Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies
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Anonymity Versus Privacy in a Control Society
Get PDFSociety is becoming increasingly more securitized with surveillance technologies having entered a phase of ubiquity, with their components built into many of our daily digital devices. The default state of tracking, monitoring, and recording has fundamentally changed our social and communicative environments. Through the lens of surveillance, everything we do and say can be potentially categorized as a “threat.” Our technological devices become the means by which social control becomes informationalized. A common tool of resistance against these pervasive surveillance practices takes the form of arguing for greater privacy protections to be implemented through information privacy and data protection laws. However, beyond the complexity of the privacy discourse itself, there are diverse information environments not easily parsed by law where the tension between transparency and secrecy complicates privacy practices.
The main purpose of this article is conceptual. I consider what the practice of anonymity can offer that privacy does not. From a legal perspective, highlighting the nuances between privacy and anonymity helps us to understand the extent to which our speech and behaviors are becoming increasingly more constrained in the digital environment. In cultural and social contexts, privacy and anonymity often connote differing values; privacy is commonly considered a moral virtue, while anonymity is often maligned and associated with criminal or deviant behavior. In contrast to this understanding, I argue that anonymity should be reconsidered in light of the deterioration of privacy considerations as privacy practices are reframed as contractual resources that are co-opted by both the market and the state. Anonymity, more broadly construed as a mode of resistance to surveillance practices, allows for a more flexible, consistent, and collective means of ensuring civil liberties remain intact
Wages for Intern Work: Denormalizing Unpaid Positions in Archives and Libraries
Get PDFWhile no comprehensive studies have yet been published quantifying the extent of unpaid internships within archives and libraries, their prevalence is easily recognized as widespread. Unpaid internships are offered and facilitated based on the implication that they correlate positively to future job prospects, although recent studies point to evidence that complicates this idea. Instead, the prevalence of unpaid internships may negatively impact efforts for diversity and inclusion among information workers while contributing to greater precarity of labor throughout the workforce. Meanwhile, professional organizations and academic programs often do not discuss the realities of unpaid internships, and some MLIS programs require or encourage students to work without remuneration for course credit at their own expense. Situating unpaid internships within larger questions of economic access, labor laws, indebtedness, and neoliberalization, this paper advocates for the denormalization of unpaid internships within archives and libraries, especially for those institutions that articulate social justice as part of their institutional values. Although rendering these positions obsolete is likely beyond the power of any one entity, this paper identify strategies that can be taken at the individual- and institutional-level to advance economic justice and the dignity of all work that occurs in our respective fields.
Pre-print first published online11/25/201
On the Space/Time of Information Literacy, Higher Education, and the Global Knowledge Economy
Get PDFLocal sites and practices of information work become embroiled in the larger imperatives and logics of the global knowledge economy through social, technological, and spatial networks. Drawing on human geography’s central claim that space and time are dialectically produced through social practices, in this essay I use human/critical geography as a framework to situate the processes and practices—the space and time—of information literacy within the broader social, political, and economic environments of the global knowledge economy.
As skills training for the knowledge economy, information literacy lies at the intersection of the spatial and temporal spheres of higher education as the locus of human capital production. Information literacy emerges as a priority for academic librarians in the 1980s in the context of neoliberal reforms to higher education: a necessary skill in the burgeoning “information economy,” it legitimates the role of librarians as teachers. As a strategic priority, information literacy serves to demonstrate the library’s value within the university’s globalizing agenda.
While there has been a renewed interest in space/time within the humanities and social sciences since the 1980s, LIS has not taken up this “spatial turn” with the same enthusiasm—or the same degree of criticality—as other social science disciplines. This article attempts to address that gap and offers new insights into the ways that the spatial and temporal registers of the global knowledge economy and the neoliberal university produce and regulate the practice of information literacy in the academic library.
Pre-print first published online 12/09/201
Surveillance to Art: “Flipping Around the Paranoia”
Get PDFThis photo essay explores a particular (but not uncommon) historical nexus and regime of information and control—the operations and recorded remains of a police surveillance program—and the ways in which today two artists, through politico-aesthetic practices, re-vision and make public, alter and share knowledge about past invasive acts on individual privacy and previously covert documents.
