[p2p-research] Fwd: [CTHEORY] CTheory Interview: Post-Literacy and the Age of Imagination

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: andrew paterson <agryfp at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 9:40 PM
Subject: Fwd: [CTHEORY] CTheory Interview: Post-Literacy and the Age of
Imagination
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>




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 From: "Theory, Technology and Culture" <ctheory at lists.uvic.ca>
> Date: December 16, 2010 5:55:55 AM GMT+07:00
> To: ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
> Subject: [CTHEORY] CTheory Interview: Post-Literacy and the Age of
> Imagination
> Reply-To: ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
>
>  _____________________________________________________________________
>  CTHEORY:         THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE          VOL 33, NO 3
>        *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
>
>  TBC 013       12/15/2010        Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
>  _____________________________________________________________________
>
>                       *************************
>
>                        THEORY BEYOND THE CODES
>
>                       *************************
>  _____________________________________________________________________
>
>
>  CTheory Interview
>
>  Digital Inflections: Post-Literacy and the Age of Imagination
>  =============================================================
>
>
>  ~Michael Ridley in conversation with Christopher Parsons~
>
>
>
>      "... [O]ne of the things about librarians is that they're
>      subversive in the nicest possible ways. They've been doing the
>      Wikileak thing for centuries, but just didn't get the credit for
>      it. This is what we try to do all the time; we try to reduce the
>      barriers and open up that information."
>
>      -- Michael Ridley
>
>  Self-identifying as the University's Head Geek and Chief Dork,
>  Michael Ridley leads a life of the future by reconfiguring access to
>  the past. As Chief Librarian and Chief Information Office of the
>  University of Guelph, Ridley spends his days integrating digital
>  potentialities and the power of imagination with the cultural and
>  historical resources of the library. Seeing the digital as a liminal
>  space between the age of the alphabet and an era of post-literacy, he
>  is transforming the mission of libraries: gone are the days where
>  libraries primarily focus on developing collections. Today,
>  collections are the raw materials fueling the library as a dissonance
>  engine, an engine enabling collaborative, cross-disciplinary
>  imaginations.
>
>  With a critical attitude towards the hegemony of literacy, combined
>  with a prognostication of digitality's impending demise, Ridley's
>  position at the University of Guelph facilitates radical
>  reconsiderations of the library's present and forthcoming roles. He
>  received his M.L.S. from the University of Toronto, his M.A from the
>  University of New Brunswick, and has been a professional librarian
>  since 1979. So far, Michael has served as President of the Canadian
>  Association for Information Science, President of the Ontario Library
>  Association, Board member of the Canadian Association of Research
>  Libraries, and Chair of the Ontario Council of Universities. He is
>  presently a board member of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network
>  and of the Canadian University Council of CIOs. He has received an
>  array of awards, and was most recently awarded the Miles Blackwell
>  Award for Outstanding Academic Librarians by the Canadian Association
>  of College and University Libraries. Ridley has published extensively
>  about the intersection of networks, digital systems, and libraries,
>  including "The Online Catalogue and the User," "Providing Electronic
>  Library Reference Service: Experiences from the Indonesia-Canada
>  Tele-Education Project," "Computer-Mediated Communications Systems,"
>  and "Community Development in the Digital World." He has also
>  co-edited volumes one and two of _The Public-Access Computer Systems
>  Review_. Lately, his work has examined the potentials of
>  post-literacy, which has seen him teach an ongoing undergraduate
>  class on literacy and post-literacy as well as giving presentations
>  and publishing on the topic.
>
>
>  Post-Literacy
>  -------------
>
>  CTheory: I want to start by talking about literacies. As the
>  University of Guelph's chief librarian, you've asserted that literacy
>  is a has-been thing to talk about. Let's talk about your notion of
>  post-literacy; what do you mean by this term?
>
>  Michael Ridley: Obviously, as a librarian, literacy is pretty
>  important, but it does strike me that while the alphabet which is a
>  phenomenal invention, it is just a tool; it's not the ultimate tool.
>  Inventing the alphabet let us develop other kinds of literacies, but
>  these literacies are built upon the alphabet. I think it was
>  realizing that maybe the alphabet and that kind of textual literacy
>  isn't the end-state, it's a place along the way, and it's a
>  developmental process. As tied as we are to literacy today, people
>  like Ong and others will say that literacy is like a prison; once
>  you're inside it you can't get out again because the mind is
>  absolutely shaped by it, which is, I think, absolutely the case. As
>  literate people we have enormous difficulties in thinking what it
>  would mean to be non-literate.
>
>  So, the challenge for me was then to ask what it meant to be
>  post-literate. What would happen if something came along that
>  displaced literacy? That was more powerful, more effective, more
>  useful? And so if this could happen -- and in my mind it will happen,
>  it's just not clear what it would be -- what would be the impact?
>  What would it be like, and how would people react to it? We're very,
>  very tied to our literate selves and literacy is an enormously
>  important tool for us, but really, it's just a tool.
>
>  We know what kind of disruption occurred when we moved from primarily
>  oral cultures to primarily written cultures, and we know the
>  suspicion and disbelief and loss that were associated with that. We
>  know that there was this disruption and that there will be a
>  disruption in moving from a literate to a post-literate world. But
>  then the interesting thing, I think, is that it's not like we're
>  losing something. Moving into post-literacy isn't like moving into
>  some kind of Dark Age; this isn't going backwards and regressing in
>  some way. Computers and the Internet as we know it are extremely
>  literate environments and so they're not the model for a
>  post-literate world; they're the model for a hyper-literate world. We
>  need to think of something much different, something beyond this
>  hyper-literacy, and so this is when you get into the wacky stuff.
>
>  It's at this point that we're not talking about a simple evolution,
>  in a way that the alphabet wasn't a simple evolution -- it was a
>  revolution. So now we're in the realm of telepathy, in the realm of
>  ideas being part of pharmacology. One of the things that I've been
>  talking about recently has been the physiology of information.
