Introduction

Traditionally, libraries and librarians have played an important part in the provision of information to support democracy and the democratic processes. In this context, this chapter reports on a study conducted in 2017 which explores and compares the respective contributions of public libraries and university libraries in Sydney, Australia, to supporting democratic processes. It concludes that in spite of a shift from an institutionally based view of truth to one focusing on an individual, librarians are still concerned with principles that underpin the understanding of quality in information.

Democracy and library services

Western culture has developed based on notions that truth, by overcoming falsehood, underpins democracy. However, Rose and Barros (2017) claim we are no longer concerned with creating a consensus of knowledge, and Harsin (2015) asserts that we are undergoing a shift from a regime of truth to a regime of post-truth, where citizens acknowledge that they cannot easily verify a truth claim. Foucault – whose influence on thinking on the relationship between information, knowledge and authority is described by Andrew Whitworth in Chapter 2 of this book – wrote that ‘each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enables one to distinguish true and false statements’ (Foucault, 1980, 131). Foucault's regimes of truth are produced by institutions in which there are relatively clear processes for identifying the authority of the source of a message and therefore the credibility of that message, control over channels of communication is understood, the processes for validation of the content of messages are recognised, mechanisms for addressing audiences are regulated and competing messages can be categorised so that the flow of information is not overwhelming.

For Harsin (2015), key factors in a regime of post-truth include fragmentation of sources of information leading to a dilution of authority, the creation of social groups bounded by the use of technology, content targeted to these bounded groups, along with shifts in journalistic practices, political communication and the speed of communication. Lewandowsky, Cook and Ecker (2017, 420) identified seven societal trends indicating ‘the emergence of a post-truth world’, although they acknowledge that this list may not be exhaustive.

This book as a whole is concerned with the notion that information and, by extension, information literacy (IL) are political: more precisely, that information and IL are enmeshed in formal and informal decision-making systems that determine the distribution of capital, human rights, public benefits and so on. From the work of Bell (1976), through Castells (1996) and other analyses of the ‘information society’ (see Webster, 2014 for a review), these issues are considered most frequently at the global, macro level. Discussions of information literacy in respect to such macro-political and economic matters are rarer, but the gap is partly filled by the preceding chapter, and others that follow in this collection.

Befitting the common conception of IL as an attribute of individuals and communities, the focus of this chapter is on micro-politics: that is, the relations of power, authority and inequality that stem from everyday language and discourse. The aim is to explore how information and IL underpin political processes at this micro-level, and how dialogue, interaction and the making of judgements about information operate within information landscapes (Lloyd, 2010) that are shaped and stratified by power and authority of various kinds. This is accomplished by investigating the critical political theories of authors including Jürgen Habermas, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault to gain insight into the ways in which IL can be applied in challenges to power and authority structures – but how it also may become part of these structures.

Politics and information

The earliest philosophers recognised the importance of applying knowledge and information to political decisions. Socrates ‘preached insistently that knowledge ought to be applied to conduct in the same way as it was already applied with such success to carpentry, shoemaking or medicine’ (Lindsay, 1906, xii). In Book VII of The Republic Plato argues to Glaucon that public affairs should never be conducted only by ‘men who are poor and hungry for goods of their own’ (ibid., 214) as, motivated only by self-interest, they would lack the wisdom and skill to take effective decisions. Plato would ‘persuade those who are to share in the highest affairs of the city to take to calculation, and embrace it in no amateur spirit … until they arrive by the help of sheer intelligence at a vision of the nature of numbers’ (ibid., 219).

Introduction

Almost a quarter of a century has gone by since political democracy¹ and the World Bank reported that South Africa is the most unequal society in the world, and that its poverty is the ‘enduring legacy of apartheid’. The World Bank also reported that inequality has deepened since the dawn of this political democracy. This is contrary to the assertions made by successive national governments, which state that South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy is a success. Keeton (2014) acknowledges that there have been significant attempts, through policy and legislation, to bring about economic and social democracy. He goes on to assert that poverty, lack of job creation, lack of public service delivery and so on are the root causes of inequality and not due to policy or political failure.

There is substantial commitment by the national government of South Africa to extend the political liberation to include socio-economic liberation; to bring into the democracy stable social inclusion. Buoyed by a progressive Constitution, complementary legislation and policy have been brought forward in support of a better future for the people of the country: a future in which no person lives in poverty, where no one goes hungry and where there is work for all. The elimination of poverty and reduction of inequality will accelerate the growth of the economy which will be of benefit to all South Africans. The National Development Plan (NDP) was constructed to serve as an action plan for securing the future of South Africans as advocated in the Constitution.

