Kierkegaard from The Corsair affair

My favourite parts of this little book were Chapter Three, which deals with the problem of embodiment and virtual social interaction, and Chapter Four, which deals with nihilism under the weight of the infinity of information on the Net.  I will talk about the second part first as the later ties in with something I am writing for a class I am auditing.

Dreyfus quotes heavily from Kierkegaard’s “The Present Age” which discusses the mass media of newspapers and its negative effects on culture.  Dreyfus quotes from Kierkegaard:

The Public is not a people, a generation, one’s era, not a community, an association, nor these particular persons, for all these are only what the are by virtue of what is concrete.  Not a single one of those who belong to the public has an essential engagement in anything.

The Internet allows people to comment and discuss everything without having to act on it.  Dreyfus does admit that for those who are engaging in social struggle in the real world, the Internet is an essential tool to help people socially organize and get their message out.  But discussions which are completely virtual are much less committed.  I thought immediately of those whose social action is limited to subscribing to causes on Facebook.

Becoming an expert, and putting one’s ideas into practice, requires risk and the possibility of failure.  But there is no commitment when only debating online.  As well, the endless triviality of the discussion online leads to the ultimate trivial discussion, talking about the Internet itself: how big it is, how it is growing, how new and profound it is.  Such talk has always disgusted me to no end.  From McLuhan to the present day, it distracts us from the more important task of critique and a desire to ask why we would want technology the way it is, and what the proper path is for us in the future.

Ultimately, the only way to stay engaged is in living what Kierkegaard calls an aesthetic existence.  Dreyfus says:

Such a surfer is curious about everything and ready to spend every free moment visiting the latest hot spots in the Web. He or she enjoys the sheer range of possibilities. For such a person, just visiting as many sites as possible and keeping up on cool ones is an end in itself.

Life consists in fighting off boredom by being a spectator at everything interesting in the universe and in communicating with everyone else so inclined. Such a life produced what we would now call a postmordern self — a self that has no defining content or continuity but is constantly taking on new roles.

Instantly I thought of my daily skimming of BoingBoing. This is not the first time I’ve been overwhelmed by the triviality of it all.  Every day there is a new wave of “Wonderful Things” made up of pop culture, nostalgia, middle brow science, and the occasional political comment.  The thing that always struck me was that I knew that none of these things would make an impact on me.  Regardless of whether I saved the link to any of them I would not look at them ever again.  I surely wouldn’t go back to them like I go back to Kierkegaard or Heidegger again and again.  I don’t mean to disparage BoingBoing, I am sure the writers take it very seriously.  But life on the Internet feels like BoingBoing: A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, ultimately. We are not really compelled to react to the flood, but only keep up with it.  This is Kierkegaard’s aesthetic commitment.

The third chapter of Dreyfus’ book deals with embodiment.  We forget how important embodiment is to our social interactions, and we’d like to think that virtual community can be as fulfilling, something else I’ve come to believe is not true.  I’ve been a lover of virtual communities ever since I dialed-up to an IBM BBS to find a driver for my broken computer when I was 12 or 13.  There were people talking on there!  Boy did I rack up a long distance bill.  But as I’ve overcome a lot of my own social anxiety, I’m reaching the conclusion that real social interaction, real talking and debate, watching of local sports or local artists, speaking to people as they walk down the street or sit on a park bench, these are much more important to the health of our society.  It seems like we are making more of a “connection” with people on Facebook, but ignoring the grocer who is an actual member of our actual community.

This ties into my paper for Information Ethics, where I hope to discuss the important of embodiment for ethics, building hopefully on Levinas.  This may be the source of the problem of ethics on the Internet, which is lacking if you read studies on racism in message boards.  I love not having to pay for this class and get a credit, because I can develop this argument without caring about deadlines.  If it takes me until the Spring I am going to write something I am interested in and proud of.

In conclusion, I have a message for those few regulars who read this blog.  You may have noticed my lack of “library” discussion.   I am much more interested in the essence of modern technology and what our phenomenological relation to it is.  So this blog is going to get more philosophical, even as it remains a discussion of technology in general and media technology in particular.  If this is interesting to you, feel free to continue your reading and comments.

The majority of the article is a good recap for those who haven’t been following the debate closely, but I specifically wanted to touch on two parts.

