Technostress and Library Values

Stress is A hallmark of the 'anger epidemic,' and the major contributing factors are time and technology…. There is not enough of the first, and there is strong fallout from the second."—Karen Peterson, USA Today, July 18, 2000

We live fractured, many-faceted, discordant lives devoting our energy to the hopeless task of fitting the pieces of a surrealist jigsaw puzzle together. Bombarded with information and stimulation, we struggle to attain reflection, repose, and the enjoyment of life. Take the average middle-class American teenager born in 1984. Imagine how her life has been conditioned by the consumer-entertainment complex, by cell phones, faxes, advertisements in every medium, personal computers, the Internet, 100-channel television in every room of her home and in every public place (including elevators), and all the other distractions and assaults on the mind. Do you wonder that she may never have developed a rich interior life, may never have known the joy of serious reading, and may never have the intellectual equipment that will make her a truly independent, free person?

The greatly increased pace and the many stresses of modern life—largely due, directly and indirectly, to changing technology—give rise to a number of paradoxes, like the situation of the teenager pictured above. We are exposed to other cultures through mass communications and easy, affordable travel but live increasingly in a bland, homogenized global culture created by mass communications and the travel industry.

We have, 50 years after David Reisman foretold it, the culmination of society as a "lonely crowd"—mass culture lived in mentally isolated, physically crowded environments; surfing alone, bowling alone, sitting in traffic jams alone with only the cell phone and golden oldie radio stations for company.

We have more "information" available to us than ever before (and more reason to doubt the authenticity of much of that "information"). At the same time, we have an ever-decreasing ability to cope with it, organize it, preserve it, and evaluate it. Such phrases as "information anxiety," "information shock," "information dilemma," "information gap," and "information overload" are perennial features of the titles of current books and articles. Far from reveling in the increased availability of texts and images, many of us feel overwhelmed by the flood and increasingly incapable of dealing with it. Those who use the Internet for hours daily are driven by the ever-receding horizon—the Grail of information satisfaction forever just out of their reach.

For some time now, pundits have been predicting the death of the book, the imminent end of the scholarly journal and the newspaper, and the general passing of the age of Gutenberg. We have no idea what will happen to culture and society if the sustained reading of texts is replaced by an age dependent on visual stimulation, sound bites, wall-to-wall sound, and snippets of text.

The greatest paradox of the information age is both practical and urgent. Everyone knows that much of what is on the Internet is meretricious, purely commercial, of no value or of fleeting and local value, or generally worthless. These electronic wastelands reinforce the wise words of Dave Barry: "The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communications since 'call waiting.'"

Filterers are just the same old book-banners in new clothing, but we have to admit that, in our touting of the Internet in education and libraries, we have handed them a powerful weapon. As British mass communication scholar Brian Winston notes, "[T]he only effective marketers on the vaunted Information Highway … [are] pornographers." Librarians and educators stress the importance of the Internet. The Internet is rife with commercial pornography. Can we blame the censors for seizing on the unhappy conjunction of these two facts?

The great shining exception to this intellectual squalor is the mass of information and recorded knowledge that is available because, and only because, it is a by-product of a flourishing print industry. The huge majority of our e-books are computerized transcriptions of out-of-copyright texts in print or the computer versions of modern books that are a standard part of the book production process today. One commonly cited advantage—a real advantage—of the Internet is that it gives almost everybody access to newspapers across the country and the world. That access would not exist if the newspapers themselves cease to exist when the Age of Print ends.

Many years ago, at the first Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) National Conference, Hans Wellisch noted that the number and portability of human records grew in inverse relationship to their durability. Books are far more numerous, portable, and extensive than carved stones, but they are far less durable. Digital records are created in mind-boggling numbers and can be transferred to remote locations in nanoseconds, but they are evanescent and unstable. We may have reached the solution to Wellisch's conundrum during the last 200 years. Books are not as durable as stones, but, when many copies are manufactured (as is almost always the case), the survival of any given text is almost assured. We like to think of the history of human communication as being one of progress, but the paradox is that in terms of preserving the human record, we are regressing, not progressing. In truth, the Electronic Age may be another Dark Ages—a time in which people think, dream, write, and create as they have always done, but their thoughts, dreams, and writings die with them.