The NDP has, inter alia, the broad objectives of eliminating poverty and reducing inequality. Critical to achieving this and other objectives is the development of a citizenry that is skilled and has access to an infrastructure that will contribute to its growth and development. It is acknowledged that one of the most significant challenges that need to be overcome is that of illiteracy, which is viewed as a major cause of the poverty and failure of the nation. In order to overcome these challenges it is important that the country increases the literate base of the country to facilitate growth and development of the nation.

To say that this book is timely is an understatement.

Whether one is at the moment reflecting on Brexit, considering elections in Brazil or the USA, tracking developments related to academic freedom in Hungary, monitoring the development of censored search engines in China, to name but a few cases, one cannot but consider how information, information literacy (or lack thereof), and information technology has and continues to shape these social and political developments.

As those who study and teach information literacy, we are confronted with the dual reality that our work is urgently needed and that our past practices may not be sufficient for the kinds of challenges we are currently facing. The authors in this book have provided us with the gift of the opportunity to see our work through various lenses in order to confront the demands of contemporary global society and the context that networked technology has created for global civic engagement.

From my vantage point as the current Chair of the Information Literacy Section of the International Federation for Library Association and Institutions (IFLA), I am keenly aware of the importance of information literacy for all peoples. Information literacy enables people and communities to identify issues, make decisions, solve problems, and pursue future visions in all aspects of life. As the 2011 IFLA Media and Information Literacy Recommendations states:

This inspiring statement of the pursuit of equity and collective good continues on:

Introduction

This chapter discusses the evolution of the media and information literacy (MIL) concept, and the framework for understanding the ‘intersection’ between media literacy (ML) and information literacy (IL). The aim is to offer a brief history and a general introduction to MIL and the work and actions deployed by UNESCO. The chapter is useful to those who are interested in becoming familiar with this subject. This is a bibliographic and exploratory text, not an indepth study.

Concept evolution: media and information literacy – the historical place of IL and ML

UNESCO created the MIL concept in 2007 by merging two separate terms, stating that MIL ‘… empowers citizens to understand the functions of media and other information providers, to critically evaluate their content, and to make informed decisions as users and producers of information and media content.’ (UNESCO, 2017c; see also Grizzle, 2013). The organisation prefers not to give a classic definition of MIL, focusing instead on delineating the key learning objectives, outcomes or competencies of MIL. The argument here is that it is hard to capture all the essentials of MIL in one short paragraph. Furthermore, when one considers the hundreds of definitions of media literacy and information literacy, with their myriad of entry points and emphases, non-expert stakeholders may be confused (Grizzle, 2013 and Grizzle, 2014a). MIL skills are elements vital to the exercising of human rights, as established by Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights …’ (United Nations, 2006). It is a right that is also recognised in the UN Sustainable Development Goals that have a human rights approach, where public information access and other fundamental freedoms are included specifically in target 16.10 (United Nations, 2015). UNESCO has made several great efforts to promote MIL skills as vital elements in the exercise of human rights are several but best summarised in the book Media and Information Literacy: enhancing human rights and countering radicalization and extremism (Grizzle, 2016). MIL skills and their role in democracy, participation and social, economic and political engagement, as well as in personal well-being, have also been a concern for UNESCO.

Introduction

The relationship between information literacy (IL), national policy making and high-level national action has attracted surprisingly little attention in the wider world of information literacy research and development, given that it is reasonable to expect the production of an overarching strategy within which to situate specific aspects of information literacy. This chapter will explore the issues and problems in developing national IL strategies.

It is also the case that there is something of a backstory to IL and national policy making. The Prague Declaration (UNESCO, 2003) explicitly recognised IL as an all-encompassing phenomenon, a concern for all sectors of society and key to the social, cultural and economic development of nations, communities, institutions and individuals in the 21st century and beyond. The Alexandria Proclamation (Garner, 2005) reiterated some of these points, stating that IL provides the key to support economic development, education, health and human services. It also noted that IL encompasses learning, critical thinking and interpretative skills across professional boundaries and empowers individuals and communities, a point which will be returned to later. IL, therefore, can be interpreted as being about personal and civil rights, participative citizenship, lifelong learning, skills and financial well-being, education and critical thinking and the maintenance of a healthy lifestyle. Paul Zurkowski, who coined the term information literacy, emphasised the importance of the workplace (Bawden, 2001), describing information-literate people as ‘People trained in the application of information resources to their work…’. But in the 1990s IL was taken up enthusiastically by academic librarians, who saw it as a natural progression from bibliographic instruction and who came to dominate the IL agenda. In higher education information came to be linked with the idea of a hierarchy or laddering of skills, as exemplified by the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (SCONUL, 2011). However, such a concept was less suited to IL activity in other sectors. Academics came to be concerned with learning outcomes and pedagogy which are susceptible to measurement, while public librarians were more con - cerned with social inclusion, which is less so (Crawford and Irving, 2013, 22–23).