The first is her idea, which I believe is original because she doesn’t cite anyone, of “infogration”:

As well as trying to ensure that information is accessible to all, Google is involved in trying to make sure that people are accessing more and more information via the Web. Google has done this by pioneering a brilliant new model of business expansion, introduced here as infogration. Infogration is radically different from the traditional model of horizontal integration, which involves buying up competition, and vertical integration, which involves buying upstream and downstream industries. Infogration involves capturing different aspects of physical and social reality and representing them with digital information. In other words, infogration involves the integration of aspects of the world in to the medium of information into which targeted ads can then be placed.

Much more insidious than the regular process of horizontal and vertical integration, this infogration actually involves the gobbling up of our personal lives by corporations in the business of information. Our personal info, our thoughts and feelings, even our health records and genetic code. As Waller notes, one day we will see that we have the genetic marker for obesity and be targeted for weight loss ads wherever we search.

While I appreciate the social aspect of the Internet, it seems like you take any organic naissance of a means of social interaction, and sooner or later it gets sold out to the highest bidder just for the aggregate of information built up. YouTube is a prime example, but any of Google’s acquisitions would do.

The second discussion of Waller’s, and one I have begun thinking about a lot lately, is the differing concept of “information” used by Google in their business goal to organize the world’s information, and by Libraries as exemplified by the ALA’s mission statement.

However, how can these two uses of the information support such dissimilar goals: to make information accessible and sell advertising on Google’s part, and to support democracy on the part of public libraries. Waller quotes Roszak’s The Cult of Information: “‘A fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are “information”.’” She briefly discusses the modern use of the word “information”, and then writes in a very important passage the following (my emphasis):

Google is concerned with the free flow of digital information, information that is accessible anywhere anytime. In other words, Google is concerned with the form of the information. In contrast, public libraries aim to provide access to information in order to strengthen democracy. This requires a balanced flow of information and some sort of ordering of significance. In other words, libraries are concerned with the content of information. Google is only concerned with the content inasmuch as it is enables targeted advertising.

This quote explains exactly why I have been so dissatisfied with my colleagues in libraries, and what I believe the problem to be. With the rise of computer systems for accessing data, librarians have given up on their historical mandate of supporting democracy by not only supplying “information”, but by supplying the kind of information that will allow citizens to come to independent judgments and participate in a healthy democracy.

We have given up on trying to offer some balance, quality control, and yes, even ordering of information based on educated judgement, in favour of ever increasing flows of information, technological utopianism, and a willingness to let corporations solve our problems instead of using our own professional judgement.

But a recent post by Walt Crawford has got me thinking though (as usual), and that deserves more than a Tweet.  Entitled “We and Me“, he questions the mythology around new technology when people make statements such as

“We (all) are (or soon will be) connected to the internet all the time.” “We (all) are growing to prefer reading online rather than in print.” “We (all) use iPhones.”

And in comment which echoes everything I have been thinking about our profession for the last year, Walt writes:

The breakthrough recognition: It’s not false universalism. It’s elitism. “We” really means “the people who matter.”

Doesn’t make it any more right. Does make it a lot more understandable. Without that recognition, I’d have to believe that some We-ists are hard of hearing, hard of understanding or a bit daft: Surely they’re aware that their universal assertions are nowhere near being universal?

I think it is time we all took a step back and really thought about the universals that do apply to our work as librarians.  That everyone seeks knowledge, not just information.  All people desire to know, says Aristotle. And to know is more than to just be informed.  In terms of information theory, Fox News gives me “information”, but I don’t know if I then know more about the world except for the fact that Fox News is good for a laugh.

The related universal is education.  Everyone has a right to education, from birth until death. The education gap is different then an information gap.  Identifying an information need and then seeking it is very different then identifying an education need and filling it.

And lastly people need recreation.  All of these are coming from my enthusiastic reading of Bill Crowley’s Renewing Professional Librarianship.

The danger that Walt identifies, and I agree with, is that when blinded by one kind of universal–the myth of universal connectedness–we are missing the other universals.  That not everyone can even use a web browser, let alone Facebook, Twitter, and the like.  That not everyone has a cell phone, or if they do they can do anything beyond make calls.  The one benefit of my job is that I interact with users of all ages and skill levels.  Some people use the social features of the software I’ve implemented very well.  And yet the women down the hall from me can’t find the “Internet” because all she does is make icons for the few sites she uses, and clicks them from her desktop.

I don’t see this changing any time soon.  Even in the net generation.  My younger brother and sister, while both technologically savvy, are not these mythical users that people make them out to be.  My brother really dislikes social software.  And while my sister takes to it, I don’t see her doing library research from her cell phone.

