Conference Overview
 The 2012 Information Fluency Conference will be held March 14-16, 2012 and will feature a keynote address, plenary sessions, and concurrent sessions with presentations on the various aspects of Information Fluency. This year’s theme is “Information Fluency & the Digital Divides.”
Over the past twenty years, the digital divide has been studied, discussed and chronicled. The concept of the digital divide appeared in the 1990s and is conventionally understood in terms of access to and usage of digital technologies: “unequal access to technologies or digital exclusion at an international as well as at a local level” (Cammaerts and Van Audenhove, 2003:7). In 2001 Everett M. Rogers said in his work, “The Digital Divide”, that “The digital divide is the gap that exists between individuals advantaged by the Internet and those individuals relatively disadvantaged by the Internet” (2001 7:96). The digital divide seems to be a simple dichotomy between the “information haves” and “information have-nots” (Wresch, 1996).
Ten years later in Media, Culture & Society, Dr. Panayiota Tsatsou wrote, “A worldwide debate has taken place in the last two decades about the digital divide and its constituents, as well as its dimensions and variations in the different contexts in which it emerges. In this article, I refer to ‘digital divides’ throughout the text, since I argue that many different aspects and forms of divides co-exist today” (2011 33:317). We have moved from a seemingly simple issue of access to a complex examination involving governments, politics, gender, income levels, race, location, and disability.
This year we will examine the digital divides from various disciplines and perspectives. Possible topics for presentations include:
- User generated tagging vs. mechanized information retrieval
- Politics of information
- Physical, political, cultural, and social access to the Internet
- Information seeking behaviors
- Global Information
- Revisions of library space and function
- Meta thinking about technology
- Digital rhetoric
- Role of political institutions in diffusing technology
- Technology, resources and skills necessary for digital citizenship
References
Cammaerts, B. and Van Audenhove, L. (2003). Dominant digital divide discourses. In:
B. Cammaerts, et al. (Eds), Beyond the digital divide: Reducing exclusion, fostering inclusion 7-14 Brussels: VUBPress.
Wresch, W. (1996). Disconnected: Haves and have-nots in the information age. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
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Key Dates
February 3, 2012
Early Bird Registration Deadline
March 14 - 16, 2012
Conference
Conference Committee Members |
