Taylor Swift is often described as one of the smartest business strategists in entertainment. From a sold-out and record-breaking global tour, she has become a case study in brand control, platform power, and audience loyalty. So, I used her as an example in my class at a private Canadian university. And almost no one knew who she was.
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Information privilege helps us see how access and visibility shape what becomes credible, legitimate, and shareable knowledge. It refers not only to unequal access to information, often structured by institutional affiliation, education, class, or social position, but also to unequal access to the means of making experience intelligible. In scholarly communication, this usually appears through paywalls, subscriptions, databases, and prestige economies. Yet information privilege also operates through language. As discussions from the Association of College & Research Libraries have suggested, access to information is inseparable from access to the systems that authorize what counts as legitimate knowledge.
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For decades, English has been a lingua franca in the research community, where it has become the principal language for publishing and conferences. But when one main language is used to share information, knowledge of this language is also needed to access information. In this way, English has become linked to information privilege: people who have mastered English can access scholarly information more easily than people who are less comfortable in this language. This has ripple effects, influencing the extent to which scientists can participate fully in scholarly communication. While the problems are clear, the solutions are trickier.
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The systems, tools, and practices developed by Big Tech and academic publishers that we use daily in our personal and professional lives have created inequitable and unjust information environments and societies. This is due to the concentrated power, extreme wealth, and influence in the hands of the few.
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“Transgender” is no longer a foreign word in the Philippines, nor are transgender Filipinos allowing discrimination to hold them back. Though LGBTQIA+ minority groups in the Philippines are still seen as “deviant, immoral, or even illegal” by the wider population, transgender Filipinos do not let that stop them from thriving. Instead of relying on traditional sources of information and risking intolerance from Filipino society, they create, recreate, and distribute information they’ve made themselves for both education and community solidarity.
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As a librarian (occasionally practicing) and a practicing physician, I often encounter workplace issues that would be better resolved with a little perspective from the information field. Problems, such as the need to search for reliable information in order to treat a particularly challenging medical case, are commonplace. This can be a frustrating but fascinating experience, as I, being an information professional, have some intrinsic knowledge of the issues that make solving these problems a challenge.
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As generative AI tools move into library makerspaces, they do more than draft metadata or translate text—they reflect the power structures embedded in the spaces where they are deployed. Without intentional design, we risk automating the very inequities libraries seek to dismantle.
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War has always been a theatre of speed, strategy and chaos but today, the performers are changing. No longer confined to generals, pilots and analysts, artificial intelligence has marched into the war room and pirouetted across screens and networks with a poise that is terrifying and exhilarating. As Craig Jones, a lecturer at Newcastle University, notes, AI now compresses the “kill chain,” shrinking the time from target identification to destruction in ways almost unimaginable in previous conflicts. In essence, bombs can drop faster than the speed of thought.
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Information privilege is usually framed as unequal access to journals and databases. But place-based research in Tondo shows it also shapes which cities become legible in scholarship, how Urban South communities must be narrated to be publishable, and who benefits from the knowledge produced. Drawing from fieldwork in Isla Puting Bato, this essay traces how information, visibility, and authority are distributed, and offers practical ways scholars can help research travel back across paywalls, institutions, and languages.
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This is what information privilege looks like in practice: the ability of some people to access information that others cannot, shaped by affiliation and economic context. It also shapes visibility in which work becomes easy to find, cite, and treat as “authoritative.” The ACRL Framework’s “Information Has Value” frame invites us to examine how information is embedded in economic and social systems, and how unequal access influences what counts as legitimate and trustworthy knowledge.
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