The problem of information naïveté

Abstract

With the rapidly changing Web-enabled world, the already existing dichotomy between knowing of and knowing about, or information naïveté, widens daily. This article explores the ethical dilemmas that can result from the lack of information literacy. The article also discusses conditions and consequences of information naïveté, media bias, possessive memory, and limited contexts and abilities. To help avoid information failure, the author recommends producers, contributors, disseminators, and aggregators of information be less information naïve.

To know of and to know about are not quite the same in English, and it is in the difference between those two situations of knowing that the problem of information naïveté is situated. Information naïveté, as posited here, is the belief held by an individual or a group that information designed, created, obtained, or stored is comprehensive and where this belief is without a grounding or understanding of the situation of that information within its own contexts. This space between knowing of and knowing about is not intended to address epistemological issues regarding the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing but rather to consider a problem that might be a transitory and perhaps necessary part of the current information environment. Information naïveté includes both the hubris of incompetence and the misplaced pride of the inexperienced. It appears to be fed by the same media conditions that foster manufactured consent (Herman & Chomsky, 1988) and by the global nature of information transactions (Crowley & Ginsberg, 2003). It seems to be enabled by a crowd of ideas competing for attention on the world stage and the careless misinforming or willful disinforming that accompanies the many voices on this crowded stage.

Everyone believes that he or she is competent at finding information, and this article does not address information retrieval or information-seeking behaviors as such but rather considers the conditions and consequences of ethical issues that arise from a naïve assurance in one's own prowess, whether personal or organizational.

An Ethical Dilemma

In examining the ethical dilemmas relative to information naïveté, let us consider information naïveté as a condition that may be no more than process involved in producing an artifact. It may even serve a useful purpose for the individual who is information naïve by keeping feelings of being overwhelmed at bay and for the organization that produces information-naïve products as well. Nevertheless, as an existent condition, the dilemmas that arise from information naïveté seem to be situated in the realm of applied ethics. The core issue is about real and potential consequences when users rely on or take action based on messages dispensed by the information naïve. The dilemma then is how information creators, aggregators, and disseminators should act, given an understanding that information naïveté may shape what appears to be credible information either by intent, by incompetence, or by circumstance.

The problem then may be considered as one of applied ethics. Applied ethics are values that are enacted (i.e., values that are translated into actions or behaviors): “The only thing that is ever judged to be ethical or unethical is an action. The driving force in ethics is to do the right thing all the time and not to do the same thing all the time” (Rogerson, 1995, p. 14). The need for guidelines or principles that help us to do the right thing arises when the law is silent. In effect, ethics and laws do not exist in parallel universes but rather in a common one; however, they do not take up the same exact space. While many laws seem to be attempts to codify ethics or morals, laws do not address all situations and dilemmas. Richard Severson (1997) elegantly described information ethics as “a guide for our morality when we face complicated situations that eclipse the level of our prior moral experience” (p. 8). He also specified four principles, or guidelines, of information ethics: (a) respect for intellectual property, (b) respect for privacy, (c) fair representation, and (d) nonmaleficence. His principle of fair representation “refers primarily to the manner in which vendors make their products and services known to clients” (p. 79). Information naïveté is a problem of fair representation that is not only confined to vendors of information but also to those who create the information or information products that are being sold.

Conditions and Consequences of Information Naïveté

At first glance, information naïveté appears to be nothing more than ignorance or carelessness in the handling of “second hand knowledge” (Wilson, 1983); perhaps solved or mitigated with an improvement in information literacy. Even those who are scrupulous also may be information naïve. For example, the condition may be fed by the multitude of voices that vie for our attention. In her plea for interdisciplinarity, Dervin (2003) reminded us that

In our insular communities it is easy to move happily along missing the growing and generalized state of disarray in our work. It is also easier when brushing the edges of the chaos to build larger moats and thicker walls to protect our discourse from exterior invasion and the mind-wrenching task of having to attend to the chaos that is, in actuality, the state of human studies. The chaos within discourse communities is difficult enough to grasp and manifests itself between findings that claim one result and findings claiming the opposite.

If even a scrupulous scholar may find himself afloat in a sea of different voices, how much more so must that be the experience of the overwhelmed, the indifferent or the arrogant user. Dervin went on to express the scholar's awareness of such discontinuities and contradictions. Globalization compounds the confusion and the cacophony of voices and the contexts in which those voices must be considered. It is not confined to the scholarly world.