>
>  CTheory: The physiology of knowledge? Could you elaborate?
>
>  MR: Well, it's the ultimate reductionist thing that takes all the
>  romance out of information. What we know, the ideas and concepts that
>  we have, are chemical sequences of some sort that are comprised of
>  neurotransmitters and synapses and protein sequences, and whatever
>  those bits and pieces are. Everything we know and understand is
>  encoded in this way.
>
>  So it really is the encoding system that matters at the end of the
>  day. Digitization, digital representation and the alphabet are just
>  abstracted from the core thing that is physiological. We're learning
>  more and more about how the brain works and we're getting closer and
>  closer to understanding how information is encoded. If we can achieve
>  this end, then we can (metaphorically) synthesize ideas; if you want
>  to learn French then you could just take a pill. The pill would
>  'grow' the knowledge inside of you.
>
>  CTheory: Interesting. Katherine Hayles has written about how
>  programmers are the new psychologists insofar as machine code is so
>  deeply embedded in our lives that only coders can help us see our
>  world and diagnose our situatedness. You seem to be taking her notion
>  one step further; where she says that digital coders are the next
>  psychologists, and that to be literate you need to be digitally code
>  savvy, you're saying that the next step is that the psychologist
>  becomes the biochemist.
>
>  MR: I think you're absolutely right. The new digital is biochemistry,
>  that's where we're going. But it's interesting, because the huge
>  power of the alphabet and digital code, and code generally, is its
>  symbolic value. It isn't the thing; it's the representation of the
>  thing. Symbolism gives nuance and plasticity that is really very
>  powerful. We need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater;
>  when we start talking about biochemistry as the basis of knowledge
>  it's very clinical and seems not to have all the nuances associated
>  with symbolism. I think we're wrong to think that way, because we
>  need to recognize that all these nuances are in the biochemistry as
>  well, but our sense of it is that biochemistry is hard cold science
>  -- it's almost machine-like.
>
>  I think we need to think about how symbolic meaning is also encoded.
>  These levels of abstraction around the alphabet and code really have
>  been our advantage for a very long time, and I suspect this is so
>  only because we can't burrow down into that biochemistry, where the
>  stuff composing symbolism in the mind really resides at the end of
>  the day. Is there something that's deeper than the biochemistry at
>  the end of the day? I don't know, but biochemistry seems to be the
>  next frontier.
>
>  CTheory: This seems to have pretty significant implications for the
>  digital frontier!
>
>  MR: I've said this to other people, and it seems kind of horrific,
>  but digital is dead in maybe a generation or two. We'll look back at
>  digital and think of it as something quite quaint and reminisce that
>  it's nice that our generation did digital when the future generations
>  will be doing something much different and more powerful at a
>  biochemical level.
>
>  CTheory: When talking about spoken and written language, its symbolic
>  impressions might function as a kind of texture that slows you down,
>  letting you experience what is being conveyed. It seems like the
>  interfaces to knowledge and ideas that we're talking about are
>  upsetting this notion of friction, whereby knowledge grows rapidly or
>  arrives through telepathy or is delivered seamlessly across the
>  Internet. Each of these mediums involves increasing the speed of
>  information delivery and reducing frictions of transmission; have you
>  thought about the relation between speed and friction as it pertains
>  to literacy and post-literacy?
>
>  MR: Friction's an interesting way to think about this. For me,
>  literacy is about thinking and imagination and reflection. Reflection
>  is the thing that people say that they can't do anymore in the
>  contemporary world. They're inundated with information and it flows
>  to them very quickly and without a boundary or way to manage it. It
>  is overwhelming, and I think that we're at a place where people don't
>  necessarily have the skills and techniques to deal with it.
>
>  I'm not sure that the answer is to slow things down or to limit its
>  delivery. The question is how to process information flows in a
>  better way. So the fear is that we're being inundated with
>  information.
>
>  If you'll permit me an aside, in class I often speak to my students
>  about the possibilities of telepathy. The horror story of telepathy
>  is that you start hearing everything...
>
>  CTheory: ... you start hearing the things that people think about
>  you!
>
>  MR: Right, right! Sure, if that's how telepathy evolved it would be
>  insanity, but you know that that's not what's going to happen. We
>  would learn techniques about how to block things and manage it;
>  otherwise it wouldn't be advantageous to our environment. My point is
>  that one of the things that humans are good at is innovating and
>  adapting to those kinds of information flows to be able to use
>  information effectively.
>
>  I guess what I'm saying is that we're probably in the uncomfortable
>  transitional zone between literacies right now, we're at a point
>  where we're not handling things very well, but are on our way towards
>  other realms. As we progress, we'll develop other ways to be
>  reflective or to have that more thoughtful ways of being. Friction,
>  which slows you down perhaps while also connecting you to elements
>  that comprise learning will continue.
>
>  I'm confident that the techniques to learn will continue to develop
>  and adapt as we transition to new kinds of literacies.
>
>  CTheory: You've used the word 'we' regularly, and I want to think
>  about this term in relation to literacy. If "we" are captured within
>  the prison of literacy, is it possible that those who lack or are
>  less captured by it might be the group that offers the way to
>  post-literacy? Or is it the case that even if individuals don't read
>  they are so captured by the prison of the literate world that they
>  are in a similar position as those who are formally recognized as
>  literate?
>
>  MR: Fascinating question about whether non-literate people have an
>  advantage in the transition between literacies. I think that we're in
>  this transition period between the literate and post-literate world
>  and every other time we've gone through a transition the middle
>  ground is complex and controversial and fraught with problems. We're
>  in that space now; whether it takes a hundred years or 10 minutes to
>  go through, we're going to have to go through this rough transition.
>  Do you have to be literate to be post-literate? Do people who are not
>  literate possess an advantage?
>
>  The advantage would be that they weren't shaped by literacy, that the
>  warping hasn't occurred to them and so somehow they have more useful
>  starting points for what follows literacy. I don't know that I
>  necessarily agree with that, because we rewire ourselves all the
>  time. We know that if you read predominantly from texts you're wired
>  a certain way, and if you read from a screen you read in a different
>  way because the experience is different. Experience changes who you
>  are, how you think and how you act.
