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

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.

Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.

Hooked? Stay around for the conclusion.

I just wanted to comment on a statement by Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk, hosted on LibraryCrunch.

I come to this post with an ever expanding knowledge of Information Literacy and designing instructional programs and of reading about the research habits and information behavior of users (admittedly, academic library users). I also am learning a lot about how to advocate for change in my Library Advocacy class. Of course, I have a lot more to learn, too.

So I can’t help but agree with this statement:

Energy focused on implementing new tools and programs is wasted if we don’t know what our users really want. Without knowing that, we create more work for ourselves with hit or miss initiatives.

Which is great! Although I can’t really stomach the opening statement: “We know what Library 2.0 is and is not.” That statement itself seems a little counter-intuitive, given that it is supposedly about being open, flexible and user-centric. I think opening a debate about some of the things that Library 2.0 may or may not be is much more productive over saying “We know (period)”.

“Library 2.0 is not just about technology,” say Casey and Savastinuk. Which is a fine attitude to have–although I am of the camp that believes if it is not technology, it is really just librarianship. If what is left of the concept is user-centrism, change and evolution, and politics, then librarians who do not do these things are bad librarians. Good librarians have always been user-centric. They were user-centric in the “public education” era of the library, where they suggested books at “the people’s university.” They were user-centric when they began to offer readers’ advisory of popular fiction, when that came in demand.

However, the solutions proposed by Library 2.0 are mostly about technology. Casey and Savastinuk agree: “No matter how much this is said, technology continues to be a leading topic of discussion.”

And why is that? Because technology gets visible results quickly and cheaply. People believe that the library is missing a certain segment of the population–or perhaps it is that a certain segment are missing the library? Regardless, librarians want to do something. So they start a blog (without questioning if the missing population reads blogs) or they have a wiki (without questioning if there is a demand for a wiki) or a Second Life presence (without questioning whether there are people looking for their library on SL).

I completely agree with Casey and Savastinuk: we focus too much on solutions before understanding the problems. And I think that suggesting these technological solutions is specifically not user-centric in this case. Suggesting technologies is librarian centric. The problem is that proponents of LIbrary 2.0 rely too little on empirical research about what users need and about their perspectives. Giving them technologies is telling them what they want, not giving them what they need. The solution librarians always suggest is more technology. And the suggestion they rarely suggest is to slow down and listen to people.

I am not wholly qualified to give study suggestions. But let’s look at some. What does the Making Cities Stronger (2007) study say: libraries need to improve literacy and school readiness, train people for the workplace, and assist small businesses with their information needs. In my own specialty, what do university students need? Information literacy instruction. Students cannot tell the different between Google, the catalogue, and periodical databases. They cannot find and evaluate information. Faculty tell us they cannot formulate a thesis.

The problem is that collection development for marginalized groups, expansion of electronic holdings, hiring of roving reference librarians, the development of information literacy instructional classes appropriate for the community we are serving–all of these cost major amounts of money. I am all for all of the things that people suggest for Library 2.0 solutions, save a very small number. However, if we think that these stop-gap solutions are worthy of a 1.0–>2.0 revolution, we have to look at the studies around us and see what our users really need.

A quote from Library Garden:

But how did we get to this stage? Why do we have professional librarians who refuse to keep up with the professional and technological requirements? How did we reach a point where the patrons’ needs were less important than the traditional way of doing things? All along, the job of a reference librarian has been to find the information patrons need. We are in the business of connecting people to the information they require… so why care about the format that information is found in?

My reply brings up a lot of issues I have been realizing about Library 2.0 and librarianship in general.

Of course we should always keep up with the times. Librarians have always been seen as the avant-garde of information technology (even beginning with the codex).

I think the real danger is to see technology as the complete solution. Patrons not coming to the library: must be because there is no Flickr group. Reference service stats down: must be because IM reference is so horrible, or non existent. Teenagers choosing Google over books: we need a Second Life presence.

There is a problem in society and culture right now where people choose cheap and easy information satisfactions over long, difficult but ultimately more enriching ones. True, we should use technology to fulfil the later, but it is not going to do the work for us, nor solve all of our problems.

Sometimes people just can’t have it cheap and easy. And the library has to keep promoting the hard and rewarding path and instruct (gasp!) patrons as to why that path is rewarding.

The first thing to admit: maybe Internet culture is not that good.

I’ve been part of this “information revolution” since even before the Internet. When I was young I caught the tail end of BBSing. I can remember when the bulliten boards began offering the option to connect to the graphical world wide web. After that I signed up for my local Freenet, and here I am.

