The Information Dam: How Majority-World Communities Restrict the Flow of Information

It is hardly a novel concept to compare how information travels from source to source to a stream. Indeed, it has become even more popular with the rise of the internet, with the phrase “information stream” becoming commonplace. Ideally, this “stream” would be able to flow to and fro with little to block its path. However, this is far from the case. In the current field of LIS, the flow of information is skewed sharply in the favor of the minority world at the detriment of the majority world (terms coined by David Hudson in his article “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: used to represent what is commonly known as First World countries and Developing countries respectively). These dams in the information stream exist to give minority world communities control and centrality over majority world communities by limiting what information they receive, controlling what information is deemed important, and creating false information about these communities. These tactics are built from and continue to perpetuate racist ideas of superiority that have been at play for centuries and continue to hide under the notion that “information” is a neutral term that cannot be influenced or subjective. By examining the three impact points where the flow of information starts to drip and how they currently work to undermine information flow to the majority world, we can find ways to shift the control away from the minority world to the majority world and create a more flowing information stream.

 

Starting at the beginning of the information stream, the first control dam we encounter is when information created by majority worlds enters minority world spaces. There are two ways this information can be controlled by the minority world. The first can be when the information is stopped from entering the space. This can be seen in Ghaddar’s article “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory”, where she highlights how the Society of American Archives failed to endorse and incorporate the Protocols for the Native American Archival Materials, a manual primarily created by indigenous collaborators. By refusing information from a majority world community, the minority world continues to hold control over how they handle archival protocols for indigenous archival materials. This has led to inhumane practices such as withholding the bodies of indigenous members from their communities and the preserving of materials that should by indigenous standards be destroyed.

Another way that information from the majority world may be controlled while entering the minority world is if it is taken without consent. An example of this would be the taking of the Iraqi Baath Party records to the USA. This removal of information deprives Iraq of valuable information about its ancestry, and limits access by restricting who has access to it. It also plays off an existing idea that majority world communities are not worthy of taking care of their own information, as they do not understand the importance of it. This idea was recently displayed when the British Museum condemned the Egyptian Museum for the botched repair of King Tutankhamun’s beard on his burial mask, heavily implying that the Museum was incapable of caring for the artifact, and idea that the British Museum used to validate their withholding of artifacts from other majority world communities.

 

After the initial information dam, what meager information from the majority worlds passes to the minority worlds has to contend with the second barrier in the information flow; information that is created about the majority world in house by the minority world. The first example of this that comes to my mind are the treaties that were written during the “Age of Discovery” by Western Europeans that ranked other peoples by how “barbaric” they were. Cultures that were more like the Europeans in terms of government, religion, and economics were seen as more “civilized barbarians”, whereas cultures that structured themselves differently to the minority worlds were seen as “savage barbarians”. This creation of cultural stereotypes was perfected with the idea of the Oriental, as seen in Edward Said’s book Orientalism, where false and imagined images of the Middle East, Indian sub-continent, and the Far East were constructed by Imperial nations to validate their own superiority over these areas. This was done by creating images that evoked fear (Arabs as seen by the United States post 1970’s), submissiveness (Oriental women by Britain, France, and the United States), and a multitude of other sentiments, but the common denominator was they were all seen as inferior traits to the Imperial nations.

By boiling the image of a country or people to a one-dimensional stereotype such as enemy, overly emotional, or submissive, minority worlds were able to validate any action they may take against these groups that would be unethical in other cases because they know better. This can further alienate the information coming from the majority worlds as they are seen as not being entirely factual, as they are coming from inferior sources, and this perception is extremely difficult to shake. As a personal example, even though I have had a loving and  healthy relationship with a man from the Middle East for over 6 years and have gone to great lengths to disillusion my family to the dangerous stereotypes that the US has propagated about his home country, my mother is still fearful that I will be taken away and forcefully converted to Islam. The stories she hears that perpetuate the narrative the US has created feel more factual and accurate than the testimonies we tell her that come directly from the country in question.