Media Bias

Media outlets throughout the globe reflect the bias, interests, public policies, national politics, market conditions, and cultural contexts within which they produce their information products (Goldberg, 2002; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; McChesney, 2004). Whether to improve market share or to reflect an audience's insularity, media rely on reportorial values rather than on the information literacy values of scholars and librarians. The values expressed by the latter, as found in the Association for Research and College Libraries' Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (2000), emphasize evaluation and context. In contrast, reportorial values are focused on reporting information that is available at the time to the reporter. The bias of the reporter is among the ideas that are available to the journalist when he or she reports the news. To this end, Steven Brill is said to have remarked that “when it comes to arrogance, power and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good” (Goldberg, 2002, p. 11). The media distributes a report in the press or in other outlets. The implication is that later reports will correct misinformation. In the arena of investigative journalism, which is an important part of news reporting, writers are encouraged to “become aware that they have brought certain assumptions to their subjects” (Weinberg, 1996, p. 8). At the same time, the courage and presence of mind that journalists need to gather and disseminate information about the powerful or to approach people, no matter how powerful, to ask difficult questions can easily become the arrogance that allows reporters to overlook sources or to draw upon Web resources out of context and with incredible naïveté.

Possessive Memory

A notion among those who study American culture in 1960s is the idea that the turbulent social times resulted in memories and ideas embedded within those memories, and that rather than individuals possessing memories, some memories seem to “possess” the individual (Perlstein, 1996). The social change brought about by a Web-enabled information world may have left some information producers and aggregators with a possessive memory of a time when information channels, production, and availability as well as information seeking were constrained by rules that are, in many ways, no longer operant. For example, the barriers for entry into electronic publications are far lower than they were in the early 1990s before popular and rapid access to documents deployed on the Web—production and distribution models are vastly different. Perhaps the information naïve are still possessed by the memories of a different information environment and by the successes of former patterns of information gathering and distribution.

Limited Contexts

While one can scarcely find an article that does not address our rapidly changing Web-enabled world, the circumstances and conditions of information naïveté predate the emergence of electronic information, though perhaps current contexts seem to make some aspects and implications more apparent. The space between knowing of and knowing about may be widened by electronic contexts. That is, the electronic information environment encourages the delivery of bits of information that have been removed from their native contexts.

For example, to know of search utilities and to know how to perform a basic search using a search engine or a commercially available database may imply a basic information literacy (Shapiro & Hughes, 1990), but it does not mean that the user understands how the content of the results is shaped within larger contexts and what, consequently, may be emphasized, distorted, or missing. In the worst case—that of a tragic death that resulted from an insufficiently sophisticated literature search performed by the principal investigator of a medical study—post tragedy analysis of the circumstances would indicate either negligence or incompetence in conducting the review. The naïveté exhibited by the investigator and the reviewers was apparent to information professionals, and it would appear that many sought to replicate the investigator's blunder and perform a more complete or at least a more competent search (Quint, 2001). It is obvious that these searchers were more sophisticated since they were able to exploit their knowledge about the conditions of the published information in the field. The researcher's naïveté about comprehensiveness of the database cost the life of a medical test participant. One may surmise that there are other tragedies, greater and lesser, that occur when similar sets of circumstances occur.

Limited Abilities

While it may be argued that one may successfully use a mechanism without understanding how it works, when we speak of mechanisms that manipulate information, the differences are many. All machines have in them the potential for ethical and unethical deployment. So, for example, it is a legal and ethical expectation that the driver of a motorcycle should not be intoxicated. The potential for harm to the driver and to others is clear. But unlike the motorcycle engine, we are all aware that despite its name, a search engine is not a mechanism that animates or drives the mere physical for the user. The results of its labors do not move us in time and space, and the ethical issues raised by its use and misuse are as different as the underlying mechanism is from the motorcycle's engine. And comical as it might be to consider a law against searching while intoxicated, it is worth considering whether search engines and search interfaces should come with a hazard warning.

Information Deficits and Competence

In what they refer to as the “double curse of incompetence,” Dunning, Heath, and Suls (2004) explained that

in many significant social and intellectual domains, the skills necessary to recognize competence are extremely close if not identical to those needed to produce competent responses…. Thus incompetent individuals suffer a double curse: their deficits cause them to make errors and also prevent them from gaining insight into their errors. (p. 73)

Dunning et al. also cited various “informational deficits” among which is their discussion of “information neglect.” This concept refers to their claim that “people also misjudge themselves because they ignore crucial information” (p. 75). Ignoring crucial information is not confined to individual self-assessment and the informational errors that result. These concerns seem to be as prevalent in the board room as they are in the “war room,” including both government and military intelligence as well as business intelligence. Complaints that intelligence reports were ignored can be found in the aftermath of unanticipated public events. In recent years, accusations regarding heads of state who ignored or neglected intelligence reports have been part of the rhetorical criticism leveled at governments' response to terrorist attacks.