>
>  I don't think there are a good and a bad here but that there are
>  dominant characteristics that define who we are and that these
>  characteristics are in transition. So what's the argument? It's that
>  kids don't read any more and have different attitudes and that this
>  isn't good. While there is a different experience, perception, and
>  thought pattern it's not true that they don't read. They do other
>  things as well, and in doing those other things in sophisticated ways
>  they're building capabilities and opportunities that I haven't
>  nurtured the same way.
>
>  This is a digital natives/immigrant thing. An analogy is the debate
>  around information overload. This is huge in the media; people want
>  to turn their BlackBerry off and only check email at certain times.
>  I'm absolutely perplexed by this, because the attitude is "I can't
>  deal with this stuff so I'll control it by having rules about how
>  I'll interact with the media." This is an obvious digital immigrant
>  thing to say because we think of the media and tools as something to
>  engage with.
>
>  You go over to the other side, and think about it like a digital
>  native, and they'd treat it like unplugging themselves from the
>  world. They've already figured out how to manage this flow; turning
>  off the cellphone, how crazy can you be?! They don't talk about
>  protecting themselves from the information flow, which this immigrant
>  group does. I guess the point is that we learn how to cope with all
>  of this -- we develop capabilities -- that let us engage with this
>  different kind of environment. So the transition into a post-literate
>  environment will be rocky for some, but for others will be absolutely
>  natural. I think this divide in the 'naturalness' speaks to reactions
>  people have about post-literacy. Some see it as foreign, unnatural, a
>  loss of capability while those who are members of the early adopter
>  environment will identify with it as being part of who they are and
>  won't see it as unnatural at all.
>
>  This gets back to a traditional discussion of the nature of change,
>  where it is hard to catch up to something and become part of a new
>  environment when your formative experience is with a completely
>  different toolset; others will naturally evolve into the
>  post-literate because it's normal for them.
>
>
>  Ethics, Imagination, and Intellectual Property
>  ----------------------------------------------
>
>  CTheory: So the way that you've (broadly) drawn things thus far is
>  that we have the written word, and then we hit computers, and then
>  there's the next stage. When the digital becomes cohesive, when it
>  closes in on itself, will it have then lost its imaginative
>  potential?
>
>  MR: Perhaps. We can think of technologies as metaphors for how we
>  think. In the industrial revolution the mind was a machine and that
>  let us conceptualize how we think and act. Digital computing let us
>  think of the mind as a computer, as more powerful, symbolic, and so
>  forth. But we know that the brain is more than that -- as we talked
>  about earlier it's a biochemical thing. So I think that computers are
>  simply an abstraction of how we think and a means to understand how
>  we think using those technologies. But I think that computers as we
>  know them now will morph into something quite different. We need to
>  track the shift from silicon based computing to molecular computing
>  as the kind of next shift.
>
>  I don't know that we're going to call molecular computing "computing"
>  given that it will be something technically much different. So the
>  metaphor of computing is going to become sort of the horseless
>  carriage.
>
>  CTheory: It sounds almost as though computing might lose its current
>  association with the computer; computing might return to refer to
>  those who compute.
>
>  MR: The computers that we have around us today are just going to
>  disappear. That's going to be the other piece. The capabilities that
>  we invest in our devices will become internalized, and this will
>  massively shift things. Computing will disappear as a visible facet
>  of our daily lives. Computing today is outside of us as a tool, but
>  it will disappear.
>
>  CTheory: Do you think it will disappear in the same manner as
>  electricity has for many Western citizens?
>
>  MR: Absolutely.
>
>  CTheory: So computing could shift to being a truly invisible utility
>  that you just access when you need it, sort of like what cloud
>  computing is like today?
>
>  MR: Here's the danger of that. The Internet is going to become so big
>  that pretty soon it's going to disappear as well. It'll disappear
>  exactly as the electrical grid did. It's just so pervasive that we
>  don't see it anymore; electricity is like the air we breathe. I think
>  that the danger is that we won't think of computing any more; the
>  less we worry about it as it recesses into the crevices of our lives,
>  the more we cede responsibility to some other group to govern for us.
>  The Internet would just become a tool we use or an environment that
>  we live in and maybe we would be less conscious of what going on in
>  it, what does and doesn't happen in it, and that's significant. How
>  much do you think that the electrical grid is ethical?
>
>  CTheory: Do you think we'll talk less about ethics of the Internet?
>  Coal fire and nuclear power electricity plants are deeply
>  politicized; while the Internet might disappear for a while isn't it
>  more likely that as the externalities of the 'net become more
>  apparent that it would return and be (re)politicized?
>
>  MR: That's a good question. As you were talking, I was thinking about
>  power and electricity as still respecting political jurisdiction. The
>  Internet is still messing around with that quite a bit; who does set
>  the rules? Is ICANN really an authority; is it a US authority, what
>  does the rest of the world think about it? It seems that the 'net is
>  in that grey zone around jurisdiction.
>
>  Will political jurisdiction eventually start being more of a force
>  for the Internet, or less of a force on the Internet?
>
>  The other thing that occurred to me is that we see political
>  movements around things that then shape the technology. So one thing
>  that is going to shape technology is environmental politics; if the
>  direction around environmental advocacy and action start to turn its
>  back on high technology environments then things could change quite
>  dramatically. If we see a return to some previous kind of model or a
>  denial of some of these things ...
>
>  I don't know if you have a background in scenario planning, but there
>  is interesting work on long-term scenario planning. Looking 50, 100
>  years out and trying to decide what might happen.
>
>  CTheory: Almost like a futurology at that level of planning...
