Needing NoDI (normal democratic information)? The problem of information poverty in post-industrial society

Abstract

The paper addresses one of the main paradoxes of post-industrial society: information poverty. While digital divides of various types have been extensively theorized and researched, the actual condition of the information poor – those at the wrong end of socioeconomic information-divides – has not received sufficient attention. Yet if advanced nations have ‘informatized’ and thus become, at least in some measure, information societies, the plight of those lacking the definitive resource ought surely to be high on academic and political agendas. The article reviews the scattered multidisciplinary literature on the condition, confirming the iron link between economic poverty and information poverty, while also registering cultural and behavioural dimensions. Building on such work, a focused, up-to-date and, it is believed, original conception is able to be introduced, namely, information poverty as a deficiency in certain taken-for-granted categories of political and cognate information, or normal democratic information (NoDI). The new construct is then trialled in the field, among a sample of severely disadvantaged men in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. The informants are indeed found to be, by and large, wanting in these key categories of information, an epistemic pathology that reflects and reinforces their material malaise. The article concludes that the ‘option for the poor’ – the political duty of care for the worst off – in the twenty-first century demands new modes of State action to combat an acute and increasingly salient social problem.

Keywords:

• information poor
• poverty
• normativity
• citizenship
• post-industrialism

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my deep gratitude to my excellent fieldworker Lauren Elliott, as well as to the anonymous referees at Information, Communication & Society.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alistair S. Duff

Dr Alistair Duff is professor of information policy in the School of Arts and Creative Industries and the Centre for Social Informatics, Edinburgh Napier University. He is the author of Information Society Studies (Routledge, 2000), A Normative Theory of the Information Society (Routledge, 2012), and articles in a wide range of journals and newspapers. Formerly a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, he is now principal investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project – Informing the Good Society: New Directions in Information Policy (www.informingthegoodsociety.com).