Pre-print first published online 11/25/201
A Death in the Timeline: Memory and Metadata in Social Platforms
Get PDFThis paper explores a Life Event post from Facebook as a point of departure for critical data studies to understand how social media metadata shapes digital cultural memory and the disciplining of data subjects. I discuss some possible interventions that can contribute to our understanding of metadata’s role in the critical study of data, and in particular, how user generated metadata created in social platforms authored by state actors features in to new forms of information control, civic engagement, and networked information technologies. This discussion includes traditional concepts of concern and analysis for information and archival scholars, including creating data as a new form of belonging in society, collection tools and access policies, and the representation of events with metadata, such as death or state-sanctioned violence. In developing these concepts through a reading of a Life event that announces death and state power over life as it is represented in a social platform, I seek to expand the modes that information scholars use to address issues of time, context, and memory in digital archives and metadata emerging from social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Pre-print first published online 12/20/201
Contextualizing Information Behavior: A Methodological Approach
Get PDFBuilding on recent developments in information behavior theory & research, this paper explores the role of context in methodological approaches to the investigation of everyday information behavior. In particular, the author examines the implicit role of Western constructs in existing models and theories of information behavior, and illustrates how a more contextually responsive method for investigating information behavior may provide more robust and accurate indices of how individuals interact with information in their everyday lives in diverse contexts. The value of a contextualized understanding of information behavior is demonstrated by drawing on two studies examining the role of contextual factors in everyday information behavior in non-Western societies. In doing so the author identifies several factors with considerable contextual variation that play a strong role in how individuals need, seek and use information in their daily lives, particularly social and cultural values. The author also demonstrates the value in further exploring this contextual variation in information behavior research, supported by relevant theoretical and philosophical considerations. The resulting information behavior research methodology is aimed at identifying the contextual factors present in everyday information behavior, which may enable information scientists to better understand variation in information behavior and develop more robust tools for investigating information behavior in diverse communities. I conclude by suggesting that the implementation of this method may also lead to better understanding of the relationship between information practices and well-being, as well as having implications for international development and cross-cultural collaboration
Becoming-Infrastructure: Datafication, Deactivation and the Social Credit System
Get PDFHow might critical library and information studies analyze the intersection of information infrastructure and class structure? The emergence of big data through "datafication" rests on the historical process of information and communication technology (ICT) production and distribution. This paper explores the concept of datafication as an integrated component of information infrastructures unfolding within the class structures of capitalism. A critical realist perspective on relational sociology is offered to illustrate how heterogenous data sources are combined and configured to activate materials and bodies into new internal economic class relations of control. My analysis of datafication therefore moves beyond isolated conceptions of "information" and toward the capacity of distributed data sources to extend and deepen class structures. Two recent large scale cases of datafication are analyzed to highlight its causal powers within class structured society. The first case is drawn from a New York Times article concerning the subprime automobile loan market in the United States. The article details the installation of surveillance technologies into the vehicles of people segmented by low credit scores as a condition of exchange for subprime loans. As a result of this exchange, surveillance technologies capture borrower's driving behaviors and locations in real-time data flows. These data flows are analyzed according to interest bearing payment regimes, rendering both vehicle and borrower as manageable assets while conferring onto lenders the power of remote automobile deactivation. This suggests datafication of driving behaviour produces new implications for class conditions when such data are integrated with the structures of the subprime market. The second case detailed in several news articles examines the plan for a large scale top-down cybernetic behavioural programming initiative by the Chinese government termed the "social credit system," built from digital traces of multiple economic and non-economic social behaviours of its citizens. While aspects of this system are currently voluntary, they are expected to become mandatory within five years. Ubiquitous surveillance of digital activity never before combined into a predictive and prescriptive score may be considered a nation-wide disciplinary subsumption of social activity under novel valuation algorithms, integrating previously unwatched or irrelevant external activities into new internal relations determinative of class structured possibilities. The plan for a social credit system appears driven toward developing a seamlessly interconnected national behavioural identity for every Chinese citizen, which may produce structural implications for pre-existing class conditions. I suggest these cases are examples of the need for library and information studies to engage critically with the emerging causal powers of information infrastructures theorized here as deepening capitalism's control of class structures
Critical Archiving and Recordkeeping Research and Practice in the Continuum
No full textRecords Continuum research is increasingly engaging with critical and participatory archiving and recordkeeping approaches to research and practice, "questioning the social constructs, values and power differentials embedded in current frameworks, processes, systems and technologies, exploring archival and recordkeeping agency, autonomy and activism, and moving beyond insight and critique with the aim of bringing about transformative outcomes."[1] In this paper, we explore the characteristics of these approaches with reference to an illustrative case, and the Records Continuum, theory, models and constructs which complement, frame and support critical archiving and recordkeeping theorizing and practice.[1] Sue McKemmish, "Recordkeeping in the Continuum: An Australian Tradition.†In Research in the Archival Multiverse edited by Anne Gilliland, Sue McKemmish and Andrew Lau. Melbourne: Monash Publishing, 2016
A Case for Critical Data Studies in Library and Information Studies
Get PDFThe proliferation, ubiquity, and growth of data, big data, and digital infrastructure raise a number of questions for library and information studies (LIS) practitioners, researchers, and educators. While some uncritically accept and embrace the idea that big data will fundamentally alter every sector of society including economics, politics, health care, and knowledge production, others are more critical of the data turn. Data can be contradictory in that it can be used for surveillance, impinge on privacy, be used for secondary purposes (often without consent), and can be totalizing in that we continually create data exhaust, it can be hacked, searched, aggregated, and preserved for years. Conversely, data can be used for the public good, to promote progressive social change, and to empower people. The overarching argument presented in this paper is that critical library and information studies must include critical data studies. To develop this argument, this paper explores the ontological nature of data and their contradictory implications and effects in terms of broader society, the academy, and in LIS research, education, and practice. Next, the philosophical foundations and the work being done in the budding area of critical data studies are presented (most notably work by Rob Kitchin). Finally, the intersections between critical data studies and LIS are discussed in terms of research methodologies, philosophical underpinnings, and application of critical social theory, values, and ethics using Dalton and Thatcher's seven data criticisms
Questioning the Past and Possible Futures: Digital Historiography and Critical Librarianship
Get PDFHistorical digitization projects are transformative endeavours that attempt to negotiate and navigate a past's relationship to the present and the future. This article considers librarians' roles within the context of critical librarianship and digital historiography and argues for a more robust role for librarians within these transformative endeavours. Within the literature on digital humanities, there are recurrent assumptions that librarians' roles in digitization projects ought to be those of collectors, cataloguers, preservers, metadata creators, web designers, or programmers while the intellectual or theoretical "heavy lifting" falls to disciplinary partners like historians or literary scholars. In this article, we argue that librarians' digital historical work also needs to engage with "core historical questions" and with the act of asking critical questions about the larger cultural, social, and political issues inherent in digitization work