>
>  MR: Yeah, but it's interesting stuff because you don't think about
>  what the specifics are but what trends might affect future
>  directions. One of the ones that I've seen around universities and
>  research is that there is a fairly significant meltdown in energy and
>  energy availability, which is making things that were once quite
>  global suddenly very local. The local is what you need to deal with
>  because you can't travel too much -- it's just too expensive. So all
>  of a sudden it's think local instead of global, and the world shrinks
>  into these little neighborhoods rather and perspectives shift to the
>  local, away from the current global perspectives.
>
>  In that world, the technological infrastructures that we're building
>  today won't be important, because what will be important is the
>  people that you can physically get to and speak with. So there is a
>  future world that is on a different trajectory than we're on now.
>
>  CTheory: In some of your presentations you've said that we need to
>  think past the information age, that we're moving into an era of
>  imagination. Can you explain this new era?
>
>  MR: The information age is dead, particularly in the world of
>  academic libraries or information more generally. The information age
>  is a nice concept for the past maybe 20 years or so, but it's a trap
>  going forward, particularly for academic research libraries. If we
>  think that we're the only one's invested in the information business
>  then we're crazy because everybody is in the information business
>  today. Our niche is not information, really, but something beyond
>  that: how do we use that information, how do we morph it and link it
>  up and have it relate and help people understand it.
>
>  That is why I say that the age we're in today is not an information
>  age but an imagination age. We've got tons of content and tools, but
>  it's how we take advantage of it that's really cool right now. I
>  think that this is where librarians need to think of themselves in
>  the present world.
>
>  If I can use libraries as an example, the product of libraries for a
>  long time has been the collection; what libraries have done is gather
>  collections. This, I think, is the wrong approach today. We need to
>  think about collections not as the end-goal but as the raw materials,
>  and these materials are then used to link things together and get
>  people working with complex concepts. There are massive numbers of
>  distributed collections all over the 'net today, and the really
>  exciting piece isn't just the collections but the space between the
>  collections -- the ideas that link them together, the dependencies
>  between them, and how we manage that glue space or interstitial space
>  is where libraries really need to focus. That's where the semantic
>  'net is going to be, that's where the ideas start to intersect in
>  really interesting ways. Libraries need to be in this space and less
>  concerned about the collection space.
>
>  CTheory: You had talked about the alphabet and 'traditional' literacy
>  acting as a prison that threatens to trap us within it. But it seems
>  like the written word is going to cause some real problems for any
>  'post' notion of literacy and libraries. Intellectual property laws
>  and copyright in particular impose financial and legal obligations to
>  fix us within particular boundaries, particular forms of literacy.
>  Won't IP and copyright laws limit the potentialities of libraries and
>  post-literacy; do they constitute an element of the literate prison?
>
>  MR: This is where things get fascinating, because I could see this
>  from both sides. IP and copyright are a continuing challenge and the
>  ways we think of commodifying information has been a big issue for
>  librarians for some time.
>
>  We have huge issues with people trying to protect intellectual
>  property in the digital realm, using all kinds of techniques and
>  tools, which are eventually always going to be broken by somebody. I
>  don't doubt that Technological Protection Measures are less effective
>  than cultural ones; iTunes is flourishing, so people will pay at a
>  certain level and make a lot of money for other people. We see an
>  interest in protecting IP as we should, but also see open access and
>  Creative Commons as ways that people can release their ideas in a
>  more open marketplace. Open access models and creative commons modes
>  of licensing are really gaining hold of people; they see them as ways
>  to enable sharing. Intuitively we know that innovation comes from the
>  open sharing of ideas, so we know the more we put stuff behind
>  various IP walls the more innovation will suffer. We need to find
>  that fine balance between open access and the ability to make money
>  on the production of ideas. We're kind of in that wonderful
>  transition zone, where some of it works and some of it doesn't.
>
>  I think we've had this debate about locking things down and opening
>  them up for quite some time and the means we've used to do this has
>  simply changed over the years. Copyright, as you know, started to
>  promote innovation and to let ideas flow freely. We've lost our path
>  on that over the years, but even still there's a desire to open up
>  ideas as much as control them. So there's a balance here that's going
>  on, and the tools to create that balance are changing.
>
>  CTheory: In this creative world, with a remixed organizational
>  infrastructure, we would likely see a mass blurring of siloed works.
>  Archivists, technical staff, and related groups would need to work
>  together to decode how information interacted with the body and so
>  forth, and then deliver the information. This would necessitate
>  multi-disciplinary understandings of knowledge and cross-disciplinary
>  commitments. It might see the contemporary scientist return to being
>  a kind of renaissance figure.
>
>  MR: Well, scientists would certainly be broader. One of the critiques
>  of the 20th century is that science has gotten narrower and narrower
>  along a reductionist path. We went so deep because it was the only
>  way to know about the core pieces of the world; we understand more
>  about the core mechanics of the world than ever before. But the
>  result in going deeper is that we've lost the context and broader
>  picture, and this is what I see science as having been trying to
>  recover for the past 5 or 10 years. It's been reopening itself to
>  other disciplines, and you absolutely see this in a university
>  setting where the hottest and coolest stuff going on emerges from
>  groups bringing humanists and scientists together to look at common
>  problems and issues.
>
>  At the University of Guelph there are cases where we are deliberately
>  bringing these groups together to get them to inform one another and
>  they're more interested in being informed by one another. Bringing
>  together people in this kind of way is incredibly crucial because the
>  kinds of experimentation and discoveries to be made are in those grey
>  zones in between.
>
>  Talking about library roles, I think that this is one of the roles
>  that the research library has going forward; not simply stewarding
>  information but providing opportunities for people from different
>  perspectives to come together and actually let them rub shoulders and
>  understand their differences and similarities. I love the metaphor
>  that learning is a contact sport because it's absolutely what
>  happens. I really understand something when I finally butt up against
>  someone who thinks differently than I do, and that challenging of
>  ideas might be something that libraries going forward could
>  intentionally facilitate.
>
>
>  The Library, Technology, and Privacy
>  ------------------------------------
>
>  CTheory: I would wager that when many people think of libraries, they
>  imagine the great old Carnegie buildings or maybe their university
>  library. Perhaps they're also thinking about physical properties like
>  cooling, books, librarians, some computers and study carrels. I
>  expect that the coming library will still have spaces of individual
>  reflection and learning process, but it also sounds like there's
>  going to be a lot more community.