The Internet is important, and is changing things.  But it doesn’t change the fundamentals, and I think sometimes that we are losing focus on what we are delivering when we look to much on how we are delivering it.

At the same time, I’ve become largely disillusioned by Internet culture. I don’t know if the rise of Twitter coincides in my apathy for social media, Web 2.0, and the hype around software in libraries. My Facebook page is as empty as a development of pre-Financial Crisis houses, with dead leaves blown from uncut lawns strewn around imitation hardwood floors in mansion-like houses.

People are beginning to speak of Twitter as if it is this tap into some collective consciousness. I can’t deny that some amazing things have been done with the medium. The troubles in Iran alone are enough to convince anyone. But it is not the actor of the story. It is not the miracle. It doesn’t shed blood. Or, to put in a another way, the French Revolution happened without Twitter.

Ever day around the world people are fighting a struggle for their lives, and it just seems a little shallow to be focusing on the golden halo around these technologies. In my current field, libraries, you’d think the computers were going to make every student successful. A student who doesn’t know how to write, and isn’t motivated to put serious time in studying, isn’t going to be graduated by a interacting with the library through Facebook. It will be done by the library unfolding the world of ideas before the student. By showing her all these wonderful creations and inviting her to make her contribution. By all means have a presence, but can we now talk about something else.

Or perhaps I am doing the wrong thing. Part of the stress of this writer’s block is trying to really figure out what I am interested in. In one sense I have had so much trouble reading, because every time I want to do directed research or reading on something I lose interest almost immediately.

On the other hand I do so much free reading. From the Dune series to histories of Modern China, from the poems of Charles Bukowski to Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of Criticism, my reading has been far and wide and completely at whim. Part of my writing has always been bound up in directed reading, and I don’t know how to connect such disparate inputs with my outputs, or whether they should be connected at all.

More than once I have thought about intellectual work in itself. Perhaps I would like to be chopping wood somewhere and reading books in my off hours. I was at a provincial park for a wedding the other week and I remembered my two wonderful summers at the park. In the mornings I would show up at 6 am. I made coffee in the cantina, stole a cookie from the jar, and listened to Weather Canada’s report on the marine radio information channel. I would then write the weather down–the wind speed, direction, forecast, etc–on a chalkboard by the boat launch, so boaters and fishermen could see it as they go. Sometimes I would cut grass all day on a robotic riding lawnmower. Often I would drive around in this rugged golf cart with six wheels, picking up picnic tables, moving barbeques, or jumping around the hills on the way to the beach.

To combine the two, I would really love to build a library from scratch. To physically build the shelves, finish the wood with my own hands, then select the books to fill them. It is a postcolonial colonialist dream to go over to other places to help “fix” them. But perhaps to give someone a library is to help them fix themselves. You know at one time in North America there was a libraries movement. It become the right of every democratic citizen to have access to a library. We give food aid, and we build schools and hospitals, but you never hear about libraries. Maybe it is because society has moved on. Once the wealthiest individuals donated their fortune to establish them. Now our governments can barely keep the lights on. Or the twitters tweeting.

On the one hand, I am a child of the computer generation through and through. I was on [Bulletin Board Systems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_Board_Systems) when I was 12. From there I upgraded to the text based [Hamilton Freenet](http://www.hwcn.org/) when the Internet first became accessible to a wider public. In elementary school I always followed around that one teacher who ran the network, and in high school I seriously considered studying computers in university.

But a few good teachers at the end of high school and I feel in love with academic subjects like English and History. Slowly over [OAC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Academic_Credit) and five years of a degree in Philosophy I became a reader and writer.

I always loved the reading more, and I now read much more widely than I every did, from Rousseau’s *[Confessions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Jean-Jacques_Rousseau))* to Milton Friedman’s *[A Monetary History of the United States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Monetary_History_of_the_United_States)*. But I never really have had a subject to write about that took up as much as my interest as hacking on a computer does. In many respects I think communication on the Internet can be shallow, pointless, and a waste of my mental energy, and I would much prefer being in a book. But I admit I am an Internet addict.

I think if I could help people—particularly those in academia—help one another find what they consider good and interesting, that would make me happy.

So I think I am seriously considering moving my focus to becoming something of a web or technology librarian. But not exactly. I think I have been progressing that way. [Copyright](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright), [Information Literacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_literacy), [Media Ecology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology), for me these all point to something: what is the Internet doing to those things that have been dominated by the success of printing technology, those being scholarship and learning.

