Down the rabbit hole: Investigating disruption of the information encountering process

Abstract

Information encountering (IE) often occurs during active information-seeking and involves passively finding unsought, unexpected information that is subjectively considered interesting, useful or potentially useful. While the idealized IE process involves engaging with information after noticing it (e.g. by examining it, conducting follow-up seeking to determine usefulness, then using or sharing it), the process can be disrupted -resulting in missed opportunities for knowledge and insight creation. This study provides a detailed understanding of when and why the process can be disrupted. Thinkaloud observations and Critical Incident Interviews were conducted with fifteen Web users, focusing on examining when they encountered information but did not engage with it. Factors that discouraged engagement and simultaneously encouraged participants to return to active, goal-directed informationseeking by disrupting the IE process were identified. These factors individually and collectively demonstrate IE can instigate a highly uncertain cost-benefit trade-off, sometimes resulting in encounterers being cautious by returning to 'less risky' active seeking. Design suggestions are made for reducing the uncertainty of deciding whether to engage with encountered information and making it easier to return to the active seeking task if disruption occurs.

Information encountering re-encountered

“…This is analogous to their ability and willingness to notice, examine and follow-up on encountered information. She found that some participants were much less willing to “change direction” than others after encountering information – a finding supported more recently by Makri and Buckley (2019). Personality traits, specifically extroversion (Heinström, 2006; McCay-Peet et al , 2015), have been found to increase this willingness, while stress and anxiety have been found to decrease it (Heinström, 2006).…”

“…This is a simple, yet powerful way of distinguishing between active and passive information acquisition and may also serve to unify terminology if adopted by the research community as a preferred term for serendipity in the context of information acquisition. We also think IE is a particularly appropriate term as it was one of the first serendipity-related terms to be created in the field of HIB (Erdelez, 1995) and is still used to frame and motivate current studies of passive information acquisition (e.g., Jiang et al, 2019;Makri and Buckley, 2019).…”

“…It is also possible for IE to occur when passively acquiring rather than actively seeking information. This can be as a “tangent to a tangent” during another encountering episode (chains of information encounters were noticed in Makri and Buckley, 2019). It can also be as a result of other forms of passive “lean back” information acquisition (Lindley et al , 2012).…”

“…We also think IE is a particularly appropriate term as it was one of the first serendipity-related terms to be created in the field of HIB (Erdelez, 1995) and is still used to frame and motivate current studies of passive information acquisition (e.g. Jiang et al , 2019; Makri and Buckley, 2019).…”

Search a Great Leveler? Ensuring More Equitable Information Acquisition

“…While this form of serendipitous information acquisition often occurs during active search, this is as an unintended byproduct (Makri et al, 2014). Search environments typically support passive information encountering indirectly and incidentally; as an unexpected but often welcome distraction to the search at hand (Makri & Buckley, 2020), but a distraction nonetheless. Although recommender systems, including those that drive personalized search, now value search result novelty and diversity as well as relevance (Castelis et al,2015), search is still better suited to active seeking than passive encountering.…”