Information Avoidance: Out of the Shadow of Information Seeking

December 4, 2024 Jette Seiden Hyldegård

Jette Seiden Hyldegård, Alison Hicks, Pamela McKenzie, Jenny Bronstein, Ian Ruthven and Gunilla Widén

Have you ever ignored news to escape information overload? Or avoided information from certain people, sources and institutions? Then you confirm recent research on information avoidance.

Background

People avoid information for many reasons to cope with and manage daily life. That said, information avoidance (hereafter IA) has long been in the shadow of information seeking in information science, challenging the idea that seeking information is good while abstaining from it is bad. IA has not only been seen as wrong and abnormal, but also as a practice implying severe risks to society at large. The research interest in IA practices has, thus, been much lower than the interest in seeking and using information. This picture has started to change in response to the acknowledgement of information overload and the recognition that cybercrime and mis- and disinformation campaigns produce information that should be avoided. The urgent need for individuals’ critical awareness is demonstrated on a daily basis that calls for a re-examination of IA as a positive set of practices.

—People avoid information for many reasons to cope with and manage daily life—

Up till now our understanding of information avoidance has remained fragmentary. Researchers have been unable to give a single coherent definition of what IA actually is. With our critical conceptual review of IA, we sought to address this oversight by theorizing IA as an instance of human information practice—distinct from, but co-existing dynamically with information seeking.

The conceptual analysis

From our deep analysis and evaluation of prior research of IA in information science we identified three general limitations: information has typically been narrowly defined, e.g. as good and wanted; IA is negatively depicted, and IA is absent from models and frameworks of information behaviour. This contrasted with other disciplines like communication and psychology.

A wide range of related IA terms and definitions emerged from our analysis of the multidisciplinary literature. When mapping and conceptualizing the 36 identified terms, we identified seven key characteristics: Intensity, granularity, engagement, control, relevance, quality and timeliness. We then grouped these characteristics into three overarching categories: information-related, where the type and form of information drives avoidance activity, person-related, where avoidance activity is related to individual’s values and conditions, and person-information related, where avoidance is linked to both the form of information and personal factors (see Table 1).

Information-related

Intensity
The amount, pace, or force of information

Granularity
The scale of information, whether encompassing entire information sources or individual pieces of content

Person-related

Engagement
How invested or involved a person is with information, whether active, receptive, or passive

Control
The extent to which the person has or believes they have command over information

Person-information-related

Relevance
The significance or importance that information has to a person, including the degree of specificity

Quality
The authority or credibility information has to a person

Timeliness
The temporal suitability or appropriateness of information to a person

Table 1. Definitions of the seven characteristics of information avoidance categorized according to their relatedness to person and/or information

During our critical analysis, the mapping of the 36 IA-related terms and their accompanying references contributed a new conceptual perspective of IA. For example, blunting, delegation, hedging, ignorance and/or self-handicapping, among others, positioned IA as mediating engagement.

Figure 1 shows the seven characteristics shaping the practices of IA. However, the practice of IA is not separated from seeking, but co-exists with information seeking as one of many information practices. In a recent paper we propose how radial mapping may be used to shape the complex and dynamic interplay between information seeking and avoidance practices.

Figure 1. The categorized seven characteristics of information avoidance

Through this conceptual analysis of IA, we provided a new definition: “Information avoidance is the practices that moderate interaction with information by 1) reducing the intensity (amount and/or flow) across multiple levels of granularity; 2) restricting engagement with or control over information, whether actively, passively or receptively, and/or 3) excluding information based on relevance, quality, and timeliness criteria”.

The holistic approach to studying information avoidance also revealed that avoidance practices are varied and complex. Similar to information seeking, people avoid information for a variety of reasons. Additionally, numerous factors shape information avoidance, including cognitive, affective, personal, and situational aspects.

Concluding remarks

The time has come to reconsider classic concepts in research along with frameworks and models of information behaviour and practices. New methodologies and methods are needed to investigate the often hidden and tacit practices of avoiding information. New self-caring information literacies like critical ignoring also need to be explored. Finally, we need to investigate how IA can be considered in system design given that personalization, AI and algorithms shape and control what the user sees and doesn’t see.