Scoping national information literacy activities

Serious attention to sectors other than higher education is of more recent interest. In 2014 a study by Whitworth (2014) revealed that 60% of the IL literature relates to higher education.

Introduction

There is growing concern that Western liberal democracy has been undermined over the decades by citizens’ participation deficit in institutional politics and distrust of institutions and the media. More recently, in the context of Brexit and the 2016 US Presidential election, there have also been concerns about misinformation undermining citizens’ engagement in civic and political life. Inasmuch as civic and political engagement is highly mediated by the internet – at least in the West (e.g. Europe and North America) – this chapter explores the relevance of information literacy to democracy by looking at its interrelation with ‘critical digital literacy’, approached here as a set of critical abilities, knowledge and interpretations necessary for engaging with information in the digital age. After unpacking how the internet facilitates democracy while remaining subject to structural constraints, this chapter discusses what has been achieved by media research on critical digital literacy and civic and political engagement. It then draws on political research and democratic theory to discuss how the knowledge and abilities required by citizens to engage civically and politically vary, depending on how we understand democracy.

This chapter addresses gaps within media research, political science and democratic theory. It is argued that critical digital literacy can be a useful concept for democratic practice in line with different normative models of democracy, provided it is not just reduced to the ability to evaluate information in relation to trustworthiness, bias and representation. In order to contribute to the active participation of well-informed and critically autonomous citizens in democracy in the digital age, critical digital literacy needs to include knowledge about the digital environment where information circulates. It needs to incorporate an understanding of how the internet operates socio-economically along with its potentials and constraints for democracy, politics and civic and political participation.

Information literacy and critical digital literacy

The concept of information literacy transcends traditional and digital media, as it refers to the ability to access, ‘identify, locate, evaluate, organise and effectively create, use and communicate information’ (Information Literacy Meeting of Experts, 2003, 1). In an age where information is highly mediated by digital media, the boundary between information literacy and terms such as media literacy is blurred (Livingstone, van Couvering and Thumim, 2008). As captured by UNESCO's adoption of media and information literacy (MIL), ‘the 21st century digital environment is deeply affecting the meaning and use of media and information’ (UNESCO, 2014, 1).

Introduction

This chapter explores current research on how young people make judgements about the information they encounter. There will be a discussion on why some young people appear to trust, without question, online information whilst others show remarkable powers of insight and critique. Evidence on how this might affect their physical and mental well-being will be provided. Why this is important both in educational and political terms is discussed. There will then be an exploration of the approaches that can be employed to help young people develop a more discerning approach to engaging with the information they see, hear and read in any context.

The discussion put forward here is based upon a synthesis of research findings involving three groups of young people from the UK – 16–17-year-olds, at a secondary school, 18–19-year-old university students in their first undergraduate year and finally 18–24-year-old men recruited for an experiment, mostly undergraduates – all carried out in the UK. For the first two groups there was a concern voiced by teachers and academic tutors respectively that their students exhibited a noticeable lack of the necessary capabilities to make well-calibrated judgements in order to select good-quality information to support their work for assignments. The 16–17-year-olds were working towards gaining their Extended Project Qualification (EPQ)1 – a mini-dissertation in addition to their A-level study. Walton et al. (2018a) provide a comprehensive reflection of these studies. The 18–19-year-olds were working towards completing their first assignment and had to find good quality information about a sporting issue of their choice (see Walton and Hepworth, 2011; 2013 for a more detailed account). These two groups are quite similar in their context and we will see that their comments and experiences and our analyses align in an encouraging way. How? They both appear to indicate that most (but by no means all) students present with remarkably poor capabilities in making judgements about information, which prevent them from making the most suitable choices. The third group were recruited to find out whether the cognitive process of information discernment has a physiological component. Why? We wanted to find out whether being good at information discernment is related to positive responses to stress.