The end. Right now I am touching up my CSS and HTML skills. And I am planning to write a paper on adapting this particular open source networking site in academia. Expect some design changes here soon.

I think that the profession’s adoption of the word information back hearkens to a time when academic libraries were managed gateways, and technology was a way to deliver this “stuff” called “information” as efficiently as possible. And, unfortunately, the notion that the library is in the information business is the source of the problems facing academic libraries today. Or at least the source under our direct control.

Instead of teaching, supporting learning, and fostering discovery, the old academic library focused simply on getting information into the hands of its users. Instead of creating a balance between physical space and virtual space, the old library saw technology as a license to focus on resources and not people. And instead of making connections between itself and the wider community, the library relied on the strength of its information to bring people through the doors.

Balancing our virtual and physical spaces

You might be surprised that I did not mention the Internet and digital technology itself as one of challenges. This is not because I don’t have a concern, but because I think all of us are pressing to innovate in this direction. And too often the library focuses on technology as a catch all solution to our problems. But what you get from talking to our newest students is that they don’t make the same distinctions we do. The Internet for them is not something world changing–it is their world. Apart from the ease of getting items while in their fuzzy pajamas, they don’t see the same revolutionary gulf between the physical and digital as we do. For them it is just space. Space for work, space for discovery, space for collaboration.

Studies like the wonderfully innovative ethnographic study of the University of Rochester library and our own experience will show the continued importance of library as place. In fact, students are packing every corner of our physical space, even as we cede the space once taken up by bulky encyclopedias. A supervisor of mine, giving me a tour of her newly renovated library, described how they had to hire student bouncers—like at some bar or a club—counting people in and out on one of those hand devices, because the building often reached capacity according to the fire codes. The day they opened, she told me, students were taking chairs right out of the hands of the staff unloading them. Despite the all hysteria, students are coming here. It is our job to make sure that all the spaces we create—both the physical and the virtual– are welcoming ones: enriching environments inspiring creativity and collaboration.

Balancing our teaching

And, because we’ve got them right where we want them, we have to make our environments of one academic excellence. For me, on top of all of the positive experiences I had in during my undergraduate degree, and all the insights I gained from inspirational classes, the true place of my learning was the library. The library is the place where students ultimately become active, independent, and lifelong learners. It is here where students are encouraged to be critical through the simple act of selecting one item over another item. Anyway… that’s the goal.

Our library instruction therefore has to go beyond the teaching of basic information and technology skills. We cannot just teach students how to search. We need to forge connections with departments and show each student how her discipline speaks and writes, how knowledge is created and transmitted, and what it means to be thoughtful and critical when completing research in that area. This falls under the broadest definition of information literacy. In the library we do not just teach subject knowledge, but teach students how to empower their own learning. That is, beyond technology, information literacy is learning how to learn.

Balancing the place of the library in the university

We cannot out innovate Google. We don’t have the money, and we don’t have the experts. And all of the superior resources in the world will not stand up to the growing control the corporate world is going to have over this stuff called information. So we cannot be about information. Okay, I’ll give in, we cannot just be about information.

The solution to this final challenge is really the solution to all three. It should be our job to use outreach, marketing, and advocacy to remind everyone in our community what I think they already know. Cicero called the library the soul of a house. When I call the library the heart of the university, it is not only because if its central location. The library supplies the lifeblood which sustains the university: ideas. As we make our all of our spaces ones which are student-centered, we should at the same time breaking down our walls to spread this message. We should be going to every corner of the campus, and to the places online where our students works and play, to promote the library as the place where ideas happen. As the place where the path of your life will be changed by the next book you pick up, the next digital exhibit you experience, or research discovery you make.

To be competitive in a world where it hits us from every direction, success is not just serving information then getting out of the way. We have to reach out to our community to impress upon that our business of ideas and knowledge and teaching and learning. Because the library has something that Google will never have: heart.

The wonderful [CBC Radio](http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ “Radio – CBC.ca”) show [*Search Engine*](http://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/index.html?copy-index “Main | Search Engine | CBC Radio”) has posted an [interview](http://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/blog/2008/06/jim_prentice_unlocked_the_sear.html “Search Engine | CBC Radio | Jim Prentice unlocked: the Search Engine interview”) with Minister Prentice ([MP3](http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/searchengine_20080619_6331.mp3)), where he hums and haws on a number of listener submitted questions.