In intelligence gathering, there is a commonly expressed tension that exists between intelligence collectors and intelligence analysts wherein the collectors appear to overemphasize what they believe is important so it is not ignored while the analysts, preferring to make their own decisions about what is significant, disregard or downplay the emphasized information. In business intelligence, one can find a fair amount of concern for preventing blindsiding or blind spots when developing competitive strategy. Gilad (1996) identified three “business blindspots” in the contexts of denial, failure, or refusal to see reality. He claimed that “the three most devastating blindspots are unchallenged assumptions, corporate myths and corporate taboos” (p. 3). All appear to be part of the constellation of information neglect.

Information Failure

Why is it naïveté and not ignorance to know of conditions without knowing about the circumstances that create them? First, ignorance has at least the potential to be corrected whereas information naïveté may contain in it the arrogance of prejudice—that is, the perception that there is nothing more to know other than to know of the circumstance. Just as one may read with comprehension but without judgment, so may one create and use information that appears to be satisfactory while still remaining naïve about the underlying processes that shape the results and its resultant flaws. Information naïveté is a type of information failure. Second, it is possible that the naïveté gap is a temporary one—one that will be remedied or resolved through channels already in place within the individual's habits of mind, a group's processes, or an organization's routine reviews.

While it may now be commonplace to remark upon the commodification of information and the imposition of commercial values in the dissemination and retrieval of information, note that the dominance of a commercial model of information creation, dissemination, and use continues to create “an environment in which information issues that deeply affect the quality of national cultural life are decided by commercial, mostly corporate decisions” (Schiller, 1989, p. 72).

One failure that information naïveté represents is that the systems of information creation and distribution do not sufficiently alert the user to its limitation. If databases were governed by the regulatory restrictions that other consumables with risk factors were—such as pharmaceuticals—they would come packaged with warning labels about adverse effects, cautionary instructions about using and administering the informing contents, and the contexts in which such information should be applied. If this were the case, the death of the study participant in the case mentioned earlier might not have happened. But, of course, that is not the case, and it is precisely because it is not the case that the administration of information is not highly regulated that ethical issues arise. There are emerging global standards for information production, and certainly there are production standards in traditional publishing. But neither address the problem of information naïveté.

Some Considerations

For everyday applications, such unwarranted confidence in the comprehensiveness of one's sources is generally not significant. For the most part, we neither need nor desire comprehensive information on every inquiry that we make; however, when investigative, scientific, and scholarly questions are pursued, such naïveté is foolhardy at best. Unjustifiable confidence in a seemingly comprehensive quantity of secondary research results or in the reportorial standards of media reporting is the hallmark of information naïveté. At its worst, the result of information naïveté has been fatal.

The conditions and consequences of information naïveté, as was illustrated in the tragic Johns Hopkins case mentioned earlier, can be the difference between life and death. And while information literacy standards demand competence from the user of information, codes of ethics in the information industry do not demand competence, authenticity, or even the absence of harm from the creators of information— including the creators of dynamic results such as search results from search engines, commercial databases, or data discovery software. Codes of ethics that address competence in information use are confined mostly to the information professions, those who are least likely to be information naïve.

Conclusion

The space between knowing of and knowing about also may be seen as a gap between information and its recipients, but is not meant to imply that the gap exists because there are receiver deficits and perfect information. Instead, it would appear that while there are information users seeking information who are moving through time and space and situations and struggling to bridge gaps in their understanding (Dervin, 1980), there also are the information naïve who are unaware of such gaps, uninterested in bridging them, or intentionally exploiting them. We cannot fact check all of the information we receive and still make decisions and act upon those decisions in a timely manner, nor should we be expected to do so. We also should not obsess about whether we, as users, are sufficiently information literate.

Instead, we should consider pressing the producers, disseminators, and aggregators of information as well as the contributors to these products to be less information naïve; to be more questioning, less arrogant, and less possessed by the memories of past market conditions. Information is plentiful, and that as a commodity, it has come to reflect market conditions; but it should not reflect ethical judgments. Ethical behavior does not just happen. Pressure to produce results without regard to the process nurtures a disregard for consequences. While publishers' disclaimers limit liability, the best efforts need to be better efforts. I end with a call for information professionals on review boards and other similar policy-making bodies where they can to act as a leavening force against the rising incidents of information naïveté.