Technology used to be simply a way of improving and enhancing library service. That was certainly true 15 to 20 years ago, when library automation was seen as the only way to improve library service in cataloging, circulation, acquisitions, and many other areas. The online catalog, to take one example, was a highly successful attempt to improve and integrate valuable services. This use of automation as a tool to improve and enhance libraries has now been replaced. Increasingly, the transition from automation to digitization results in a discontinuity in which the tool becomes larger and more important than the service. Just consider the remarkably ill-informed discussions on cataloging web resources that have occupied many librarians and others in recent years. If digitization were merely a tool, that discussion would concentrate on two, at least superficially, simple questions: How do we extend bibliographic standards to cover digital resources? Having done so, which web resources shall we catalog? This has not been the main thrust of discussion. There are many papers on metadata (a primitive species of cataloging), the great majority of which assume the irrelevance of current bibliographic standards and library catalogs. Thus, the tool (digitization) is greater than the service (the library).

This phenomenon is present, at least implicitly, in all areas of modern library service. Is "information competence" about, and only about, competence in using digitized resources? Are "automating reference" and "disintermediation" codes for doing away with reference services? These and many other questions point to the dissonance and discontinuity that is at the heart of our response to technology—as librarians and as human beings. As librarians, we have to decide whether to use technology to improve library service and to provide new library services not possible hitherto or to replace all existing library services and programs with something that is all-

digital and entirely new. As human beings, we have to resolve the stresses and the discordance of this phase of civilization and technology so that technology becomes a positive part of society and not a threat to its very existence. There is no reason why technology should be inimical to a harmonious life that balances all aspects of living. However, there is no doubt that few have managed to integrate technology into their lives in a way that enriches those lives. Surely there is a way in which technology is a powerful tool for the enrichment of human lives, neither trivial nor dominant?

In dealing with technology in libraries, we would do well to heed the five challenges of the present age put forward by Jeff Rutenbeck (LJ netConnect, Fall 2000, p. 30ff.).

• Malleability. Producers change electronic documents without regard to their intellectual integrity or the necessity to preserve the original content.
• Selectivity. Librarians and library users often take the easy route in preferring digital resources to print and, when we choose print, preferring the small proportion that is easily digitized.
• Exclusivity: Technology today favors the First World, the white, the well off, and the educated.
• Vulnerability. Interconnectedness makes us more vulnerable to the destruction, the alteration, and the misuse of documents and to the possibility of local, regional, and even global crashes.
• Superficiality. How do we improve on the shallow nature of our interaction with recorded knowledge and information and with each other in the world of the net and the web?

We are deep into an era in which digitized information and electronic resources dominate our working life and professional discussions. At the same time, print publishing and the reading of books and magazines is flourishing (not to mention the use of videos, sound recordings, and all the other ways human beings communicate and preserve recorded knowledge and information). Moreover, many, probably most, of our library patrons live more in that print world than in the digital world. This is another paradox and discontinuity but not one that would be apparent from a reading of our professional literature or a perusal, say, of the list of programs at any American Library Association Annual Conference. Conference librarianship has become technology today, technology tomorrow, and technology forever. However, we have certainly not solved all the nontechnological problems of our working lives. Are we concentrating on the areas of our work that attract funding and the interest of our masters out of calculation or belief?

We need to see clearly the real needs of our patrons, rather than looking solely through the lens of technology, which invariably dictates a technological solution to all problems and nonproblems alike. We can attain harmony and balance in our work if we concentrate on two things: an understanding of the evolutionary history of our profession and of technology and a collective belief in our central and unchanging values. The eight values below [put forward in Gorman's Our Enduring Values, ALA, 2000] and the ways in which they relate to technology in libraries demand our attention.