Then the host Jesse Brown gets to the real issue with the law: while it allows for a number of different fair dealing rights, all of those rights are taken away by the fact that breaking any “digital lock,” digital rights management, or technical protection measure is a violation of copyright, regardless of the rights of the individual involved. This includes copying DRM’d CDs to your iPod, unlocking your phone to use overseas, or playing DVDs on Linux which requires an unauthorized decryption of some discs.

As Prentice is fighting to get off the phone, he comes out with the real motivation behind his copyright legislation: the free hand of the market will decide whether producers create works DRM’d up the wazoo, or whether demand will head towards unencrypted works which facilitate our legal rights.

I don’t want to say that the government grants us these rights. Copyright, the property right granted to creators as incentive for them to continue to create, is an *artificial* creation of society. Information cannot be owned, and the first pirates of the printing press will show. Society is gifting this right to creators, it is not inherent in their act of creation. So to say that the government is giving *us* fair use rights is incorrect: these are the rights we retain for ourselves. The right to quote for democratic and academic discourse. The right to make secure copies incase our original is destroyed. The right to enter interlibrary loan agreements. And the right to enjoy our purchased product in whatever manner we choose.

Prentice and the government sees a future where whatever freedoms we have with *our* cultural products are only those which are given by corporations, (or the “market”, as if a free and equal one exists). This is again the error of submitting what we hold as most dear to the logic of the market–add to this health care and education, which I am sure [Harper](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_harper “Stephen Harper – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) would love to get his hands on (or off).

Actually, perhaps Prentice is correct. Maybe the market will rule, and people will stop buying these goods from large companies, and go back to a time when individuals interacted directly with the artists and creators themselves. While this required one to be a travelling musician in the past, now all one needs is five thousand dollars of recording equipment and a pretty website to make money. And I don’t think those dinosaurs in business and government have understood that reality yet.

The first part of the book details that myth, from Marshal McLuhan to Alvin Toffler to Nicholas Negroponte. What I am enjoying right now is the second half, which goes on to show that other technological developments where lauded in their time with the exact same language that we use to describe the Internet.

Any of these quotes sound familiar:

The Telegraph

• “the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world.”
• “Our whole human existence is being transformed.”

Electrification

• “It is no longer a matter of choice whether or not one shall become acquainted with the general facts and principles of electric science. Such an acquaintance has become a matter of necessity. So intimately does electricity enter into our everyday life that to know nothing of its peculiar properties or applications is, to say the least, to be severely handicapped in the struggle for existence.” (does this call for Electronic Literacy anyone?)

The Telephone

• the harbinger of “a new social order”
• “a moral obligation for a considerate husband and a good citizen.”
• This would lead to an acceleration of democracy in politics and social life since we are all equals on the telephone.
• others welcomed the likely breakdown in class and family boundaries.

Radio

• “the greatest force yet developed by man in his march down the slopes of time.
• “a means for general and perpetual peace on earth.”
• “it has restored the demos upon which republican government is founded.”
• “Every home has the potentiality of becoming an extension of Carnegie Hall or Harvard University.”

Television

• “a torch of hope in a troubled world” (seriously!)
• will make “the attendance of classes in any one place…as obsolete as the buggy of twenty-five years ago”
• “television will usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth”
• The new medium was predicted to be so potent that writers began to speak of a “pre-television” era and admonished those who were foolish enough to cling to the “habits of thinking” that characterized this time as “trapped in another anachronism.” (Library 2.0?)
• “Television is no instrument of imperialism. It belongs to the people as does radio. It comes at a time in history when the world needs to have an eye kept upon it for the welfare of civilization.”
• Additional examples give new hope for community television in low-income areas, for direct contact with candidates for electoral office, and for a transformation in the quantity and quality of citizen communication with government officials.
• “an “information highway.”

What Mosco is arguing is that, sooner or later, all of these new technologies become banal. He notes at one point that the average home now has 8 radios. Where the telephone was once seen by people as some kind of mythological device, now we do not think twice about it. In the 1930′s television was to be this great democratic and educational tool–now we see it as exactly the opposite.

So too with the Internet. This honeymoon many of us are still having with the Internet, and certain sub-technologies on the Internet (Blogs/Tagging/Social Software will save the world!) will quickly come to the end as new youngsters cease seeing the technology around them as something sacred, but as something purely profane.

This has been all over the news here in Toronto, but I have not read about it in any of my feeds yet, which is weird given the rush to get libraries on Facebook.

Here is the story. Chris Avenir, a first year engineering student at Ryerson University, was charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct because he was the administrator of a Facebook study group for a chemistry class. The 147 stems from the fact that the group had that many students in it when the administration found out about it.

