♾Information Lifestyles and Collective Intelligence
Reimagining Information Literacy, Restoring Trust
December 07, 2024, Vol. 2, Issue 52
Cite as: Coleman, Anita S. (2024, December 7). Information lifestyles and collective intelligence: Reimagining information literacy, restoring trust. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 2 (52).
It's been a month since the US elections, and I'm still processing the results, which continue to leave me unsettled. Add to that my travels in the South, a particularly bad bout of flu, and I'm wrestling with a mix of physical and emotional fatigue. On top of all this, recent news about the shooting of the CEO of United HealthCare insurance has made it harder to find peace of mind. Despite my diligent avoidance of too much media or information, I've been surprised to see the flurry of political commentary that's blown up my Substack Notes. Many readers, like me, are grappling with the same blend of exhaustion and concern. So, I ask—how's everybody feeling?
Amidst this backdrop, I also find myself reflecting on the nature of our information consumption, especially how our affinity with information—infophilia—shapes our emotional landscape and can rebuild trust in investigative journalism. It’s no secret that our modern information ecosystems are overwhelming, particularly when the lines between truth, perception, and performance are blurred, as they increasingly are. And, journalists and librarians are only two professional groups among many others who have been trying for decades to teach and encourage media and information literacies. We hardly seem to have made a dent. Computers and information technologies are supposed to make our lives easier but it appears that the cognitive and mental health problems are not isolated – brain rot is Oxford's word of the year!
I'm not an investigative journalist and my writing is relatively easier; scholarly writing has to be fairly and explicitly referenced but as I've noted before I still make mistakes such as simply forgeting to cite fundamental or well-known connections. Last week, as I was writing AI augmentation versus automation stories of Doug Engelbart, the Father of the Mouse and the man behind the Mother of all Demos - oN-Line System (NLS) which took place 56 years ago on Dec 9, 1968 - kept coming to mind. Engelbart was the founder of the first Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI. He wrote the paper Augmenting Human Intellect (and the theory of human augmentation) envisioning how computers would augment human intelligence and boosted the concept of collective IQ and dynamic knowledge repositories. I still forgot to cite him! So, I get how hard it can be to report the news factually, accurately, without errors. I understand the need for fact checkers. In fact, one of my favorite books is The Lifespan of a Fact by John D. Agata and Jim Fingal (Norton, 2012). Fingal was the fact-checker for Agata’s About a Mountain and in Lifespan of a Fact they share their eye-opening adventure into truth and accuracy and whether a writer can substitute one for the other.
Our promising framework—infophilic information lifestyles—for restoring trust in media and democracy requires rethinking how we ourselves gather, engage with, use, share, and create information. Thus, far, I’ve focused on adaptive infophilia as the new information literacy in various use contexts and encouraged approaches that prioritize authenticity, transparency, and careful curation. This is the healthy to maladaptive infophilia styles on the information literacy spectrum.* Now, I want to emphasize that healthy infophilic information styles include info creation and use and move beyond the oversaturation of sensationalist headlines and viral content, focusing instead on quality, depth, accuracy, and accountability. A few weeks ago, I shared about readers' infophilic information styles in the context of election news gathering. Today, I share the results from another survey: Institutions that are vital for democracy. Then, I explore how our information lifestyles and collective intelligence can help restore trust in a news media ecosystem filled with sensationalism, gonzo, opinion, and entertainment journalism among other things. I use Substack as an example for collective intelligence and the new journalism and highlight key takeaways for info lifestyles.