Better than Google’: Information Activism for LGBTQ+ Young Adults in a Rural Community

DOI

For young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and those belonging to other marginalized sexual and gender identities (LGBTQ+), accessing information to develop one's identity and community is essential. Yet information and resource access is a particularly complex process for LGBTQ+ youth living in rural areas and small towns without dense, visible LGBTQ+ networks. While efforts to remove LGBTQ+ resources and demonize LGBTQ+ people intensify, this study asks a group of young LGBTQ+ adults living in and around a college town in the rural Midwestern United States to document their experiences with navigating information landscapes in low-resource settings. Despite the remarkable everyday creativity required to craft their information practices, participants' current efforts produce several vulnerabilities that make local queer information networks precarious and often inaccessible. We lay out several patterns in this data, including experiences of both connectedness and disconnectedness, the role of organizations in information sharing, and the existence of both active and passive information search. Building on prior research that found increasing demand for multi-modal access to relevant information that is digitally enabled, but deeply embedded in localized social geography and LGBTQ+ community, we use this data and complementary interviews to identify problem areas and potential interventions to strengthen rural LGBTQ+ young people's information access. In response to the informational needs and desires of LGBTQ+ youth in this community, we propose a series of imaginative designs. These speculative artifacts are embedded in local communities to strengthen grassroots webs of knowledge. We focus on contributing solutions that fall under three problem areas in participants' information ecosystem: increasing information stumbling, building expert capacity and support, and bridging the disconnected to the connected. We propose speculative conceptual designs that address core challenges in LGBTQ+ information networks, working in the tradition of ``information activism'' to create and maintain access to otherwise precarious and ephemeral resources and spark social change.