I am Privileged…
After reading Char Booth’s insightful article on information privilege, it provided me with the realization that there is another facet of privilege that I benefit from — the privilege of information (that I still undoubtedly paid for but my University willingly provides). This information privilege exists, and Booth almost claims that it is a moral obligation for librarians to make this known. I never thought about it’s existence until now. It seems that education and information are analogous with this term. I have the privilege of going on JSTOR and reading an article by using my Wake Forest student account. Some of my family members in Mexico do not have readily available access to this information. They do not have a large amount of data for wifi available in their area, furthermore it is difficult to access scholarly information because of cost. Therefore it is obvious to see that living in the USA and being a middle class citizen helps in attaining said information. How can I fix this? I don’t know…This is something I’m still confronting. Perhaps by editing Wikipedia with my own insight and knowledge I can help make education a tad more public? But I have yet to think about solving the issue for those who do not have access to the internet at all. Some of my family members are too busy working to even focus on the utilization of the internet — survival and the well-being of their children. I can “freely” (I’m using this word in careful context, because I doubt it is really free; I am, after all, paying for it through Wake Tuition) use scholarly articles and online databases like JSTOR and the ZSR library to research and find possible answers to research questions that interest me. I am educating myself with theses, concepts, and ideologies on a continual basis and to think that I took this privilege for granted. Something must be done…but what? This a concept far bigger than I can possibly fathom.
Works Cited:
Booth, Char. “On Information Privilege.” Weblog post. Info-mational. Wordpress.com, 01 Dec. 2014. Web. 21 June 2015. <https://infomational.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/on-information-privilege/>
Photo found at: http://www.mexperience.com/blog/?p=422.
