Information worlds of Chinese farmers and their implications for agricultural information services: a fresh look at ways to deliver effective services

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the major characteristics of Chinese farmers’ information worlds with a view to shedding light on new approaches to improving agricultural information services. “Information world” is defined here as a concept to describe individuals and their aggregates rather than social environment; it refers to the space-time-cognition delimited life sphere of an individual in which he/she obtains information and communication utilities from components of Popper’s worlds 1, 2 and 3 through intentional, conscious and involuntary information practices that are performed by him/her as an information creator, provider, transmitter, seeker, receiver and/or user. The characteristics of farmers’ information worlds are examined using this concept as a framework and the interview survey of 83 farmers in a northern Chinese county as empirical evidence. The study shows that these farmers’ information worlds appear to be highly limited in all its spatial, temporal and cognitive dimensions and are dominated by involuntary information practices sporadically performed in the process of doing non-information activities, which render only a very small proportion of resources made available in rural China actually accessible from within their information worlds. Consequently, when there is a need for information, these farmers seem to have very few resources to utilize. Based on these findings, this paper advises agricultural information system designers and service providers to inform their product design with knowledge of farmers’ information worlds, particularly knowledge about how these worlds redefine the accessibility of information and how this redefinition sharply reduces the range of information that is useful to farmers.

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