At ACRL, One Librarian Looks to the Very, Very, Distant Future

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 3/19/2009

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Will we one day be able take a pill to, say, learn French?
Ridley: Post-literacy is powerful, desirable
"Computer-mediated" reality coming

(This article first appeared in the March 19 issue of the LJ Academic Newswire.)

In a session at last weekend's Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference billed as “not for the faint of heart,” University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) librarian and chief information officer Michael Ridley challenged librarians to imagine the library of the future—the very, very distant future.

In a talk that had Star Trek fans among the audience brimming with enthusiasm, Ridley spoke of a “post-literate” future in which man and machine meld seamlessly together. Ridley got right to the point. “What we do is toast,” he told the audience. “Are reading and writing doomed? The answer is an unequivocal yes.”

Ridley entertained his audience with a James Cameron-like vision of the future, where borgs, bio-computing, advances in brain research, the “hive mind,” and advances in pharmacology would one day—although not one day soon—undo the need to read, write, manage, or organize information as we now know it. Want to learn French? One day you will just take a pill, he suggested.

Rise of the machines
Simply put, machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence. Literacy, he noted, is simply a tool, and as humans develop new technology to deal with complex problems, it will spell the end of literacy. “Post-literacy is not a decline in a literacy,” he stressed. “This will not be a dark age, but a powerful desirable thing.”

He sketched a world—already in process, as anyone who has a BlackBerry or an iPhone can imagine—where humans and their machines collaborate seamlessly in creating a “computer-mediated” reality. “Increasingly we will live not in the world we see, but in the world we create.”

He acknowledged that the future he imagined would have its downside. Imagine a world of “neuro-hacking” or “mind-spam.” And the idea of the hive mind, a concept where one shared mind knows all, precluding the concept of individuality.

Still, no need to sell your Google stock or quit your futile job just yet, he stressed. Humans will not give up literacy easily, and the advances he spoke of were certainly many centuries away. And while somewhat jarring, the talk offered a strong, imaginative underlying message for librarians wrestling with the rapidly changing world of digital information: get over it.

Toward the end of the session one librarian suggested that the future Ridley sketched might, just might, hold an even greater place for librarians. “Spoken like a desperate, literate person,” Ridley responded, “wired to think that knowledge has to be managed and organized.”