly discuss a few recent developments.

Information practices

Whilst much research in the field continues to adopt the ‘user-centred’ approaches analysed in my original article, it is also clear that the alternative information practices discourse described by Savolainen (2007) and advocated in my original article has continued to grow and develop in the seven years since my original article. The information practices approach recognises that earlier ‘user-centred’ approaches, in narrowly focusing on the active searching of individual information users, provides us with only a very limited view of the complex relationship people have with information. We are none of us isolated ‘information processing devices’ (Belkin, 1990) and our every encounter with information is inextricably linked to our broader social context: our interests and expertise; our professional, educational and social experience, standards and accepted practices; how what we are doing now is related to what we have done before and will do in the future.

Information practices researchers seek to address this by developing more holistic approaches to understanding our relationship with information. An Australian researcher, Annemarie Lloyd, one of the earliest adopters of a practiced-based approach to information research, has provided us with a succinct definition of information practices:

An array of information-related activities and skills, constituted, justified and organised through the arrangements of a social site, and mediated socially and materially with the aim of producing shared understanding and mutual agreement about ways of knowing and recognising how performance is enacted, enabled and constrained in collective situated action. (Lloyd, 2011)

The last few years have also seen the emergence of a new generation of researchers, many of them Australian (e.g. Colwell, 2015; Heizmann, 2012; Irvine-Smith, 2016), drawing on a range of different theoretical and methodological approaches, including critical discourse analysis and practice theory, to develop studies examining information practices in a variety of professional and institutional contexts.

Following on from the studies described in the original article, my own research has continued to explore the role of information in people’s working lives, including workplaces previously neglected by information researchers. My main research project in recent years has been a study of the information practices of archaeologists in the field (Olsson, 2016). This study both builds on and extends the studies described in my original article. It has involved ethnographic fieldwork (Geertz, 1977), as well as interviewing in order to build a richer picture of participants’ everyday information practices. The conceptual framework of my work has also evolved, incorporated practice theoretical approaches (Gherardi, 1999, 2000; Nicolini, 2013) as well as Dervin’s Sense-Making (Dervin, 2003) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010), as in my previous studies.

As in my previous studies, the findings showed that participants’ sense-making included many embodied and affective practices. It has once again demonstrated that people’s relationship with information is far richer than our literature tends to acknowledge. The study I am currently piloting will extend my research into a leisure context by studying the information practices of enthusiast car restorers.

My ongoing research has convinced me even more than at the time of my writing the original article that a narrow focus on information needs and active information seeking does both our profession and the clients we work with a deep disservice. As information researchers and professionals we need to recognise how our interactions with those we work with and research are but one part of the richer picture of their lives: their interests, their passions, their expertise and their social context. Information literacy education, for example, has been rightly seen as an important contribution that information professionals can make to the communities and organisations they work with. I would argue that this can be made more valuable still, the more we focus on preparing people for the information cultures and practices they will encounter everyday rather than focusing narrowly on completing discrete tasks.

Virtual communities – a new techno-centrism?

The rise, indeed ubiquity, of social media over the last decade has clearly had an influence on the thinking of both information researchers and professionals. The social nature of so many online information practices has led to more of us questioning the utility of the narrow focus on individual information seeking that was characteristic of many of the theoretical frameworks described in my 2009 article.

The growing body of research into ‘online information behaviour’ does however raise the question of whether we are in danger of reifying a new kind of techno-centrism. Research which studies online practices in isolation, which situates them in a separate world of ‘virtual communities’ (Rheingold, 1994), risk divorcing them from their roots in the everyday lives of flesh and blood people. Fortunately, studies such as Godbold’s (2013) of online renal discussion groups and Walker’s (2010) of city-specific discussion forums build a convincing case that ‘… a rigid distinction between online and offline makes little theoretical sense … [and therefore] a methodological line between online and offline only reifies such a dualism’ (Walker, 2010, p. 25).

If we recognise that online practices are integrated into, not separated from, our lives, then the approach advocated by Bakardjieva seems the wisest course:

… as we move into the future, research on most areas of social life will be internet-related research. Thus online and offline data will routinely be collected and used for what they are – complementary records of events unfolding within the same social world and not as specimens from two different planets. (Bakardjieva, 2009, p. 114)

Conclusions

Information researchers still have some way to go before they can claim their research comes close to representing ‘the totality of human behaviour in relation to sources and channels of information’ (Wilson, 2000, p. 50). It is unlikely that this is a goal that can ever be satisfactorily achieved, although it is important that all information researchers continue to strive to build our understanding. In the rapidly changing information landscape of the twenty-first century, it is just as important that information professionals question their own assumptions, using a broad range of conceptual tools to inform their practice. I hope that my article and this brief reflection may provide some signposts on the journey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Michael R. Olsson is a senior lecturer in Information and Knowledge Management at the University of Technology Sydney. He is an active researcher in the field of information behaviour/information practices research, with a particular interest in information/knowledge sharing in academic, professional and artistic communities. Combining Dervin’s Sense-Making with discourse analysis, his research focuses on the social construction of information & knowledge, the inter-relationship of meaning and authority (Knowledge/Power), and affective and embodied sense-making. His work has appeared in leading international research journals and conferences across a range of disciplines, including Information Studies, Communication and Knowledge Management.