Opening Thoughts on the Study of Community Information Needs in a Democracy

The three questions posed to the Knight Commission (KnightComm) are:

What are the information needs of communities in a democracy?
What are the trends affecting how community information needs are met?
What public policy and private initiatives will help better meet community information needs?

Community Information Needs in a Democracy

Even in the Information Age, people live in real world communities. Groups of actual human beings live in relative proximity to one another, sharing, depending upon, and maintaining governance over some identifiable domain of common resources. Where community life is successful, we would expect to see:

The prevalence of peaceful and cooperative human interaction;
Widespread opportunities for members of the community to pursue dignified, fulfilling lives according to their own values;
High levels of public health and safety;
The capacity of adults to support themselves and their families through honest work;
The maintenance of community resources, including environmental resources, in a manner likely to sustain community well-being over a long period of time;
A rich community cultural life; and
Positive self-reports of individual satisfaction with the quality of community life.

Within communities, people also live and participate in what we could usefully call an “information ecosystem.” By “information ecosystem,” we mean not just the information that a community presently has available, but all the human and technological elements through which people become informed. The “media,” of course, play a critical role in the information ecosystem, but they are hardly all of it. Numerous actors, both individual and organizational, contribute to the information ecosystem by creating, storing, sorting, disseminating, interpreting, reformulating and consuming information.

The sharing of information furthers four general goals in society: problem-solving, coordination, accountability, and creating systems of meaning. The table below illustrates what each means for both individuals and for communities:

The health of the local information ecosystem will have a direct bearing on these critical functions.

In the United States, the measure of a healthy information ecosystem must fundamentally take into account our national commitment to democratic life. That is, Americans living in local communities are entitled to pursue their personal and collective goals within the framework of our constitutional commitment to democracy. At a minimum, the democratic character of local communities depends on three things:

The right of adult citizens to participate either directly or through democratically chosen officials in collective decisions that affect their lives and interests;

To the extent collective decisions are made by democratically chosen officials, the capacity of adult citizens to hold those representatives meaningfully to account; and

The right of adult citizens to organize politically and to express themselves freely and fully on matters of public concern.

In a robust democracy, a healthy information ecosystem supports these rights, 1empowers individuals to make their own choices based on their own goals and objectives for themselves and their communities, and equips local communities with the tools people need to use information in debates, discussions, and deliberations for the greater good of everyone.

Given this degree of complexity, it is clear that taking stock of whether community information needs are being met is going to entail multiple modes of inquiry. One may be to assess whether local communities seem to have access to, and to interact successfully with, information in a number of areas critical to the working of democracy and to the success of communities. Some candidates that occurred to us (and which might elicit broader interest) are:

• Economic development
• Environmental protection,
• Education,
• Hunger and poverty,
• Emergency preparedness,
• Public health,
• And the performance of government itself.

Another is to look at the institutions and processes through which people interact with information. Such interactions are plainly shaped by a host of factors other than the substantive content of information. Not everyone in a community will have equal access to acquire 1raw data or power to shape its presentation. Not everyone will have identical capacities to perceive and interpret information, and how people’s capacities are activated can easily depend on how a community’s political, cultural, and social environments affect how people hear and understand one another. It is also now well understood that the medium through which information is conveyed can itself alter the content or meaning of that information. These realities pose the question: Can we differentiate information ecosystems in which these complexities function either more or less as impediments to achieving problem-solving, coordination, public accountability, and the creation of systems of meaning? Are there ways in which, in successful communities, the search for and the discussion and analysis of relevant information become 1“embedded in everyday decision-making routines of users and disclosers”1 so that information is reliably translated into constructive democratic action?
Trends Affecting How Community Information Needs Are Met

It is no secret that the forces buffeting the information sector today include changes in technology, law and culture. Most obviously, the advent of networked computing and the World Wide Web have made it possible to develop, store, manipulate and distribute unprecedented volumes of information with levels of speed and convenience that have largely obliterated considerations of time, space and marginal cost in the sharing of ideas. New digital technologies do not determine the future of the information society – these are technologies famously compatible with regimes of either boundless expressive freedom or unchecked, oppressive surveillance. But it is the capacities of these technologies that have captured relevant human attention and economic investment, and nothing is likely to be more important to the quality of our future democratic life than the choices we make with regard to new technologies.

The second part of our study requires us to identify trends that affect the service of community information needs. We need to attend not only to trends in media, but also to trends that reveal how society is using its new information technologies, how these technologies are affecting the capacity and performance of media -- radio, television (in all its forms), newspapers, and other forms of print periodicals – and how the new environment is affecting people’s interaction with information. We need to be alert to trends in law and regulation that may open up or constrain the quality of media performance, and how institutions that are part of the information ecosystem – even if beyond the usual conception of “media” -- are changing their roles, as well.

