Human Information Interaction: An Ecological Approach to Information Behavior

1 Basic Concepts

1 Basic Concepts Since human information interaction (HII) is a multidisciplinary field, it is not surprising that its basic concepts have various definitions and interpretations, with researchers giving these concepts the meanings common in their discipline. Yet the state of affairs is even more complex because researchers in the same discipline may differ in their construal of basic concepts.1 It is useful, therefore, for researchers to explicitly state their personal interpretations of such concepts to avoid misunderstanding and confusion among their audience. This chapter presents my understanding of some basic concepts relevant to this book. I first attend to concepts in HII and then to those in the systems approach that has provided analytical tools for this book and guided my research work. 1.1 Basic Concepts—Definitions Scholars in the same area often put forward a variety of definitions for a single basic concept in HII. Thus, the definitions of basic concepts in HII have been a topic of discussion among scholars and will probably remain unresolved for the foreseeable future. Misunderstandings commonly occur in discussions among colleagues when participants do not clarify the meaning they attribute to basic concepts. To prevent confusion, I first present my interpretation of the basic concepts in the book’s title: human, information, and the ecological approach.2 1.1.1 Human In the context of HII, humans are people who interact with information. How to name such people has lately turned into a topic for discussion (e.g., Dervin 2006). In the context of information systems, people who interact with information through a system have been called patrons (in libraries), clients (in the corporate context), and 4 Chapter 1 users (in the information science and human-computer interaction fields). All these terms include only those who actually use a system and ignore potential users who may also benefit from using it. Because these terms are centered on a system and its patrons, clients, or users, they are useful when one investigates a certain system but are not accurate when one studies HII on a general level without focusing on a specific system. These terms are not useful for most HII studies, which aim at uncovering general, system-independent patterns even though they frequently examine people using a specific system—and at times even a system that was designed especially for the study. Another term to signify the human participants in the interaction is actor. This term is the one used in this book.3 The term actor has various advantages: • It centers on the participant rather than on the system, as actors have an existence independent of information systems. • It places interaction with information as part of a person’s activities, rather than as an isolated process. • It creates no division between actual users of a system and nonusers, and thus concentrates on the investigation of all participants who interact with information and may benefit from an information system. This approach is particularly important in cases where nonusers avoid the system because it does not fit their needs. Moreover, to identify such cases requires a study of users and nonusers as well, that is, a study of actors. One important distinction from the term people, which is used in general studies, free of a specific system, is that the word actor emphasizes the activities aspect of humans when they interact with information. This emphasis highlights the view that HII takes place in a context of activities—a view that agrees with the ecological approach. 1.1.1.1 Community of Actors A community of actors is a group of actors who operate in a certain type of environment , carrying out the same type of tasks.4 Scholars have used other terms to represent this concept, such as user group and users within context, but these terms represent concepts that are broader than community of actors. The term user group has been employed intuitively without a specific definition. As such, it may bind all actors within a specific environment regardless of their tasks, or all actors conducting the same task regardless of the environment. It can also designate all users of a certain Basic Concepts 5 system. The term users within context refers to actors within a certain environment but by itself does not identify a task.5 Communities of actors are of various sizes. Students with no searching experience in an underfunded, inner-city high school searching the web...