 

The final dam that information must cross to complete its journey is the return home to the majority world, where the perils it faces come in two-fold. The first peril it must navigate around is destruction. The minority world can and will destroy information to keep it out of other hands, just ask the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) when the Canadian government ordered the destruction of the majority of Indian Residential Schools (IRS) records, thus hindering the TRC’s mission to preserve the memories of what occurred in Residential Schools across Canada. While this was done in the name of privacy, given the TRC had to file suit three separate times to gain access to these documents leads one to a more cynical conclusion.

The other peril that must be avoided is the twisting of information to suit the needs and objectives of the minority world it is leaving. This could be as simple as an increased emphasis on a specific notion or added weight or incentive to adapt a new perspective. One example that springs to mind is the Uganda AIDS epidemic; during the 90’s and early 2000’s, Uganda made great strides in reversing its AIDS epidemic through promoting the ABC’s; abstinence, be faithful, and condoms. However, during the mid-2000’s, the US helped fund AIDS prevention strategies in Uganda, but only promised the funds if they dropped the C in their ABC’s model. This was done to appease Evangelical Christians. By dropping the safe-sex aspect of their ABC model, Uganda’s epidemic started to grow again post 2005, with fewer than 8% of men who had sex with multiple partners not using condoms. By manipulating what information was deemed important through the incentive of funding, real harm was caused to Ugandans that would otherwise not have happened.

After looking at the tumultuous journey of the information stream, we see that the need for information control has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that builds off a racist, xenophobic history. By slowing the information flow to a drip to and from majority world countries, the narratives the minority world creates can manifest and reinforce the control the minority world has on a global scale. What needs to happen is a shift in control from the minority world to the majority world, and it can start by tearing down the dams in the information flow. We can accept and incorporate information from majority world communities about their information, we can travel to their communities to study their information instead of taking it for ourselves and acknowledge that they know the significance of their artifacts better than we do. We can accept the narratives they have about their communities and recognize that our values are not the universal (and that determining if something is more civilized by how “logical” it presents itself is an incredibly harmful and incorrect idea). We can give information when asked for such as returning of stolen artifacts and not attach caveats to said information like the US did with aid to Uganda. These seem like very obvious steps to make, but in doing so we can greatly shift the control over information away from minority world groups to create a better flow of information.

 

Resources:

1.     Hudson, David J. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies.” Information Studies, n.d., 19.

2.     Ghaddar, J. J. “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory.” Archivaria, December 2, 2016, 3–26.

3.     Caswell, Michelle. “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records.” Edited by Mary Pugh. The American Archivist 74, no. 1 (April 2011): 211–40. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.4185u8574mu84041.

4.     Small, Zachary. “Push to Return 116,000 Native American Remains Is Long-Awaited.” The New York Times, August 6, 2021, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/arts/design/native-american-remains-museums-nagpra.html.

5.     “Tutankhamun: Egypt Museum Staff Face Trial over Botched Beard Job.” BBC News, January 23, 2016, sec. Middle East. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35392531.

6.     Said, Edward W., and Wolfgang Laade. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

7.     Murphy, Elaine M, Margaret E Greene, Alexandra Mihailovic, and Peter Olupot-Olupot. “Was the ‘ABC’ Approach (Abstinence, Being Faithful, Using Condoms) Responsible for Uganda’s Decline in HIV?” PLoS Medicine 3, no. 9 (September 2006): e379. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030379.

8.     aidsmap.com. “‘ABC’ Prevention Is Becoming ‘AB’ in Uganda, Thanks to US Influence against Condom Use, Says Report.” Accessed January 9, 2022. https://www.aidsmap.com/news/mar-2005/abc-prevention-becoming-ab-uganda-thanks-us-influence-against-condom-use-says-report.

9.     Kron, Josh. “In Uganda, an AIDS Success Story Comes Undone.” The New York Times, August 3, 2012, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/world/africa/in-uganda-an-aids-success-story-comes-undone.html.