The school argues that, because the site of the group said “If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted,” and the 10 percent assignments were to be done individually, then he was soliciting cheating. Students and others argue that Facebook is only a virtual meeting place and is just the same as forming a face-to-face study group, which the university has implicitly allowed in similar circumstances as this.

The administration argues that cheating is cheating, regardless of where it happens. “This is being painted as a generational issue and it’s not,” said James Norrie, director of the Toronto university’s School of Information Technology. “We are not a bunch of old farts who are afraid of technology.”

Two Questions

First, should the student be expelled, considering 1. He did not start the group, but only took over its administration after a time; 2. No actual answers to any of the questions were posted, and it is my understanding that each student received a different assignment, so in actuality exact answers couldn’t have been posted anyway. 3. 147 counts? Just because there were that many in the group? Come on.

The second question is whether we should consider this cheating at all, or, does the defense of “it is only a virtual study group” hold up? Don’t have an answer, because I don’t know the motivation of every student, particularly Chris Avenir, and he should not be held accountable for the misconduct of every student. He didn’t “facilitate” cheating, like some college movie where the frat house steals the exam. If any one facilitated something it was Facebook itself.

Implications for Libraries

Some colleagues of mine at school were discussing the implications for libraries setting up a presence on Facebook. Should the school set up policies on virtual collaboration before hand (we thought that he was not guilty unless they has specified so before hand). What about the library setting up a Facebook group: is it important for us us to make sure that no dishonesty goes on in the forums? Do we need to establish explicit policy before hand?

If so, is it important for us to make sure no dishonesty goes on in our physical space? I think this must happen every day. So why is there a difference when we are somewhat responsible for the virtual space we set up? What is the theoretical difference between the two?

Update: If you want to rally for the student, ChrisDidntCheat.com

As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.

Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.

So I direct you all to read dive in to mark‘s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:

Act VI: The act of learning

If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Just to let you know, Library Five-0 is all about technology:

Some of the twopointopians claim that Library 2.0 isn’t just about technology, that it’s just the stuff librarians have always been doing, or would have been doing if they weren’t such evil librarians and we weren’t such good librarians. We know that’s malarkey, because if that was the case there would be no need to coin such a stupid phrase to describe something that is already going on. Unless of course the point is to coin a stupid phrase to make it seem like we’re doing something new when we really aren’t, which will allow a few of us to congratulate ourselves in a heated circle-blog and get ourselves invited to conferences so we can talk about all this stuff that’s old but that we’ve somehow made to seem new. No, wait, that’s getting too complicated.

In conclusion: “Remember, I’m right and you’re wrong, and if you disagree with me it’s just because you don’t get it and don’t love the library users as much as I do.”

Ah, AL, I’d present a paper about flashy shirts in the library at your L5-0 conference any day.

An insightful addition to the discussion:

I’m all for finding out what our users want and how they want to get it. I’m also for attempting to guide our users towards quality materials and services and I’m afraid that often Library 2.0 chastises librarians who hold this belief.

I don’t think this chastising is unique to Library 2.0, but it does crop up in a lot of the rhetoric so-called progressive librarians make and have made against so-called conservative librarians. We’ve heard it before in the Reader’s Advisory movement of the 1980′s: who are we to say what reading is good and bad. And now, who are we to say what information outlets are good and bad. We should, as they argue, give them what they want.

I wrote a recent essay examining which is more democratic, the imperative of the library to inform and educate its citizenry, or to give them the materials they request, because they have paid for them. It is a difficult balance to walk–I don’t know if my essay came up with a sufficient answer. Will post it later.

Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here’s what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of “human knowledge.” Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for “truth,” anyway? You go to an encyclopedia when you can’t remember whether it was Cortez or Balboa who killed Montezuma or when you want to find out which countries border Turkey. What normal people want from an encyclopedia is not truth but accuracy. And figuring out whether something is accurate or not does not require thousands of words of epistemological hand-wringing. If it jibes with the facts, it’s accurate. If it doesn’t, it ain’t. One of the reasons Wikipedia so often gets a free pass is that it pretends it’s in the truth business rather than the accuracy business. That’s bullshit, but people seem to buy it.

The encyclopedia is a reference source. And like I have said before, anyone who cites any encyclopedia at the end of a paper who is older than 14 needs to be reeducated. This is not a paper/digital distinction, but a “fact”/”knowledge” distinction.