In no particular order, revealing trends (if evidence exists to analyze them) would include:

• The number of institutionalized informational voices serving local communities
• Patterns of ownership and control with regard to information institutions
• Patterns of media consumption, including subscriptions and listening and viewing habits for old media, and attention paid to new media, including online journalism, social networking sites, and other sources of information via the Internet
• Resources devoted by the various media to the coverage of local issues (numbers of “stories,” numbers of pages, numbers of minutes, and so on)
• Changes in the manner of presentation of local information by the various media
• Initiatives by government and other institutions and groups (libraries, universities and schools, government, nonprofit groups, private sector information providers) to make local information available through the Internet
• Patterns of broadband deployment and Internet access
• Patterns in the development of relevant “literacies,” e.g., computer literacy, media literacy, news literacy
• Public perceptions of media performance and of the availability of relevant and useful information, more generally
• Perceptions by political leaders, experts, and local civic groups as to the adequacy of information provision in their communities
• Creations of new partnerships among information institutions to serve local needs

In addition, we will need to be attentive to how technology is creating new capacities likely to affect how community information needs are served. We should explore such possibilities not only in the abstract, but by looking at a wide variety of case studies in the creative use of new technologies in local communities both here and abroad. The effort should be directed at understanding:

The degree to which changes in technology limit the prospects for longstanding institutions to serve community information needs in traditional ways;
The degree to which changes in technology open new prospects for both new and longstanding institutions to serve community information needs; and
The challenges that law, technology and patterns of personal behavior pose for communities seeking to maximize the constructive impact of information institutions, both new and old, on their information ecosystems.

Recommendations for Change

Presumably, what we will recommend in terms of plausible changes will flow from our answers to the other two questions. Another source of ideas, of course, could be to look at communities, either in the U.S. or abroad, that rate high on measures of community health, and to see if there is anything about their information environments that looks distinctive vis-à-vis other communities. (I wonder especially about communities that have invested in universal computer access or in community computer networks, and whether we can tell anything about the relationship between such developments and the health of the communities in which they have occurred.) A third inquiry would entail identification of as large a set as possible of projects that are improving the information flows in local communities. So much creativity is now being devoted to information innovation that many of our best recommendations may flow from identifying the most imaginative projects now underway to enhance the information ecosystems of local communities.

One thing likely to be clear from our study is that, both within the media sector and in the larger information ecosystem, we can observe considerable variety in the choices we have made as a society regarding the structure and governance of our information institutions. Some are publicly supported, others not. Some are democratically governed, others not. Some are subject to the discipline of the market, others not. The choices society makes in the design and governance of its information institutions presumably affects how each institution performs its role.
To the extent any information institutions fall short in serving the information needs of communities, we will want to examine the possibility of mismatch between their governance, structure and process and the objectives society looks to those institutions to achieve.

To make this point more concrete, institutions based in the for-profit private sector may have special advantages in terms of flexibility and innovation when it comes to developing and deploying new technologies and business models for the benefit of large numbers of information consumers. On the other hand, there are several strong reasons to expect that information institutions governed primarily by market forces are likely to under-produce at least some of the information critical to community success. First, “social knowledge” is a public good; the existence of free riders and the capacity of the ignorant to externalize the costs of ignorance may unjustifiably reduce the expenditure of resources to acquire social knowledge. Second, markets depend on informed consumers and consumers may under-spend for access to information about which they are currently ignorant. Third, among human beings, information acquires value because of its network effect, that is, the fact that many people hold the same information. Thus, obscure information that might have a significant impact on community welfare may be undervalued as compared to information that is widely known, but trivial from a community welfare perspective. Finally, it must be noted that, for most commercial media, individual citizens only rarely get to vote directly with their dollars for the media content provided. For most media, commercial discipline is exercised chiefly by the advertising market, and advertisers’ preferences for content that will deliver audiences to their product and services may or may not correspond with consumers’ own preferences for the information or content that would most wish to elicit.

Taking such considerations into account, it is possible to imagine the Commission making a variety of recommendations, some of which are intended to engage the private sector, some of which are intended to engage government, and some of which will require implementation by nonprofit institutions or what is now increasingly called “civil society.” Moreover, these recommendations may well fall into two distinct large categories: (1) “Direct Information Initiatives,” that is, initiatives for the production, presentation, or dissemination of information relevant to a community’s substantive goals, and (2) “Information Environment Initiatives,” that is, initiatives that would help increase a community’s capacity to interact effectively with such information as may be available. The challenge will be to offer ideas both practicable and sustainable for improving the information ecosystems of local communities in ways that will, in turn, promote those actions and attitudes of community members that facilitate effective democratic self-governance in the cause of community betterment.
5/22/08