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When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalinithi. Foreword by Abraham Verghese. New York: Random House, 2016. 228 p. Paul Kalinithi was a neurosurgeon, writer, husband, father. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died about 24 months later in March 2015. This book became his focus in the last months of his life —a rare, movingly honest, literate, and beautifully written account of facing death and living.

When Breath Becomes AirWhen Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalinithi.  Foreword by Abraham Verghese.  New York: Random House, 2016. 228 p.

Paul Kalinithi was a neurosurgeon, writer, husband, father. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died about 24 months later in March 2015. This book became his focus in the last months of his life —a rare, movingly honest, literate, and beautifully written account of facing death and living. OK, I wept when I read this, not because much of it is sad, but because all of it is so beautiful.

Paul swam in the deep end of the pool: in the incredibly exacting work of neurosurgery and neuroscience —a surgery which is meant to heal the body but unavoidably also amends the soul, a person’s very sense of self. This weighty responsibility has to be met by physicians with equal courage, tenacity, knowledge, and stamina —excellence in all things, αρετή in the true Greek sense. When Paul, such a physician, then had to become a patient, the roles shifted to courageous colleagues more than a simple reversal. His oncologist (“Emma”) was uncommonly gifted, and preserved for him an ability to choose his identity, his future, and his life at a time when too often the illness can strip those way. Paul quotes Becket, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” And he does.

In physical, embodied words, this book is beautiful to hold as well --beautifully produced.  The Monotype Bell font renders the text crisply and without weight.  Since the book is about having a body subject to disease and death, its physicality is important.  Reading it on a digital device would be definitely second-best, but good enough if that is the only choice (for those who are very ill or with impaired vision).  The care shown in the production of the volume perfectly corresponds to Paul's drive for excellence and humane expression in all his works.

This book is about facing death and remaining time to be alive —which is everyone’s situation, whether shorter or longer. Paul’s illness allowed him keep this in focus in a way few achieve. He really was remarkable, a force of nature in his prime, blazingly intelligent and impossibly well-read, with a keen sense of humor that only partially reveals itself. His intelligence, education, and experience as a neurosurgeon distilled into wisdom. When I come to that “someday” when life and mortality are both clearly in focus for me, I will reach for rather few books. This will be one of them.

The two books are Five Minds for the Future (2006) and Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (2011). Rather than simply becoming out of date, if anything these books are more urgent than ever.

During this thoroughly depressing season of American life, I have been re-reading two books by Howard Gardner, the professor of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. I was privileged to spend a morning with him this past March at the School’s Library Leadership for a Digital Age professional education forum. I was impressed again by his humanity, long-range vision, and insight that people are rarely either at their best or at their worst.

FiveMindsForTheFutureThe two books are Five Minds for the Future and Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed. Five Minds was originally published ten years ago, and Gardner added a substantial new introduction to the paperback edition of 2008. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed was published five years ago, and he added a new introduction to the paperback edition of a year later. Rather than simply becoming out of date, if anything these books are more urgent than ever.  Disciplined, respectful, creative reflection: what could be more foreign to the spirit of 2016?

Five Minds alludes to Gardner’s famous work on multiple intelligences, but takes a different approach to minds which are made up of varying mixtures of intelligences and connections. The disciplined, synthesizing, and creative minds figure most prominently in education, whether formal or informal, and form the great content of many people’s work, whether mental or physical. The respectful and ethical minds, by contrast, figure the “how” of life, both to members of a group, and to other human beings in relationship (the respectful), and in relation to the wider impact of behavior and work on society (the ethical). What makes work “good,” both in a technical sense and a moral sense? The respectful mind elucidates personal morality and reciprocity; ethical work elucidates citizenship and the “common- wealth” in an eighteenth century term. Of course this brief summary elides a great deal of content, context, and subtlety.

TruthBeautyAndGoodnessCoverTruth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed extends this work: the five minds addressing the classical virtues and their uneasy transition into a digital world.   Gardner defends these classical questions against the determinism of free market theory (in which value tends to equal price), neurobiological determinism (in which truth is a result of genetic controls), and “hard” post-modern relativism, according to which truth, beauty, and goodness are inherently unattainable, and merely cloak the acquisition and exercise of power. Gardner’s extended defence and arguments are not easy to summarize. Suffice that these are fundamental to a respectful, ethical human society and in a hyper-connected, fleeting, digital world become more important than ever as anchors for human flourishing.