The critical conceptual review of IA serves as a good starting point for IA research:

It contributes a historical and conceptual overview
It categorizes IA by seven information and/or person related characteristics
It establishes a new definition
It raises new research questions

Returning to the opening question and any feeling of guilt for ignoring news, remember that IA can be a very meaningful and even healthy information practice!

This article is a ‘translation’ of the critical conceptual review:
Alison Hicks, Pamela McKenzie, Jenny Bronstein, Jette Seiden Hyldegård, Ian Ruthven, Gunilla Widén (2024). Information avoidance: A critical conceptual review. An Annual Review of Information Science and technology (ARIST) paper. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 1-21. https://doi.org./10.1002/asi.24968

McKenzie, P., Hicks, A., Bronstein, J., Hyldegård, J., Ruthven, I., & Widén, G. (2024). The shape(s) of information practice: Using radial mapping qualitatively. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 61.
https://doi.org./10.1002/asi.24968

Cite this article in APA as: Hyldegård, J. S., Hicks, A., Mckenzie, P., Bronstein, J., Ruthven, I., & Widén, G. Information avoidance: Out of the shadow of information seeking. (2024, December 3). Information Matters, Vol. 4, Issue 12. https://informationmatters.org/2024/12/information-avoidance-out-of-the-shadow-of-information-seeking/

Authors

Jette Seiden Hyldegård

Jette Seiden Hyldegård, University of Copenhagen, is a senior researcher in human information interactions and behaviour, studying the "what", "why", "when" and "how" in connection with academic and everyday life situations. She serves as a reviewer for key journals and conferences in Library and Information Science (LIS) like ASIST AM, CoLIS and ISIC, and her work, including collaborations, is published in core LIS journals and proceedings. Her research has contributed both conceptually and methodologically to the research field, but has also suggested new approaches to serving human users in informational situations. She currently teaches and supervises in user and information studies, interaction design, digital design and design thinking,
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Alison Hicks

Alison Hicks is Assistant Professor and Programme Director, Library and Information Studies at University College, London (UCL). Her research primarily focuses on how information literacy practices help people to cope with uncertainty, including risk and transition, within academic, health, everyday and work contexts. She is additionally interested in qualitative, visual and participatory information literacy research methods and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Literacy. With a PhD from the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås and an MSIS from the University of Texas, Austin, Alison worked as an academic librarian at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Inter-American Development Bank for ten years prior to taking up her position at UCL.
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Pam McKenzie

Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario
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Jenny Bronstein

Jenny Bronstein is an associate professor and the head of the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University (Israel). She received her PhD in 2006 from the Department of Information studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests are information behavior on different social platforms and of migrant communities, the role of information in life transitions, the use of social media as political platforms. Her research has been published in journals including the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Documentation, Library and Information Science Research and she has presented at international research conferences in the U.S. and Europe.
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Ian Ruthven

Ian is a Professor of Information Seeking and Retrieval in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. His research is focussed on the human experience of interacting with information, particularly on how people find information. This involves understanding how people seek information, designing appropriate interactive search systems, and developing human-focussed approaches for evaluating information systems. He has conducted this research in various contexts including health, migration, and cultural heritage. He is the author of, Dealing With Change Through Information Sculpting, a new book that uncovers how people respond informationally to major life transitions by examining our information behaviours – how we provide, seek, assess, share, use, deny, avoid, and create information – during times of personal change and explains the role of these behaviours in reconstructing ourselves following a life event.
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Gunilla Widén

Gunilla Widén is Professor of Information Studies and currently Vice-rector for Education at Åbo Akademi University. Her research focuses on information behavior, knowledge management, and aspects of social capital and knowledge sharing in groups and organizations. She has led several large research projects, e.g. on individual and organizational key skills in information society, Library 2.0, workplace information literacy, youth information, and trust in information in the context of migration. She has been involved in several collaborative networks both nationally and internationally, appointed as external expert in a number of different evaluation committees, and published widely in her areas of expertise.
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