>
>  MR: I think that that's a really important observation. We've got to
>  be careful here that we don't suggest that libraries will cease being
>  physical spaces because that won't be the case; humans want to get
>  together and interact but they also interact in lots of other ways.
>  The ability to build communities of interest and sustain and grow and
>  nurture them becomes a core virtue of libraries. This means that 'the
>  library' is both a place and an idea. I think of libraries now as an
>  attitude associated with imagination, and the library is the way of
>  bringing coherence to information whether you happen to physically be
>  in one or it's operating as a conceptual mechanism within your head.
>
>  I like your earlier reference to the Enlightenment because maybe
>  what's happening is that the library as an attitude is the 'new'
>  philosophical position, acting as a metaphor to bring all of the
>  information elements together.
>
>  CTheory: In operating this new library it sounds like it will need to
>  know what is happening on digital/biological networks to supply
>  assistance, to link people together. When I think of librarians it's
>  as champions of privacy, whereas IT security demands surveillance and
>  access controls. Is there a tension or conflict to your work, insofar
>  as in your role as the CIO you recognize a need to secure and watch
>  the network, with this surveillance conflicting with privacy
>  protections you defend as chief librarian?
>
>  MR: Well, great stuff. As you know, privacy is one of those things
>  that we all respect and want deeply but give it away at a moment's
>  notice. Oddly enough there is a tension between wanting to have
>  privacy and releasing information for some gain. We do this online
>  all the time.
>
>  Where I give up my privacy for personal gain is my choice, and I'll
>  continue to do that. I think that right now, today, I want to give it
>  up under certain circumstances for a certain period of time, and
>  right now I'm forced to give it up forever. This is a kind of on/off
>  switch problem, where releasing personal information is done in
>  violation of the individual's desires. I see this as kind of a
>  technology problem and we need to know how to be better at privacy
>  around this.
>
>  Libraries see this tension but in order to preserve a high level of
>  privacy they also need to see the information that individuals are
>  looking for to assist them. This comes down to a huge value and
>  benefit of libraries, which is that we're trusted. Not many agencies
>  and organizations in contemporary culture have the level of trust the
>  libraries possess. It is astonishing that when cities do evaluations
>  of city services, after the firemen it's libraries that tend to be
>  the second most trusted body. That trust is something we've earned
>  over quite literally hundreds of years and we still have it in the
>  digital economy. We have this because we fight for our traditional
>  values and if we can preserve that trust going forward as information
>  and data analysis becomes more pervasive then we've got a wonderful
>  role to play in the future. We can be that arbitrator or third-party,
>  the one willing to sometimes stand up against legislation and the
>  police. How we preserve our level of trust is enormously important,
>  because if we lose it who will stand up to replace us in the digital
>  world? Will we rely on government or a corporate agency? Likely not,
>  as we'll be suspicious of these agencies in the way that we're not
>  suspicious of libraries.
>
>  CTheory: How would you regard privacy? Westin has (broadly)
>  characterized privacy as an expression of controlling personal
>  information, whereas Nissenbaum thinks of privacy as controlling the
>  flow of information and governing the appropriateness of those flows.
>  How might you trace privacy, yourself?
>
>  MR: I like the flow metaphor more than the control metaphor because I
>  think that privacy is now going to be something more about our
>  essence or being, it is information about who we are and at a deeper
>  and deeper level. Privacy used to be an external thing -- the
>  documents we had, the objects we wanted to preserve -- and now its
>  more something that affects us at a deep level. Flow is the
>  interchange between the outside world and us, but I guess I'm
>  thinking more and more that privacy is about our individual selves,
>  being, structures, emotions. Privacy is something that we will use
>  effectively, to release or withhold.
>
>  CTheory: So it's becoming a kind of social capital?
>
>  MR: Yeah, though I hate the market based approach to understanding
>  it. We're getting closer to something when we do refer to it as
>  social capital however; it's not that privacy is an on/off switch but
>  it is something that we're more fluid about that we use to our
>  advantage to enable ourselves. Privacy is something that we give up
>  quickly, but we also want to protect it. Essentially, it's an
>  internal rather than external issue these days: privacy will become
>  about genetic structures and so the most fundamental elements of our
>  selves will be knowable and exchangeable in ways that were impossible
>  in the past. And so I guess the question we need to ask is around the
>  use and ownership of that information. If I have to release my
>  genetic code to an insurance company how do I gain advantage from
>  that while also protecting myself?
>
>  CTheory: Are notions of selfhood and privacy changed by all of this?
>
>  MR: We still cling to individuality as a product of the
>  Enlightenment, where the individual is paramount. What is the future
>  of this individual in a world of enormous connection? Assuming that
>  we have post-literacies then we would all have the ability to know
>  one another in ways that are very different from how we do today.
>  It's the Borg; is the Borg the release of the self to realize these
>  wonderful opportunities to understand things at a level we've never
>  understood before at the expense of the individual? As we move down
>  this path, is the notion of the individual challenged to the point
>  where it's less important to all of us? If this is the case, then
>  maybe it's the case that privacy will die out.
>
>
>  Wikileaks and the Library
>  -------------------------
>
>  CTheory: If in the collective, individuals are drawn into question
>  and privacy seen as a pathology, but librarians are the advocates and
>  trust agents of privacy and sifting, what exactly is the relationship
>  between the library and the more transparent and interconnected
>  bio/digital environment?
>
>  MR: One role may be that libraries are a kind of mediator into that
>  world allowing people to have anonymity when it's needed and an
>  ability to protect that anonymity. Currently, for example, libraries
>  will not give up circulation records without a court order. Despite
>  the fact that the police regularly ask for this information, we
>  don't just give it out until specifically ordered to do so. So this
>  stance lets us do things that other folks can't get away with. It's
>  acceptable by the culture that we have this kind of a role.
