If you think I have gone away I haven’t. I have been a) writing an article which took most of my writing energy; b) thinking – I cannot stress how important this is; and c) working – last semester kicked my butt. But I am back! Here is the latest:
I have emerging in my research an issue around how teen content creators experience information. This is a fascinating piece of the research and it takes me into a new area – one that challenges the definition of information, or more appropriately the connotations of information and how we talk about it. This is an old, and somewhat controversial, discussion that I am nowhere close to understanding. I haven’t even really done a literature review. I say all of this because what follows is a brainstorm and therefore open to change, and demonstrates a very surface level understanding, although it emerges directly from data.
It is inevitable with the participants that if I ask what information they needed to create content that they described textual information primarily related to skills. If I asked a different question – where did the get their ideas for example – they described different sources – overheard conversations, videos they found browsing, art that they saw, pictures in magazines, fashion on the streets, brainstorming sessions with friends, critiques from other content creators, conversations, school assignments, in short the world around them provided a variety of sources of information that was used for inspiration. If I asked how they learned something they described how to videos, images, using instructions from other people, pushing buttons, help from people virtually and in real life, and from mentors and respected artists work – including professionals. If I asked what they did when they needed to know something, they described process that included asking for help from local peers and mentors, asking for help on forums, using search engines, and reading books. In this way they encountered information orally, through text, in both a communal way and in an individualistic manner.
From this it seems that they experience information in four ways (probably more, but this is where I am at.) The four ways of experiencing information seem to be information as community, information as inspiration, information as skills, and information as content.
Information as community involves collaborative and interactive experiences – commenting on art; asking for help; competing to build code; receiving and giving critique, brainstorming, talking. The use of the information is different. In some cases it helps them make authority judgments, others it helps learn the social mores and structure of a community, in some cases it builds personal knowledge (how to do something – information as skills); in other cases it builds community knowledge and adds to the community conversation.
Information as inspiration involves the sources of information that lead to the idea for content. While sometimes this is perfectly clear and participants know exactly where their ideas came from, other times it is much more vague. What is significant is that the information comes in a wide variety of formats – both the concrete and visible, and the less concrete and invisible – for instance an emotional reaction to an experience or content. Information as inspiration is mused, pondered, tossed around in a wide variety of ways until content emerges from it.
Information as skills seems in some ways to be the most concrete –it is the simple “how to” do something; the skills need to edit the video, or write the blog, or upload art. But it is more than that because it also involves the physical act of doing – the muscle memory of drawing a line, holding a camera steady. It tends to be the default when asked what information is needed – teens outline the skills – how to use a particular piece of software or how to write a particular piece of html. They describe gathering information needed for skills from how to videos, how to books, and teachers. But the process of implementing the instruction, the doing produces the information as skills.
And finally there is information as content. I am struggling with articulating this because in some ways it seems to be knowledge. The bringing together of the skills and the inspiration to create something new, to recognize how and where it may fit within a community. The problem with information as content description is content is so concrete and what I mean is information as their content. Maybe it is information as product. Again product is a concrete noun but it does maybe represent the personal presentation of content. What is interesting about this is that while it brings together previous information to create – it also provides information through evaluation and reflection. I liked this element so I will do this next time, this didn’t work, I need to adjust that, etc.
I have for over a year now been circling around the connotations of information, my problems with how it is constructed and privileged and this seems to be the beginning of articulating why it has been such a problem in both collecting and analyzing data in regards to using information. It isn’t using, it is experiencing.
