Information Privilege
The role of privilege represents a significant factor in daily life. This privilege can manifest itself into a variety of benefits, but when it’s broken down to its core it really relies upon advantages and opportunities that some people will have by default. This dynamic is widespread, but can be specifically seen within the realm of information. We live at a phenomenal time in regard to accessing information. Any of us can wake up and on a whim find information about any single event in human history in seconds. Often, we take this premier access for granted; not realizing the billions of people who do not have this luxury. Even for individuals who have this privileged access to a computer and internet, they are still restricted from accessing all the information the internet has to offer. I refer to databases of scholarly articles.
Let’s say you go to a high school that has fallen under the unfortunate burden of being overlooked by taxpayers. As a result, the school can no longer afford access to scholarly journal databases which are enormously expensive. Now, say that you have to write a paper on the economy of a Central Asian nation. Most of the countries have relatively low populations without widespread research, and you can’t cite Wikipedia on a research paper. So what can you do? In order to access a single article of a journal database you might have to pay upwards of $40. At a different school, a student of equal talent and ability has access to this research because of her schools ability to afford it, and is able to learn more and write a significantly better paper than the other student.
This is a dynamic at schools like Wake Forest that we sometimes forget about. As students we have access to essentially every academic database you could ever need for undergraduate studies, including subscriptions to magazines such as Tetrahedron which can charge up to $40,000 annually in subscription fees. I’ll admit, I take this access for granted. I’ll complain about having to do extensive research for a project and completely forget to appreciate the fact that I have access to the best of academic resources that only a minority possesses. This puts me at a significant advantage to able to gain a more in-depth understanding of a topic to produce better quality academic work. That is privilege. This is a privilege that definitely can and should be confronted. One could argue that the purpose of science is to discover new things and share these things with other people. What good is science, especially publicly-funded research if you must be part of the economic or academic elite to access it? We as a society must address this and incentive the use of public money to ensure the affordable publishing of research for as many people as possible to access.
