Communication Impoverishment in the Information Society

Hertha Firnberg Position T 82 "Communication Impovershment" in the Information Society Margit BÖCK 27.06.2000 "Information" and "communication" have become key concepts in the societies of the "west". The ever growing offer of media forms, outlets, programmes, and their diversity has led to a pluralization of the audiences of the media. Neither work nor leisure is now thinkable without the media. Not all groups, however, benefit (equally) from this change in the media. There is a real concern that societies could break apart into those who are "information rich" and those who are "information poor". There are signs of such disparate developments in empirical, representative data. The intention now is to conduct case-studies in a rural region in Austria to investigate how communicative repertoires develop against and within the background of the conditions of individual lifeworlds, and "life-plans". Communicational forms of a "media-based" and an "interpersonal" kind will be studied together. Apart form the domain of reception there will be an equal focus on the active-productive dimension of communication. A theoretical framework and adaquate methodologies for the investigation of these questions have to be developed. In the centre of the interest of this study are people/persons about the shape, characteristics, and structures of whose communicational everyday lives we know very little: these are the groups of the (so called) "communicational disadvantaged". Apart from a description of their comunicational repertoires, the aim is to establish metaphors which adequately and aptly capture, encapsulate, and describe the scope of the problem and the issues involved, which is discussion of "communicational inequality" always includes social-structured inequalities. A further aim of this interdisciplinarily conceived study is to make available the materials necessary as the basis for the development of social-technological measures designed to counteract forces of disintegration in communication.

This ethnographically oriented study was conducted in a geographically marginal area of Aus-tria. It provides detailed descriptions and analyses of habitual informational practices - the In-formation Habitus - of individuals who barely participate in the technological innovations of the information society, or if they do, do so only at the margins. The study points to factors which will need to be taken into account in any institutional or extra- institutional educational pro-grammes, as much as in the education and further professional development of potential educa-tors in that field. Without attention to these, the intended audiences of the educational pro-grammes are unlikely to find what is offered to them either relevant or acceptable for them. Not to be `where the action is` is an everyday expression that captures the situation of being apart from, of not participating in essential and relevant practices and happenings, to `be out of the loop`. That was the issue in the project on `Communicational "impoverishment" in the in-formation society?`, on two levels: the project was conducted in a geographically remote region in the Upper Mühlviertel in Austria; and at the centre of interest were people who do barely or not at all make any use of the new ICTs, and who in addition, overall, occupy marginal social positions in the public life of "Schönach" (the fictional name of the community in which the study was conducted). By means of case studies, the `Information Habitus` of selected individuals was described and analysed in the context of their individual life-worlds, of their biographies and their `lifeplans`. The aim was to trace the different habituated forms of seeking information, of accessing infor-mation, and the use of information - in the widest sense - as well as to describe the conditions under which the specific Information Habitus of an individual had developed. On the one hand the aim was to discover the extent to which those groups described in the public debates as `in-formationally impoverished` were indeed poor in information. On the other hand, the aim was to establish points for intervention in order to work against the development of a deep social divi-sion, in a situation where one group knows how to use the potentials of the new media, while another group keeps its distance because its members do not recognize any benefits for them-selves. In order to be able to make available the social technological means in a relevant domain, it is necessary to develop an approach which is both detailed and able to keep nuances clearly in fo-cus. The project aimed to develop such an approach, and it was achieved through the integration of a number of quite distinct methodologies. In this, the project`s aims point in new methodo-logical (and theoretical) directions. In its multimodal methodology there was - as well as the usual reliance on verbal data - a significant use of visual forms of data and analysis. Indeed, they had a central place. Furthermore the concentration of analysis on mass-mediated communi-cation, typical for German communication studies, was extended by an inclusion/integration of the project into the domain of analysis of interpersonal communication. The Information Habitus of individuals who, on a first look, might seem to belong to the same sociological categories, can be differentiated in many crucial ways. What emerged clearly was that such differences are above all due to the differences in biographies, stemming from origins in different life-worlds, or from different positionings in the same life-world. The hypothesis is that it is such differences which might allow one to predict relative success or failure of educa-tional interventions for groups who are presently distant from institutional forms of education. The insights and findings produced by the project make available significant new theoretical concepts and methodological starting-points for communication studies as much as for other disciplines which deal with questions of communication, learning and education. The findings provide starting points for policies and projects in education, for educational planning, for poli-cies on the regional level, as much as for regional politics quite widely, as much as for policies around communication and media education.