Understanding online information experiences: simulated,personalized and epistemological

Abstract

This paper addresses the idea of having ‘information experiences’ in our information society, a concept that prevails in the business world but is under-explored in the sociological study of information. From the literature, I identify the three theoretical approaches to these experiences as simulated, personalized and epistemological, and adopt an interpretivist approach to explore how recent trends manifest. Simulated experience is closely related to ‘virtuality’, a concept developed in the early days of the internet, while personalized experience arises out of participation in social websites. Centring on the third, I use data from Yam's case studies on Wikipedia and further propose three factors that sustain the discursive environment of epistemological experience.