Information Access in the Information Age

As a second year masters student, thoughts concerning what my MA thesis will be about are never far from mind. Over the course of the past year, I’ve been trying to narrow down my scope and have been surveying a lot of different approaches to communications, social science and cultural research. I’ve also been trying to ingest as much literature as I can about the issues that concern the field of communications (past and present). In some cases, I feel that this massive excavation has only shown me how much more there is to read and how much I, in fact, don’t know.

Nonetheless, the quest for conquering the thesis continues… The first element that I’ve decided will become part of the thesis probably comes from my own deep down anarchical tendencies. I’m not sure. In any case, I’m interested in digital deviance and can’t wait to wrap that into my study. I’m also baffled by the idea that our new technologies are able to open up a world of information and despite this, getting unbiased information (especially about politics) from a variety of sources is still pretty tough. It seems that a bottleneck to this info occurs at people’s understanding of technology or their willingness to seek out alternative sources.

At this point, I think I would like to look at tech-savvy sub-cultures, like hackers, and see how the ways that they access information is different from “regular” people. Perhaps, we can then identify how technophobia plays a role in information access. This might also allow us to see if this subgroup has a different set of personality traits that drive them to seek out varying sources of information. This is just a start. More is definitely to come as these things are fleshed out.