Accesso Libre: Equity of Access to Information through the Lens of Neoliberal Responsiblization

Text Exploration

In this text, the author explores the idea of “equal access to information,” and how this goal shifts focus towards ensuring people have equal computing access, rather than questioning why they don’t have it in the first place; the gap is typically filled by private corporations, and the author examines this neoliberal approach through a case study. Ultimately, the author argues that “equity of access” is not a valuable lens through which to understand how people are offered meaningful ways to engage with information and technology, because the lens implicitly accepts that inequity from the state should then be solved by contributions from private corporations, and individuals themselves should bear responsibility for navigating market dynamics that they did not create and do not need.

Neoliberalism refers to a view of society, politics, and economics grounded in free-market ideals. It is a promise that people can be liberated from oppression through positive economic engagement. It implicitly shifts responsibility for societal problems from the government to the market, which itself then shifts responsibility to individuals engaged in the market: it creates “responsibilization,” which is the “shifting of collective economic burdens onto subjects via moral language.”

Access can be thought of as the collective stance on how and why people should interact with information (typically via computation). This is based on a perspective that information is a “vital good” and that it is required to live; this places an ethical burden on providing access. Access becomes a container for the larger idea of proximity to information, and shifts the focus away from root-cause (why people didn’t have proximity to that information to begin with). The author argues that a neoliberal perspective is undemocratic and deceptive; it is not just an ideology, but also becomes policy arranged around free-market engagement. Philosophically, this policy “aspires to liberate autonomous, rational actors from interference by overactive state planning” and a core feature of the policy is responsibilization of individuals for how the social system works.

The author supports this argument through an ethnographic research example. The study investigated a public/private partnership called Accesso Libre, which was going to offer computer and information literacy classes in South Los Angeles. Foreshadowing the implications of the study, the author leads by explaining that the class he attended was “The first (and final) Acesso Libre class.” Made up of only 12 adults, the class did not attract enough participants to continue, and more importantly, those who attended did not return. This is because they had no use for the informational access that was provided to them; the urgency with which others perceived their lack of access did not reflect their reality: “none of them had any self-identified information needs that could be made intelligible to the instructor.” Simply, they had no need for computing-based informational access.

The case illustrates not only that a goal of access was misinformed and applied without meaningful understand of the audience; it also shows, through omission, that the program did “not engage with any exploration of power relations that might trouble it.” This responsibilization is made up of three dynamics at work.

The first dynamic is the reduction in public, government-supported welfare expenditures, which produces an artificially induced (but real) environment of “economic austerity.” This gap is then filled by corporate sponsors, such as Google (who provided financial support to the example provided above), and “valorizes particular commercial products.”

The next is a burden and expectation placed on communities, one that positions adult informational literacy and education as a moral duty.

The last dynamic is the market metaphor of self-sufficiency, which shifts a majority of the burden of skill acquisition to the individual themselves, positioning “lifelong learning as a virtuous behavior” but ignoring deskilling and other market forces that make this ongoing learning required for self-sufficiency.

The author concludes that “access means capture”—that claiming someone has a right to access allows the market-driven forces to operate, and implicitly approves the private nature of engagement in providing that access. Neoliberal theory provides clues to understanding this phenomenon, and interrogating and critiquing these theories are ways to discuss and better understand power.

It is unclear why we are reading this in the Qualitative Research Methods class, but it's a great paper...