In that time I have seen hundreds and thousands of cool webpages. Some of them artistic, hip, kitschy, nostalgic, historical. Some of them I can remember, although I don’t visit them at all anymore. Like the great flash essays with jazz soundtracks from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. And Postsecret is very nice, and I liked Exploding Dog when I first discovered it. These are only ones off the top of my head. I must have viewed tens of thousands of webpages which I thought were original, thought provoking or just plain fun. Part of the reason why I cannot list them all is the motivation behind this post.

I read boingboing religiously. Could I name one thing the editors have discovered this week without browsing to the website? No, although there are some generally cool things, and some things that are very original and artistic. I have a del.icio.us account. However, things tend to go in and never come out again. Why is that? Lack of appropriate tagging, or lack of a desire to every look at things twice? To be honest, I think people spend more time deciding on tags then the average amount of time they look at entries twice.

So let’s just have it out: Internet culture is just not up to snuff. Take all these webpages I have experienced–are any of them worthy comparisons with human creations of the “real world”? I am not even making comparisons to Homer, Dante or Shakespeare here. I like re-reading Stephen King much more often then revisiting the majority of “static” webpages (i.e. not social networking sites or message boards, which work on a paradigm of dialogue and not publishing. And not sites like Wikipedia, which are works of reference.)

I debate this within myself because I do not want to be a snob. I really think mash-ups should be considered art. I do think that the Internet allows everyone (with access to a computer) a voice to create, and presents a platform for creations which would not be possible in real space.

And yet, why would I feel the need to re-read a book, but I feel no need to check in on You’re the man now dog after that original 30 mins of hilarity. How many hundreds of YouTube videos have I watched once and never again?

Anticipated counter-argument: the paradigm of the Internet is different. It is ephemeral in its very nature. It is more akin to the unrecorded oral culture of the past and is not suited to the static paradigm of manuscript and print.

I don’t know about that, because while the creations of oral cultures were lost with each retelling, through their repetition and transmission they gained novelty and were slowly improved. Stories were told over and over, and people religiously listened to them because each telling was a new experience, either through additions to the story, or reinterpretations, or just the skill of the teller. Musical pieces were constantly worked over, passed on and blended with other styles.

I believe that essays (if that is what I can call this) should never hold definitive answers. I could change my mind tomorrow if I wrote this again. But right now I would much rather reread any one of my books, listen intently to a nice jazz or classical album, or study intently some great paintings over re-loading some website. The Internet may be great for inherently dialogue oriented applications, but we have to question its importance in many respects.

Why do spend endless time on here then? Because it is easy and it makes me lazy.

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.

Earlier today while working in the library I was listening to a podcast of CBC’s Ideas. It is hard to describe to American friends and colleagues the love many Canadians have for the CBC, but I guess I wouldn’t get NPR as well. You know you are becoming an older member of the Canadian intellectual class when you stop listening to pop music and just tune into CBC radio all day.

In any event, this first part of a two part episode was on the sociologist Richard Sennett, who I had never heard of but had some very interesting ideas about public space and why modern western culture has such a hard time with it. He is influenced by Jane Jacobs, amongst others, and I think I see his work as Jacobs with a lot of historical and cultural studies to support him.

What he was saying is that our level of publicness and privateness can be seen from the little cultural rituals and gestures we preform, and that this level changes throughout history. A lot of the loss of healthy public space he attributes to the influence of early Christianity. He is particularly worried about the fear most westerners have when confronted by a stranger for no good reason, and our particular horror if we were ever to be touched on the wrist or shoulder by a stranger who is looking to talk to us.

But in the 18th Century, or in the Arab world, this is a totally normal occurrence; in fact, in these cultures one goes out of their way to make physical contact before speaking. Similarly, in the 18th Century it was common for women to entertain people while in bed, in the sense of have men and women over, inviting them in as she was getting up, drinking coffee and talking while she brushed her hair or wrote letters. The concept of the bedroom as private space is a creation of the Victorian era (whose prudish attitudes wrecked many, many things in my opinion). Or even the bath, which is the epitome of private personal space, is not so in many cultures where public bathing is the norm.

So, conclusion. When writers are so amazed by the public life we lead on the Internet, it is not something particularly new, but only a return to older forms of public life that were lived in previous times. We have this inheritance from Victorian morality and Christian sensibilities of inwardness and privacy which I don’t think are universal and were not universal throughout time. What we will find is that there is nothing unnatural or scary about living publicly.

“It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends,” writes Nussbaum. True, but it is also a return to a public life we had in the past. Richard Sennett noted that when he started people questioned how the fact that Greeks exercised and bathed naked together could shed light on their political lives. It does shed light, and I think our own publicness does so as well.