In a review examining the intersection of philosophy with information studies, Jonathan Furner (2003) succinctly defined the latter as an interdisciplinary field which examined the “phenomena that are thought to be closely related to information and the ways in which people interact with information and with information-related phenomena” (Furner, 2003, p. 166). Information studies, as such, includes a broad category of interests, encompassing “various overlapping subfields and related professions [e.g., librarianship, social informatics, information retrieval]” (Furner, 2003, p. 166). The area of information studies undergirding the present study is what Reijo Savolainen termed everyday information practices, an outgrowth of the more established concept of information behavior, defined in a key work compiling the core information behaviour paradigms as “how people need, seek, manage, give and use information in different contexts” (Fisher, Erdelez, & McKechnie, 2005, p. xix).
According to Tom Wilson—described as “perhaps the most influential advocate of the concept” (Savolainen, 2007, p. 113)—information behaviour consisted of “the totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information seeking, and information use” (T. Wilson, 2000, p. 49).
Information was treated as something people needed, sought out, and used, with each of these three groups of activities having their own respective categories of phenomena: information needs, information seeking/searching, and information uses. The behaviours
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in question were studied according to a wider range of artifacts, such as databases, libraries, catalogs, books, newspapers, face-to-face communication, websites, search engines, and even TV advertisements. In David Ellis’s (2011) study of information behavior as an evolving discipline—the emergence of which he dates to the 1970s—he described the subfield being characterized by four main features: an epistemic orientation to the social sciences, methodological orientations to qualitative (over quantitative) research and empirical validity, and a productive orientation towards modelling behavior. Given the service-oriented nature of the wider field of information studies, Ellis noted that information behavior was originally concerned with the study of professionals (e.g., engineers and scientists) in order to provision better services and systems. Donald Case’s (2006) literature review of recent information behavior research published between 2001 and 2004 found the majority of studies remain focused on social elites, with over half of all studies exploring people in specific occupations (scholars, engineers, managers, etc.). Yet, already by this period, the scope of study had begun shifting towards looking at information behaviors outside the workplace, exploring the informational activities of subjects not defined as professionals, students, or workers, but as citizens.
According to Case (2012), citizen information behavior became a catchall phrase for non- occupation problem-solving across a range of matters such as health issues, the pursuit of hobbies, deciding who to vote for, or learning about civic opportunities. But the inherent limitations of this early formulation was highlighted in an encyclopedia article by Reijo Savolainen (2009a), who observed that citizen information behavior offered a limited scope which “primarily refers to people’s rights and obligations toward social institutions as voters or participants in activities of civil society” (Savolainen, 2009a, p. 1781). To better represent the interests of some information scholars into the “relatively stable and recurrent qualities of both work and free time activities” beyond problem-solving or decision-making scenarios, and without the normative assumptions attached to the notion of citizenship, the qualifier of “citizens” was replaced with “everyday life”. Savolainen distinguished two kinds of everyday life information: one kind intended to solve
problems (e.g., seeking a migraine remedy) and another kind consumed to help one orient oneself (e.g., watching the daily news). However, he later clarified that this distinction
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was an analytical one since a set of information activities could move between the two categories.
Another shift in research sought to redefine its subject of investigation as information practices in the place of information behaviors to represent an epistemic orientation to language and social interactions in constructing knowledge and reproducing social relations. This approach is opposed to the cognitivist/behaviorist basis of information behavior research, wherein information is approach psychologically and
individualistically “as the act that causes a change in a person’s mental state, internal ‘knowledge structure,’ or ‘image’ of the world, or as the event in which such change takes place”(Furner, 2003, p. 175). Savolainen, a central proponent of information practices, claimed that the distinction marked a shift in focus “away from the behavior, action, motives, and skills of monological [i.e., isolated] individuals” (Savolainen, 2007, p. 120). Information practices accordingly presents a more sociological (pace
psychological) approach to information’s consumption (Case, 2012; Savolainen, 1995, 2008a). Savolainen (2008a), for instance, states that:
Information practice may be understood as a set of socially and culturally established ways to identify, seek, use, and share the information available in various sources such as television, newspapers, and the internet. (pp. 2-3)
Based on exploring inter-subjective, routine, informal, and contextualized information activities, the information practices research relies largely on in-depth interviews to develop ethnographic insights. Research within information practices varies according to the populations studied (e.g., expectant mothers, prisoners, students, abused women) and the researcher’s analytical interest (e.g., authority, serendipity, class).
The significance of the difference between information practice and information behaviour was openly contested in a debate between Savolainen and Tom Wilson, with Wilson arguing that the schism was a distinction without a difference based on a “straw- man” representation of information behaviour (Savolainen & Wilson, 2009). Though the debate remains inconclusive, Savolainen admitted that the distinction mostly served as “a self-reflexive and critical attitude among researchers toward their familiar concepts in
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order to avoid being ‘trapped’ in their own discursive formation” (Savolainen, 2007, p. 127). It is with this reflexivity in mind that I undogmatically label the present study as an investigation in the category of everyday information practices, without the intention of precluding it from sphere of information behavior or entrenching this intra-disciplinary division.