DEMOCRACY Democracy requires, among other things, that we extend all the benefits of library use to all our library users. This means that we should implement useful technology fully but also that we should not force our users into a technological Procrustean Bed because of an ideological inclination on our part. Democracy also requires us to ensure that minorities are protected, including those to whom technology is daunting or stressful.

STEWARDSHIP We are responsible for the human transcript today and tomorrow. When considering technology, we must also consider our duty to ensure that future generations know what we know and, therefore, ensure preservation and onward transmission of the records of humankind. There is no evidence that our present focus on digital records and their use is contributing to good stewardship or that this is of concern to the numerous technologically advanced thinkers in the field.

SERVICE Technology must always be in the context of its usefulness in giving service to individual users of our libraries and to society as a whole. This takes us back to the question of technology—tool or master? If we allow technological developments to drive the agenda, there will inevitably be negative effects on service. It is far better to define the services that we wish to supply and match the most appropriate technologies and nontechnological answers to those services.

INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM Apart from the great filtering controversy, other intellectual freedom issues arise from our use of current technologies. The ability to monitor the specifics of individual use of electronic resources is a tool with malign consequences in the wrong hands. We lack the invaluable control mechanisms of publishers in the world of the net and the web. This means that many of the decisions are shifted to librarians and to the end user. Though not necessarily a bad thing, that transfer of responsibility means that librarians must confront intellectual freedom issues far more often than before. We must always keep in mind that the principle of library users being entitled to access the texts, images, and sounds they need or want is not altered because those texts, images, and sounds are in digital form.

PRIVACY The threat to privacy posed by modern technology is real. From dot-com companies compiling detailed dossiers on the reading, viewing, and purchasing habits of their customers to law enforcers searching the hard drives of suspects, to constraints on the use of public terminals in libraries, it is evident that we lack a code of conduct that respects the right to privacy. Some of the current invasions of privacy may seem benign or at least harmless, but their potential abuses are many and far-reaching. Using electronic records to catch embezzlers, terrorists, and child pornographers may seem an appealing use of technological possibilities. How about, however, a slightly different society that uses those possibilities to track down political dissidents, gays, religious dissenters, and members of any other minority group? It is hard for librarians to influence the wider society, but, at the very least, we can do our best to preserve the privacy rights of library users and staff.

All libraries are predicated on the idea that the imparting, creation, and preservation of knowledge are vital to a civilized society. The sustained reading of complex texts is integral to that notion. A number of studies have shown that the true literacy (as opposed to the functional literacy) of the population is declining; thus, individuals cannot interpret and absorb texts. Unless you take the extreme view that we are moving rapidly into a post-literate, dominantly visual dystopia, we will have to ensure that libraries use technology to foster literacy and learning. Again, this means confronting some difficult questions and maintaining a clear view of technology as a tool to enhance, not an irresistible force to which we must surrender.

Rationalism Libraries stand for the triumph of human reason over superstition and mental darkness. We use a rational, scientific approach to all our activities as librarians, and the idea of the individual empowering herself through the acquisition of knowledge and information is at the heart of our profession. Technology, used rationally and in a human context, allows us to create an even better librarianship, but it needs to be assessed clearly and used in the light of logic and reason.

The dominant cliché of modern librarianship is the Digital Divide. Alas, this is not only a glib phrase worn out by overuse but also an encapsulation of real problems. For the poor, disabled, rural, young, very old, and/or a resident of the inner city, access to "the information age" is often limited or nonexistent. Libraries can do things to remedy this injustice and are duty bound to do so. "Free libraries freely available to all" was the rallying cry of the 19th-century public library pioneers. There is no such thing as a "free" library, and we often fall short of our ideals, but we should never cease to strive for the ideal of unfettered access to our services for all.

We can conquer these and the other challenges that face us. We can build a new librarianship of harmony and balance that exalts the human over the technological, preserves the best of what we have, is based on agreed upon values, and explores the best of what is to be. In doing that, we can make lives (including our own) rich, productive, and multidimensional.