INFORMATION-CHANNEL PREFERENCES AND INFORMATION-OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES

Abstract

Providing an empirical base to flesh out the notion of ‘information capital’, this article charts the elusive linkages between information-seeking practices, vocational preferences, and information-opportunity structures. Drawing on data from focus group interviews with over 300 advantaged and disadvantaged students, the research examines the information-seeking practices and circumstances of students attending high schools in an agricultural region of California. The article outlines a novel typology of four distinctive information-seeking situations: Internet-reliant information-seeking (IRIS), personal community-reliant information-seeking (PCRIS), educator-reliant information-seeking (ERIS), and multi-channel information-seeking (MCIS). Each of these situations brings together particular information-seeking strategies with specific vocational and educational preferences and particular information-opportunity structures. The four groups of information-seekers exhibit distinctive internalized stances towards what they define as appropriate information-seeking strategies and useful information-channels for educational and career planning. Illustrating these patterns, the article uncovers the connections between students’ educational and career aspirations, on the one hand, and their online and offline information-seeking strategies, on the other hand. By drawing these connections, the analysis provides rich empirical scaffolding for the concepts of information-channel preferences and information-opportunity structures as they relate to information capital, concepts which have remained empirically underdeveloped.

Keywords:

• digital divide
• computer-mediated-communication
• young people
• information-seeking
• habitus
• information capital

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers and editors, Gustavo Mesch and Nalini Kotamraju, for their insights and valuable recommendations. I would also like to express my appreciation to Paul DiMaggio for his thoughtful commentary at the early stage of this project. Sincere thanks are also due to the dedicated educators and students in my fieldsites, my collaborator Jeremy Schulz, Laura Nichols, and my SCU student-researchers. Finally, I would like to acknowledge generous funding from the Center for Science, Technology, and Society; Bannan Institute, Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education; Internal Research Grants Program; Faculty-Student Research Assistant Award Program; and Office of the Provost Undergraduate Research Initiative at Santa Clara University.

Notes

While the first wave of scholarship on digital inequality largely concentrated on access differences, scholars have increasingly broadened their research agendas to examine more nuanced facets of digital inequality such as gender and production (Kotamraju 2003). Most recently, scholars of new media have suggested that usage of the internet as an information source yields many positive benefits for teenagers; by contrast, there are many potential negative consequences of digital inequality including lower educational attainment and lack of skills to succeed in the adult job market (Mesch & Talmud 2010).

Witte and Mannon (2010) find that for adults, this relationship does not hold true in major moments related to education, namely how adults use the internet for information-seeking for additional educational training and selecting a school for oneself or one's children.

Previous findings from the larger project (Robinson 2009) develop the concept of information habitus to illuminate social processes through which economically advantaged and disadvantaged youth acquire particular skills and habits associated with the use of information technologies. Facets of analysis indicate that the ways diverse populations use the internet, as well as their social circumstances, often prevent inequality from being mitigated. For those without high-quality, consistent access to new media resources, basic access to the internet does not have the same impact as it does for their economically privileged counterparts. In tandem with other resources, different use of the internet as an information resource replicates offline inequalities and accentuates the impacts of disadvantage.

All names of individuals and institutions have been replaced by pseudonyms to protect anonymity. Grammar has been corrected when necessary for clarity.