Blatant Berry: Brave New World Wide Web

It's time to rearticulate and apply library values to a digital world

By John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large, jberry@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 5/15/2007

Sometimes I wake up in the darkness with nightmarish fears that the 1984 George Orwell drew has furtively used our own enthusiasms to conquer our world. I'm an enthusiast of the new technology. I love it and use it all the time for work and play. I wait with excitement for each new breakthrough. I'm hooked up, wired, and engaged 24/7. Now we have easy communication and publication around the globe. Skeptical when “the information society” was named, now I'm a convert.

But on those dark mornings I worry about how we've adopted it all and adapted our lives to it. I worry about surveillance, control, corruption, and the integrity of the information flow, just the way we used to worry about it when I was in library school in the repressed Fifties.

Consider the question of pulling the plug. When the Polish regime wanted to silence Solidarity, it shut down the phones, presses, and lights. The dissenters were forced to dig out their old mimeograph machines to publish their messages. Luckily, they got it done. Those old machines, run on manual power, are junk by now.

Then there's the ease with which the information flow can be corrupted. The kids find all they seem to need or want to know on sources like Google and Wikipedia. They constantly tell me not to worry, that there is solid information there. But I remember the reference courses at Simmons College where we spent hours learning the criteria by which one could evaluate an information source to determine whether it could be trusted. Profit has always driven the information industry. The beloved Google has just broken profit records. It uses the order in which information comes up on my screen to make money—a new, corrupt way to “monetize” the information flow.

Governments can now “cleanse” web sites, to remove information that contradicts their ideological and policy propaganda. The bloggers I read and love spend a lot of their time, in between the usual blogrolling, hyping and pitching the latest technological gadgets from the techo-industrial complex.

Our new values need a careful, full rearticulation of the urgent and compelling reasons for a public, tax-supported agency to meet society's information needs.

Woven into the information network is the ability to track and monitor the flow. I can find out who's reading my blog and who has seen my web site. And anyone can find out all about me, my digital wanderings, from the automatic checkout at the grocery store, library, or gun dealer to the once free and open road and street, now monitored by automatic tolls and video cameras.

There are values at stake, and I hope the cadres of the new library digerati will begin to verbalize and apply them. They should begin with information integrity and the criteria and methods for evaluating information sources and ensuring total access to the whole record, especially where it reveals how governments and corporations operate. They should focus on how to separate the chaff of propaganda and marketing from the wheat of information and knowledge. They must emphasize privacy, ways to protect the individual information seeker and user from the prying technospies of the administration and commerce. Finally, they must find ways for the individual to sift through and sort more easily the incoming information assault, from the pop-up ads to the hostile messages, so a citizen can get to the bottom of things before that delete finger is exhausted.

These values were developed in the finest traditions of librarianship. The profession has worked hard to make effective the transition from print domination to a multimedia cornucopia and can be forgiven for temporarily neglecting its value system. Now it's time to get back to those values, update them, and relate them to the brave new world wide web.