Circulation, disconnection, and the distribution of silence: An ethnography of information access in the global South

This thesis considers the dynamics shaping the contemporary information ecosystem and examines how humans experience information access in real-world settings. It looks through the window of libraries, knowledge institutions on the front lines of information and media access for diverse groups. This research is set within the global South, in Bhutan, Botswana, and The Bahamas. These three countries represent distinct global regions, are broadly considered “rich” compared to other Southern countries, and are situated beside a “big country” that wields strong influence on the “small country” neighbor.

Ethnographic methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews are used, collected through international fieldwork. Participant observation was conducted within nine diverse libraries (academic, school, and public), three per country. Qualitative interviews were completed with 115 informants recruited from the constellation of actors involved in producing, disseminating, consuming, and supporting information transactions. Informants included library workers and patrons, booksellers, publishers, and authors. Further data was gleaned from informal visits to bookshops, libraries, and publishing offices and from the embodied experience of “hanging around” in the fieldsites.

Findings suggest new and continuing inequities in the contemporary information ecosystem as it transitions to digital. This transition reconfigures ownership and control in ways congenial to neoliberal ordering and adverse to humans. Digital access is precarious across multiple dimensions and unevenly distributes costs, benefits, harms, and labour. Findings also suggest the limitations of benevolent projects, such as donation programs and the Open movement, intended to enhance equity of access. Conclusions propose that digital access impairs sharing, redirecting it to extractive channels, and drawing on the ecological metaphor of diversity loss, that the information future toward which are building, which prioritizes digital and marginalizes analogue formats, is a digital monoculture that is vulnerable to crisis and disruption.