>
>  Could we transpose that into the digital network world? Maybe the
>  library needs to run anonymity circuits. I wonder about this in
>  respect to Wikileaks; is there a library affinity with what they are
>  trying to do. Under the protection of a cultural organization like a
>  library, would their mission be more acceptable than it seems to be
>  today?
>
>  I think there is an interesting relationship emerging where the
>  library -- as an attitude and not so much as a place -- is where we
>  can mediate these openness, privacy, and community conflicts as a
>  trusted player.
>
>  CTheory: If the library is to assume the meta-role of providing
>  anonymity and acting as an international trust agent does this mean
>  the library needs to be detached from the university or otherwise
>  recognized in a more autonomous way?
>
>  MR: That's a good question, and it recognizes the library is really a
>  concept. It's an attitude expressed on a space but also enabled
>  through enhanced and barrier free access to information. This might
>  not just be about open access, but something operating like
>  Wikileaks. So I think that the attitude that is the library -- that
>  philosophy -- is powerful and morphs in different ways, and could be
>  a powerful piece of what is happening today.
>
>  I like to say that one of the things about librarians is that they're
>  subversive in the nicest possible ways. They've been doing the
>  Wikileak thing for centuries, but just didn't get the credit for it.
>  This is what we try to do all the time; we try to reduce the barriers
>  and open up that information. It's now possible to do this in
>  different ways. The difference, I guess, is that the library is
>  becoming a bit invisible in all of this, which may be partially a
>  function of information networks.
>
>  Guelph is an instance of a library but the idea of a library is
>  morphing into a network spaces in interesting ways. I can argue that
>  Wikileaks is simply a library -- it's a collection of documents,
>  after all -- so it's an example of that culture or idea of openness.
>  As a result it's as controversial as a library. Libraries have always
>  been challenged about their collections; we have this and that, but
>  not some other things, and books have been banned and there has been
>  rhetoric about permitted and non-permitted texts. Libraries have been
>  agnostic about this; it's not their jobs to decide what's good and
>  bad and right and wrong, but to let patrons make these decisions.
>  They can only make those decisions if information is available, and
>  this pushes boundaries of permitted information. This is now done in
>  an era where the reach is broader than before.
>
>  Now, because the reach of libraries is global, the attitude of
>  openness and expansiveness of those resources is very different. The
>  philosophy of access and availability and the dialogue associated
>  with it is taking the concept of the library way beyond its
>  institutional boundaries. This is controversial, but in a good way
>  and we'll see what happens as libraries come up against oppressive
>  regimes. Libraries are often shut down because their essence is
>  counter to control.
>
>  CTheory: Is something like Wikileaks then, an instance that fits
>  within the concept of library or does it push the very concept of
>  library itself? Is the only significance that they receive more
>  publicity than libraries today, or is there something more going on?
>
>  MR: I think that Wikileaks is much more than publicity; this is a
>  group that is pushing the envelope on what it means to be an open
>  culture, an open society. We may disagree with some of the tactics
>  and outcomes but I don't think we can disagree with the underlying
>  philosophy, which is the right to know and the right to be protected
>  from retribution about releasing this information.
>
>  The analogy that comes up is the Pentagon Papers; it took an entire
>  publishing industry to push out those documents. Times have changed
>  and Wikileaks is now an early example of something we need to learn
>  how to live with, the far greater roles of openness in society.
>  Should some of their stuff have been released? Maybe not. Maybe you'd
>  even argue that there is a legitimate sense of confidentiality with
>  some it. But I think what they are pushing is that this is
>  information the public should be given access to.
>
>  I'm not here to defend Wikileaks, but just want to say that as a
>  librarian, as someone who works with information, I'm in favor of
>  Wikileaks as a generally good thing. As an organization, as a way
>  that organization is enabled in a networking environment: welcome to
>  the rest of your life. I think we're going to see more and more
>  groups like Wikileaks, not just media but organizations. The idea of
>  a command and control organization that filters information up and
>  down, say good-bye to that, wave farewell because it's gone.
>
>  At the end of the day we're learning to become open organizations,
>  and maybe open countries and worlds. This isn't a trivial thing,
>  we'll stumble alone the way, but this seems like an important concept
>  to be put into practice.
>
>  CTheory: We've talked about the library as providing the basic
>  building blocks for learning. Such resources are essential in
>  composing what's popularly termed 'remix culture'. From the
>  perspective of building blocks, remixing seems to fit into the
>  mission of the library that is opening itself up and facilitating
>  intersectionality. At the same time, it seems that the library sits
>  at a point to bridge remixers and more traditional groups who want to
>  control how those cultural building blocks are used. How does the
>  library address how a new generation wants to engage with their
>  culture in a participatory way while being forced to limit or
>  condition how some of these basic resources are provided?
>
>  MR: We struggle to manage how these different uses can be kept in
>  alignment in some ways. Let's use remix as an example: part of the
>  issue of remix is the availability of things, making sure that
>  information is in a form allowing remix. I note this as important
>  because a lot of the materials that libraries acquire are done so in
>  such a way that limits their easy morphing. An example would be
>  books; if we get it as a .pdf file it's not terribly helpful for
>  remix, but we could buy it as an XML document and then have
>  interesting options that we didn't have before. So how we acquire
>  things, knowing what the purpose is going to be with it in different
>  contexts is one of the things we need to keep in mind.
>
>  But going alongside that, we've talked about IP and copyright, where
>  the ownership of information and commodification of information is
>  intensifying. Alongside that is a push towards open access and
>  broader availability. So as a group moves through our culture that is
>  more accepting of remix, and openness, and intellectual access then
>  we'll see IP walls diminishing. They're never going to go away,
>  because there's an economic advantage to them, but we know that the
>  economics of the network makes certain possibilities viable.