This book is for anyone who cares for informed participation in society. It is for any reader, anywhere in the world, who suspects or recognises that inclusive societies function best when their members have the means, capability and confidence to make the most out of the information that they encounter on a daily basis. In this sense, it deals with the capacity of human beings to achieve genuine autonomy. The book is for individuals who feel that engaged citizenship thrives on informed, evidence-based views of the world. It is for anyone interested in reinforcing, reinvigorating and deepening democracy in the face of the dangers represented by misinformation and attempts to deceive – whatever the nature and the source of the deception. But at the same time, the book is absolutely not intended as an arcane treatise for experts, and although it is written with academic rigour, it is accessible, engaging and deliberately provocative. And whilst recognising many worries, difficulties and obstacles, it is ultimately optimistic about the ways that a well-informed citizenry can underpin healthy, lively democratic systems. Such is the gist of informed societies.

So, in the light of this, why information literacy, and how does it fit in? It was in 1974 that Paul Zurkowski first explicitly suggested the concept of information literacy (Zurkowski, 1974). He framed this simply as the abilities to use information tools to mould information solutions that address the problems of individuals. Although this view was set out in the pre-internet age, 45 years on, the inference remains valid: information literacy is a means of helping people to address their information needs, which are as varied as the life experiences and aspirations of individuals. This variety reflects many if not all aspects of people's lives: in education, in work, in leisure, in creativity, in well-being, in addressing financial and material needs. And one further, crucial part of this variety is the relationship with an important aspect of human endeavour: people's ability to function and take part in society, to contribute to shaping its rules and conventions, to take advantage of the opportunities for participation that democracy entails and, just as significantly, to create new opportunities for engagement and participation.

Introduction: the ageing population – a contested demographic

This chapter will focus on the civic possibilities of information literacy in relation to the needs and issues of an ageing population. This is a global question and it will be addressed from that perspective, but also using insights from: (i) the author's experience in Scotland's civic spaces – principally influencing government and political parties through Third Sector activism; and (ii) his interest in lifelong learning strategies as a useful conceptual lens – particularly those derived from the work of Paulo Freire.

The UK population has undergone a fundamental demographic shift in age structure, including falling birth rates, longer life expectancy and increase in the average age (HM Government Office for Science, 2016), which will require substantial changes across most areas of civic life, democracy and politics. In effect we are living in a society where the majority of people are in older age groups and this trend is set to continue. Significant change in age structures is a global experience shared with other nations and regions (Zimmer and McDaniel, 2013; UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2017). Clearly forecasting population change is fundamental to anticipating and making the various provisions required to adapt to change and maintain society.

In response, key concepts about the age structure of society like ‘old age’, ‘retirement’ and ‘state pension age’ are being systematically reframed in a public narrative, shaped by a dominant neoliberal political economy, as entailing unsustainable pension costs with equally unsustainable associated health and care costs (Macnicol, 2015). This narrow framing is contradicted by an alternative view of such socio-cultural features which views retirement and pension costs as essential features of the lifecourse, to be managed constructively by developed nations in order to sustain themselves as cohesive civic spaces.

Concepts like retirement, the state pension and the nature of social care arrangements have implications for everybody in society and are therefore important practical aspects to consider whenever demographic ageing is discussed as a public policy issue (Harper, 2016). Of equal importance is the challenge of linking demographic ageing to other macro-level global dynamics such as climate change, technological change and the economic environment, which are currently treated as separate issues (British-Irish Council, 2016; Lawrence, 2016).

Introduction

There has been increasing concern with the growing infusion of disinformation, or ‘fake news’, into public discourse. Fact-checkers have reported that Donald Trump has been making more than six false or misleading statements every day during his term in office thus far. This chapter explores three questions that arise from this situation:

• 1 Is disregard for the truth really an acceptable hallmark of contemporary politics? If so, how is this possible and what factors contributed to this state of affairs? I review research that shows how among partisans, endorsement of a politician has become decoupled from his or her perceived veracity. This may reflect disenchantment with the current political system and its ‘elite’.

• 2 What are the political and psychological consequences of the ‘post-truth’ world? I survey the many findings that suggest that, once acquired, misinformation ‘sticks’ in memory and is difficult to dislodge. In addition to those direct consequences of misinformation, it has indirect fallouts that may undermine the democratic process.

• 3 What is the appropriate response to this situation? I review the difficulties associated with debunking misinformation and suggest instead that ‘inoculating’ people against misinformation before it is presented is a more successful strategy. I contrast psychological approaches with the idea of ‘technocognition’, which blends findings from cognitive science with the design of information architectures that are more resilient to the spreading of misinformation.

‘Post-truth’ was nominated word of the year by Oxford dictionaries in 2016, to describe ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ‘. A year later, Collins dictionaries declared ‘fake news’ to be the next word of the year, to refer to ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’. The concern with truth – or indeed its absence – was largely triggered by two political events in 2016 that had global ramifications and that arguably involved an unprecedented extent of deception and misinformation: the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the USA.