Information literacy challenges in digital culture: conflicting engagements of trust and doubt

ABSTRACT

The ability of citizens to establish the credibility of information and information sources through critical assessment is often emphasized as essential for the upholding of a democratic society and for people’s health and safety. Drawing on material-discursive conceptualizations, the article asks, how does critical assessment of information and information sources play out as it is folded into a networked information infrastructure in which different types of information are mediated and shaped by the same algorithms and flattened into the same interfaces? The empirical material comprises dyadic interviews with 61 adolescents. The interviews were analysed using an interpretative approach focusing on the construction of action and meaning. The analysis foregrounds trust and agency as two dimensions. This way normative assumptions become visible as stereotypes, sometimes positioned as ideals towards which to strive, other times as deterrent examples: the non-evaluator, the naïve evaluator, the skeptical evaluator and the confident evaluator. The created stereotypes help to comprehend different understandings of critical assessment of information and how these can bring about different actions. The article argues that critical assessment of information as an element in media and information literacy must be understood not just in relation to how it is used to assess the credibility of information, but also regarding how it is performatively enrolled in the shaping of knowledge and in the creation of ignorance and doubt.

KEYWORDS:

• Evaluation
• trust
• algorithms
• MIL
• infrastructure
• sociomateriality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 2017-03631].

Notes on contributors

Jutta Haider

Jutta Haider is professor in Information Studies at the Swedish School of Library andInformation Science. Her research concerns the shaping of knowledge and information in contemporary digital culture.

Olof Sundin

Olof Sundin is professor in Information Studies at Lund University. His research interests concern the configuration of information in contemporary society in relation to literacies and practices of information.