Escaping information poverty through internet newsgroups

This paper presents an ongoing investigation into how people use the Internet in an attempt to escape situations of information poverty. We consider posts from a variety of newsgroups which indicate that individuals feel they have nowhere else to go to find information or support for concerns crucial to their everyday lives. A qualitative content analysis is performed to examine three main issues: what information needs people posting to these groups have, who they hide these needs from in the ‘real world’, and why they feel they can only express their needs online. Preliminary findings show that information on health and relationships is most commonly sought. Needs are most often hidden from parents and family, and the main reasons for seeking information online are a lack of understanding and the fact that people simply don’t know where else to go. Our work confirms that newsgroups provide a means of expression for those who feel they have no local support available to them

“Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe”: Information Poverty, Information Norms, and Stigma

When information practices are understood to be shaped by social context, privilege and marginalization alternately affect not only access to, but also use of information resources. In the context of information, privilege, and community, politics of marginalization drive stigmatized groups to develop collective norms for locating, sharing, and hiding information. In this paper, we investigate the information practices of a subcultural community whose activities are both stigmatized and of uncertain legal status: the extreme body modification community. We use the construct of information poverty to analyze the experiences of 18 people who had obtained, were interested in obtaining, or had performed extreme body modification procedures. With a holistic understanding of how members of this community use information, we complicate information poverty by working through concepts of stigma and community norms. Our research contributes to human information behavior scholarship on marginalized groups and to Internet studies research on how communities negotiate collective norms of information sharing online

Using internet groups in situations of information poverty : topics and information needs

This study explores the use of online newsgroups and discussion groups by people in situations of information poverty. Through a qualitative content analysis of 200 posts from across Internet groups, we identify topics and information needs expressed by people who feel they have no other sources of support available to them. We uncover various health, wellbeing, social and identity issues which are not only crucial to the lives of the people posting, but which they are unwilling to risk revealing elsewhere – offering evidence that these online environments provide an outlet for the expression of needs in situations of critical and hidden information need. To enable this analysis, we first describe our method for reliably identifying situations of information poverty in messages posted to these groups and our coding approach. Our work contributes to the study of both information seeking within the context of information poverty and the use of Internet groups as sources of information and support, bridging the two by exploring the manifestation of information poverty in this particular online setting

Beyond Behaviors, Needs, and Seeking: A Qualitative Investigation of Information Practices Among Individuals

This dissertation examines the information practices of individuals identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+). It responds to two significant problems in current Library and Information Science (LIS) studies examining these populations. First, there exist a paucity of research studying how these individuals act toward and interact with information related to their LGBTQ+ identities. Second, extant research focuses on almost exclusively on gay and lesbian sexualities, imposing a liminal, psychological model of identity development on these actions and interactions. This imposition results in a myopic view of the unique issues, concerns, barriers, and achievements of individuals with LGBTQ+ identities, often imposed by those outside these identities