>
>  I guess though that everything old is new again, because when you
>  talk about remix culture I think about jazz as an analogue because it
>  has always stolen from the very best people. Miles Davis didn't come
>  out of nowhere; he came out of a hardcore tradition of jazz that
>  demanded innovating all the way along. He just took it one step
>  further. What's in jazz, which we could learn a lot from, is that
>  collaborative, sharing, openness where I create something and someone
>  else creates something from my creation. This is a stage where they
>  have a contributory, instead of absolute, sense of ownership. So jazz
>  is a good and interesting analogue that sees intense personal
>  engagement and creativity, but within a broader context of jazz as a
>  form and a way of creating and expressing and benefiting directly
>  with others.
>
>  CTheory: Guelph is currently taking part in the living library
>  process, where people can check out human 'books' to learn about
>  those 'books' experiences. Is this one of the ways that we can see
>  the library trying to substantively realigning and exploring they
>  library's transformative possibilities?
>
>  MR: I should start by ironically telling you that the living library
>  has to be referred to as the human library because the 'living
>  library' is copyrighted in the US and they actually sued the
>  organization that was promoting it internationally. So that's an
>  interesting confluence of IP and openness (laughs). So we don't call
>  it the living library any more, it's the human library.
>
>  Having said that, bang on about why we do this. We do this program
>  for a few reasons. One is to realize what libraries actually do,
>  which is to bring people together. They do this across time through
>  objects like books and publications, but you read the _Republic_
>  because you really want to talk to Plato and it happens that the best
>  circuit we have to him is the book. But if you could sit down with
>  Plato and talk to him like he did his students it'd be a pretty great
>  experience.
>
>  The human library says that we can do that by consciously replicating
>  the idea of the library but using human figures. This project lets
>  you talk directly to people in safe, protected environments that
>  support asking hard questions. It wouldn't be possible if you didn't
>  feel safe in where you were, if you were worried about some
>  implication. So in the human library we actually spend a lot of time
>  with our 'books', because the book has to understand that the reader
>  would ask of it hard questions. That was the point. The book had to
>  be prepared to respond appropriately, it couldn't be offended or
>  defensive, but it had to engage.
>
>  For me, it wasn't just the experience of running the human library;
>  it was as much working with the books for them to realize that as
>  humans we have this responsibility to be open and honest with one
>  another. This isn't the case just in the living library situation,
>  but everyday! Wouldn't it be cool if everyday we walked around and
>  had an attitude of being books and were willing to engage and openly
>  work with others in a safe way?
>
>  The human library was phenomenal. It causes exactly what we want to
>  see happen; we want people to engage with their biggest fears. One of
>  our readers charged out the Canadian soldier because he was so
>  anti-war, he was so opposed to the Afghan mission. They had a
>  fabulous discussion about the experience of the soldier and being in
>  a war. I don't know that there was actually a change in beliefs
>  there, but it was a wonderful insight and connect between them.
>
>  Others came away crying, others angry; both good things.
>
>
>  The Library as a Dissonance Engine
>  ----------------------------------
>
>  CTheory: We have the human library, attempts to develop raw
>  resources, and in many of your presentations you have a reference to
>  Paul Saffo who worked for the Institute of the Future. One of the
>  things that Paul has talked about -- and that you've picked up -- is
>  that the future will belong to those who can provide information
>  tools. If librarians aren't actually providing the tools, they might
>  be providing key infrastructure for tool development. It seems that
>  such accumulations of power might be accompanied by worries around
>  intellectual sovereignty. How exactly does the library navigate being
>  a place within which sense is made of information while
>  simultaneously retaining its trust or neutrality?
>
>  MR: A lot of what librarians believe in is empowering individuals and
>  making them stronger and better to be themselves in the future. We
>  play these out all the time. You won't hear a librarian talking about
>  whether access to information is a good or a bad thing; it's a given
>  for them, access and openness are key.
>
>  I see the library as a kind of coherence system, it's about providing
>  the tools that can bring about sense and coherence but both of these
>  things happen in someone's head not in the library, in the tools. At
>  the end of the day the success is whether the library has helped
>  sense to be made and coherence to be enabled. If so, we've done our
>  job.
>
>  Our job now isn't collections and stuff but how those things link
>  together, how we enable others to move through that information space
>  in a way that doesn't overwhelm you, but also in a way that doesn't
>  just make it easy. I like to think that sometimes what libraries do
>  is make things very, very hard, that we ought to create barriers to
>  understanding because that's when people really learn more
>  effectively. When you have a conundrum, it's often the impetus to
>  dive deeper into something and open up other doors. Everything being
>  easy -- there's always been an argument that librarianship is a
>  service profession and so our job is to make things easy -- doesn't
>  mean it's effective. So sometimes I think that we need to enable
>  environments where you're confronted with the Other, the opposing
>  perspectives and you have to deal with them. It's not a consumer
>  culture but an idea culture where there are lots of conflicting
>  ideas, and maybe our job is to make those apparent but help you
>  figure out what pathway to choose between these conflicts.
>
>  CTheory: So where Paul Saffo says that the future will belong to
>  those who create sense making tools, the library is providing a set
>  of coherence frameworks that patrons can accept or not, but in
>  aggregate these compose a kind of dissonance engine.
>
>  MR: Yeah, it has to be both; otherwise it's just pablum. We could
>  give you the particular story but it would be a particular story or
>  stream of information, it wouldn't be the full or coherent picture.
>  The dissonance engine and coherence framework is a good way of
>  putting it: the library needs to be both. This gets libraries into
>  trouble a lot of the time because we want to have those books that
>  people are offended by, we want to let people get stuff online that
>  others would rather be blocked. It's not our choice, we just
>  absolutely need to open up those things
>
>  We throw wenches into the ideological workings all the time, and
>  that's a good thing.
>
>
>  The End of the Library
>  ----------------------
>
>  CTheory: On the subject of the end of the library. In many ways we've
>  talked about the end of library as just the physical space; it would
>  remain as a mindset and set of principles about information
>  organization and tool provision. We're inundated with information
>  today; systems to publish, organize, detection, and disseminate
>  information. What characteristics of technology are you looking for
>  as a chief information officer and chief librarian? What is involved
>  in adopting any particular process?
