My boss thinks I'm a Luddite.
She thinks this in spite of the evidence before her eyes. I am a skilled database searcher who is grateful every day for the benefits of key word searching; I run my own web page, a guide to the very best bits of information I have found on the Internet (Where the Wild Things Are: http://www.sau.edu/CWIS/Internet/Wild/index.htm); and, of course, I write this column, to people I have never met, through an editor I have never met, entirely by way of e-mail.
She thinks I am a Luddite because I am cautious about introducing new technologies. I think we should consider the possible consequences before we plunge in. I also think it's a good idea to find out how deep the water is before you plunge off an 80 foot cliff.
This is because I've paid attention to history. Machines change ideas and hence the world; as your James Burke said, in his new book, The Axemaker's Gift, our inventors give us convenience in exchange for our minds. So we need to think about the benefits to be gained, at what costs, and see if the costs are worth it, or even can be avoided by thoughtful planning.
Americans historically are quick to embrace new technology. We love gadgets and novelty, especially when the gadgets will increase our personal freedom. We fell in love with the automobile because it promised us the freedom to go wherever we wanted to go, whenever we wanted to go there, alone or in the company we chose.
All we had to give up in exchange was 41,000 lives a year. And our vigorous, thriving cities, as people moved to the new suburbs the automobile created. And downtown businesses. And clean air. And our ability to meet our own energy needs. And our foreign policy, as it had to be driven by our dependence on cheap foreign oil. And our sense of connectedness with other ordinary people we once might have shared public transportation with. And many of our social mores: if you give teenagers vehicles that double as private mobile bedrooms, you need not be surprised when out-of-wedlock births increase.
Had we known in advance what the costs would be, would we have plunged into our love affair with the automobile anyway?
You bet. Our nation was formed by our wanderlust, our unwillingness to stay put. And personal freedom, of course, is our most important value.
But we might have prevented some of the problems the automobile caused if we thought about them in advance. We might not have built all those roads to make the suburbs possible; we might have spent our money on making cities more livable and public transportation a pleasant experience. We might have asked for safer, more fuel-efficient cars a little sooner than we did.
We were also seduced easily by television. What we gained on the deal was professional quality entertainment that demanded nothing of us, available almost for free, at any hour of the day or night. What we didn't think about was that it would take up time we used to use participating in church and civic organizations, or recreation with friends. Or that time spent on TV was time not spent on reading, so that our culture has steadily been turning from a print-based culture to an image-based culture, with serious consequences for our ability to think.
We didn't think about the effect it would have on our attention spans (I think our epidemic of attention-deficit-disorder has a lot to do with a steady diet of jump cuts between images within fractions of seconds).
We didn't realize that television would change our politics from rational, civilized conversation about the different aspects of complicated problems, to nasty, camera-attracting stunts and soundbites. We didn't understand that television would change our news from what we needed to know to what had dramatic pictures to tell a story with. We didn't understand how television images would harden racial stereotypes. We didn't understand how television advertising would create wants and turn wants into needs--and how that would affect people who couldn't possibly afford the products. And we really didn't understand how it would cheapen our culture and teach our children greed, lust, and instant gratification.
So when people start talking to me about the electronic library, I say, let's think a bit about what this will do to us.
If we can buy indexes with the journal articles full-text on CD-ROM, does that mean that we drop all our journal subscriptions? That depends on a lot of things. Like, are those journal texts then archived? Or do they disappear when new articles are added? "Last in first out" has consequences, and I am unwilling to lose the old in order to get the new.
And what exactly do we mean by full text? Do we include the New Yorker cartoons? If not, we lose a valuable guide to shared cultural knowledge. Do we include Columbia Journalism Review's regular feature, "The Lower Case," a collection of wonderfully funny misprints and blunders in the nation's press? Do we include all the full color illustrations in Smithsonian and American Heritage? Do we include advertising? If not, again we lose wonderful historical lifestyle information. Do we include letters to the editor? If not, we lose a useful reflection of thoughtful public opinion at any given time in history.
Libraries are starting to use the worldwide web for reference, for texts, and for images. How can we not? There is so much useful information there.
But the information is like small pockets of gold in a mine full of dross. We librarians have always carefully selected the materials we buy for our users. We don't have a lot of money, so we have to use it carefully. We think about the authoritativeness of the materials. We think about age-appropriateness. And though we subscribe to the Library Bill of Rights and the First Amendment protections for free speech and press, we are careful about the fit between our materials and our users' and institution's goals and values.
When we make the web publicly available, we lose our ability to select. The world wide web has no filters. We cannot certify the truthfulness of our sources because the net is full of unauthoritative information, fallacies and lies. It is full of jokes and games which will have kids tying up the computers for hours on end. And of course it is full of offensive material. (My colleague, Nanette, told me that from my web page, we were 3 button clicks away from full frontal nudity. Too bad. There is hardly any place on the web that is not 3 button clicks away from something fairly disgusting.) The censorship cases libraries have seen to date will have nothing on the lawsuits we're going to be getting when Junior tells Mom and Dad about the pictures of gay sex he saw at the library.
Which doesn't mean that we can decide NOT to provide the internet for our patrons. We have no choice, because to fail to provide it is to doom ourselves to irrelevancy. It is to deprive ourselves of some of the best reference sources available (and for free). It is to fail to provide instant electronic access to the full texts of items we do not own (and probably couldn't afford).
And it is to fail in our fundamental service mission. Libraries are there to educate anyone who wants to learn, regardless of their race, social class, or income; we help everyone compete on an equal footing of knowledge. The public library has an absolute obligation to make the internet available to those who cannot afford computers. We simply have to create guides to make it easier for our users to find the gold amid the dross.
So, I don't question the gifts of the new technology. We need to use the benefits of our new connectedness. But if we think ahead about what else might be inside this particular Trojan horse, we might not have to trade quite so much for those gifts this time around.
And if we handle this technology more intelligently than we handled television, and don't let the unexpected problems do a sneak attack you can thank a Luddite.
In fact, take a Luddite to lunch today, why don't you?
Previous Columns: Target Market, Naming Names, Something Amyth , In Praise of Men, Small Truths , White Whine, Draft Dodger, Tar Baby, Sensible Lizards, Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought, Light Out, Staying on the Map, Don't just stand there..., Remotely Funny, No Government Day, Advice For Desperate Men
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