The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis

Living in this never-ending digital world, we have a whole lot of information thrown at us nearly 24/7, 365. This can be crazy overwhelming, right! But now think of if you were lacking your iPhone or tablet, would you be as overwhelmed?

The answer I come to is: probably not. Without those devices, you don’t have as much access to the information that they hold. Could be a good break for those of us that are used to eye aches from constant blue light on our screens. But what about those that don’t have access? How do they know what’s going on in the world? How do they view popular media? How do they know which Kardashian is dating which NBA player this week? All jokes aside, the digital divide is no joke and it needs to be at the forefront of our minds in order to begin the bridge to equalized access to information technology.

This conversation started long ago and has been repeated in many forms throughout the years but there is one solution that many come back to, just increase the mediums and access to such information, and then more people must be able to get to it, right? No, wrong. And this is explained by a little theory known as the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis.

Let’s start with a definition of the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis and we’ll go from there. According to Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien in 1970, “KGH explains that increasing flow of information into a social system would be more likely to benefit groups of higher socioeconomic status than those of lower SES. Moreover, increasing the information available in the system would only exacerbate already existing differences between these groups.” (Viswanath et al., 2015). So what does all this mean? Essentially, there exists a big gap between higher and lower socioeconomic statuses. For many reasons, we can imagine. But in this case, we’re focusing on access to mediated information. This gap is the difference between who has access to the media and who doesn’t; a.k.a., those of lower socioeconomic status have little to no access to media information while those of higher SES have nearly full access. There have been many discussions regarding how to fix this over the last several decades. To some, the answer seemed clear; just increase the amount of media information as a whole and surely those of lower status would find their way to it. Sounds simple enough. If there’s enough information out there, all people must get to it at some point. But that’s just not the case.

In 1970, Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien set out to further figure out what was the deal with this big gap in society. They found that increasing the amount of information only makes the gap bigger while it was intended to equalize society. This occurs because those who initially didn’t have access to the information weren’t provided the channels to get to the information when it was increased. Essentially they were just missing out even more.

Now we know that the simple fix is rarely a long-term solution and this was clearly the same case with the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis. So now let’s discuss why this gap is there. There are many factors that go into separating socioeconomic statuses. The clearest are education and finances. But there are even more factors that are called into play when it comes to access to media content. One such factor is the nature of the topic. Depending on what the topic is, it will only reach the creator’s desired audiences and unfortunately, this often isn’t people of lower SES. Another factor is channel influence. Was the information in print in a newspaper or on a television commercial? Was it a Twitter ad or billboard? We can imagine that someone who is well off could easily have a TV or buy a newspaper or have internet access to scroll on Twitter. But those of lower socioeconomic status simply don’t have these resources available to them. Further factors include both individual-level variables and macro-level variables. At the individual level exists things like personal interest, concern, or salience to the information. If someone is struggling to pay the bills and is exhausted after working three jobs, they simply don’t have the time or desire to search out what the media is saying. They have bigger fish to fry. As for the macro-level, communities of lower socioeconomic status face troubles like social conflict, structural issues, systematic inequalities, and so on. We’ll save all of those issues for another time. But at the root of both levels is that those of lower SES simply don’t have the resources to get to the information. Whatever the reason may be, it is real and it is inhibiting, and increasing the amount of information in the world does nothing to fix systematic inequality issues that perpetuate the knowledge gap.

So what’s the answer? How do we get rid of this infamous gap? It doesn’t seem that there’s any straightforward solution sadly. The issue may seem simple at the surface level but, when we dig deeper into the root causes, we see that there is so much that needs to be fixed that who knows when it will actually occur. My hope is that by sharing this information with others and helping to educate them, the word will spread, and more and more people will realize that the collective whole working towards shrinking the gap may be the only way to fix it. As we know, there is strength in numbers.