>
>  MR: Well, it's chaotic, to be honest, because libraries are living
>  through the same explosion of technologies that everyone else is and
>  it's often difficult to decide if we want to adopt and
>  institutionalize any particular tool. Some developments we see as
>  positive, but we also have to adopt developments of things that we
>  see as less than positive. An example: we love open access tools
>  because they feed into our desire to have information more readily
>  available. But we're also very strongly attached to writers and their
>  ability to help us understand things and recognize that they make
>  their living through writing so our role in helping preserve that
>  intellectual property for them is really important because otherwise
>  we might not have these writers. So we've got to be partners in that
>  process.
>
>  We have lots of resources that we buy that are incredibly constrained
>  by contracts and IP concerns and yet this information is really
>  important to some of our users. So we agree to be part of that
>  relationship. We collectively, as libraries and information
>  professionals, influence the shaping of those tools; we can promote
>  or encourage certain types of tools that are positive.
>
>  An example is the Netscape browser. I saw Marc Andreessen demo that
>  browser when he was a grad student at the University of Illinois at
>  Urbana-Champaign. He was working for the high performance-computing
>  group. A bunch of librarians were in town and he decided to demo it
>  for us. For him it was a tool for his researchers to collaborate;
>  they could see the text on the screen and the most important part was
>  that you could annotate in real-time so that everyone could see it.
>  That was the most important part that he was trying to show,
>  something that got built out of the system shortly thereafter and as
>  a result Netscape became primarily an information display tool.
>
>  He was surprised by the reaction of this audience of librarians; it
>  was the most amazing information discovery tool we'd seen in decades.
>  But for him it was a collaborative tool for a small group of people
>  who happened to be geographically distributed. It had nothing to do
>  with information delivery. So I'm not saying that the librarians are
>  responsible for Netscape and everything thereafter, but we bring that
>  perspective to the table, we encouraged a kind of direction.
>
>  The one thing that librarians don't do so much anymore that is a
>  little bit concerning to me is we tend not to be tool builders like
>  we were a few generations ago when the tools were a bit different.
>  We're more tool integrators now. That's ok, because integration is a
>  possibility now and it was harder to do before, but now we tend to be
>  looking for pieces that we can plug into a larger whole. So we can
>  take this, and plug it into that, and create a series. We're building
>  tool boxes, where the individual tools are coming from others
>  sources, and maybe that's our contribution that we're going to end up
>  with people having a really useful box of tools that we tried and
>  used and now certify in some fashion. It's the box thing that might
>  now be our contribution.
>
>  CTheory: What is the threat to the library? What is it that is the
>  primary challenge facing the library as an institution? What could go
>  wrong at this digital transition point?
>
>  MR: The biggest threat to the library is indifference, of an attitude
>  that is the library is no longer seen as valuable, that we no longer
>  think that learning and growing and expanding and dealing with
>  difference is critical. That there is another way of living your
>  life, and it's not the reflective or examined live. Really, libraries
>  are children of the Enlightenment; we have that ethic behind us that
>  knowing and developing is very important and that our past and ideas
>  are important. If you move into an anti-intellectual age, one that no
>  longer valued ideas and concepts and human freedom, then libraries
>  would disappear because they wouldn't matter so much any more.
>
>  Funding is something we can deal with, technology we can deal with.
>  In my mind, even in a post-literate world -- which arguably is the
>  end of libraries because there are no artifacts to capture or steward
>  -- it isn't the end of libraries because the attitude of libraries
>  will continue to exist. We may continue to carry around all knowledge
>  in our heads in some way but the desire to wrestle with ideas and
>  understand difference and understand what is happening is an attitude
>  about reflection and growth that I believe is really what libraries
>  are about. It's enabled utterly and completely differently in a
>  post-literate world, but it's a philosophy that resonates.
>
>  I think that libraries as we know them will be dramatically different
>  in a post-literate world, but I'm not sure that they're gone.
>
>
>  References
>  ----------------
>
>  N. Katherine Hayles. _My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and
>  Literary Texts_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
>
>  Alan Westin. _Privacy and Freedom_ (New York: Atheneum, 1967).
>
>  Helen Nissenbaum. _Privacy in Context: Technology, Privacy, and the
>  Integrity of Social Life_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
>  2009).
>
>  Paul Saffo, "It's the Context, Stupid," _Wired Magazine_ (March
>  1994), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/context.html (accessed
>  on December 12, 2010).
>
>  Michael Ridley, "Beyond Literacy: Are Readings and Writing Doomed?"
>  _Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend. Proceedings of the
>  Fourteenth National Conference of the Association of College and
>  University Libraries March 12-15, 2009 Seattle, Washington_. ed. Dawn
>  M. Mueller. (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries,
>  American Library Association, 2009), 210.
>
>  Walter J. Ong. _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
>  World_ (2nd Edition) (New York: Routledge, 2001).
>
>  ----------------
>
>  Christopher Parsons is a PhD Candidate in the University of
>  Victoria's Political Science Department. His dissertation, titled
>  "What's Driving Deep Packet Inspection? Motivations, Regulations, and
>  Public Involvement in Telecommunications Regulatory Processes," draws
>  together Internet governance, traditional social sciences, and
>  critical digital studies literatures to provide a holistic accounting
>  of deep packet inspection's powerful and plastic control-based
>  processes. Christopher has published in _CTheory_, has a forthcoming
>  publication in M. Moll's and L. R. Shade's (eds.) _Establishing an
>  Election Connection: Telecom Policy_, and a forthcoming co-authored
>  publication in W. Dutton's (ed.) _Oxford Handbook of Internet
>  Studies_.
>
> _______________________________________________
> ctheory mailing list
> ctheory at lists.uvic.ca
> https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ctheory
>


--------------------------------------
andrew gryf paterson
http://agryfp.info/
mobile [TH] until 29.12.: +66 88519 8293
agryfp at gmail.com | skype: agryfp
locale: Chiang Mai, TH
--------------------------------------




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