In a broad sense Gardner pushes back against radically reductive economic, neuro-psychological, or radically skeptical currents that would dislodge the major claims of liberal arts education. “Liberal arts” as a term never appears in these books, and yet implicit in his convictions lies a strong claim that in fact the unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates’ foundational claim). The great peril of unreflective, technological, market-driven capitalist society is not that it does not know enough to function, but that it cannot reckon what it does not know –greatly to its undoubted, eventual undoing. A reflective mind is a necessarily modest mind.

What does this have to do with an academic library? Everything. If a neo-liberal university is exclusively driven by utility –what sells? –what do users already know they want to use? –what is the return of utilization for price? –what keeps them paying tuition so they don’t move to a cheaper competitor, or away entirely? Then the question of minds simply goes out the window. In that view, a disciplined, synthesizing, and creative mind only matters if it can make money and further the aims of the organization’s management. Respect and ethics means only doing work that is good enough, behaving in the right way, and not being too nakedly self-centered or opportunistic. In that case, the library becomes simply a managed environment for stenographic repetition of known thoughts.   Concepts of truth, beauty, goodness –however tenuously re-worked—are simply beside the point, lovely luxuries for those who can flaunt high-end educational branding.

If on the other hand a university can find a way to articulate the fundamental values of reflective thinking in an unthinkingly reactive, pompous, and dis-respectful era, then the library has a place as a center for self-directed engagement with potentially transformative truths. In such a context the library enacts the university’s mission of nurturing sound learning,  new discovery, and the pursuit of wisdom by creating the physical and intellectual space where a biology student can become a biologist (just one example).  Gardner’s books have everything to do with the why of librarianship. David Lankes has been quoted that a room full of books without a librarian is just a room full of books, but an empty room with a librarian is a library. (Of course the latter case is really easier to do with at least a few books.) That focuses on the why of librarianship: it is what librarians do; the library is all the people (librarians and readers) and their thinking, not just their stuff. The librarian’s and the user’s actions can transcend their self-interests. They can create and re-create their minds for a respectful and creative future.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.

Deep WorkDeep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport. New York:  Grand Central (Hachette), 2016.  296 p.  ISBN 978-1-4555-8669-1 $28.00 list

Cal Newport became a guru of study hacks after publishing Study Hacks, two other books, a dissertation, and six articles.  Clearly “do as I say and as I do,” he knows his subject.  Deep Work extends his thinking to sharper critique of the glut of social information that distracts many people.

Newport is especially sharply critical of Facebook (including the new Facebook headquarters building), Twitter, and the well-recognized Fear of Missing Out (FOMA) that can drive compulsive distraction and seriously erode the quality and quantity of work.  His critique is well-sustained, but its claims to be counter-cultural or disruptive are overblown: numerous other writers have critiqued the culture of distraction, including Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, and Sherry Turkle.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.  Deep work is “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits.  These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”(p. 3)  By contrast shallow work is “noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”)(p. 6) His hypothesis: "the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare . . . [and] valuable . . . . The few who cultivate this skill with thrive."(p. 14)  His goal: to help you be one who can work deeply, a noble aim.   His examples are not always convincing, however.

His leading example (which opens the book), Carl Jung’s creation of Bollingen Tower as a retreat for his writing, is more multi-faceted than Newport suggests.  Jung retreated to his tower to write without distraction, but based in large part on his interaction with patients in Zurich.  Later Newport identifies Jung’s “bimodal” pattern, contrasting the Tower with Zurich, a “busy clinical practice,” “gave and attended many lectures,” “active participant in the Zurich coffeehouse culture,” all suggesting to Newport the hyper-connected, digital-age knowledge worker: “replace ‘Zurich’ with ‘San Francisco’ and ‘letter’ with ‘tweet’ and we could be discussing some hotshot tech CEO.” (p. 107)

I think this is a serious, ideologically-driven misunderstanding of Jung’s life in Zurich, and life's work.  Jung’s own writings are filled with episodes, instances, and cases from his practice in Zurich.  To suggest that Jung’s work in Zurich was “shallow work” devalues his clinical practice and Jung’s whole motivation for developing depth psychology and disputes with Sigmund Freud.  The ideas and art work Jung picked up in his Zurich life provided some of the critical raw material from which he fashioned his singular and valuable insights in the Tower.  Suggesting that Jung’s beautifully written letters are the work equivalent of contemporary tweets is simply preposterous and and fundamentally misconstrues Jung’s life’s work.  Valuable as Jung's deep concentration in the Tower was, it never would have amounted to much without his corresponding life in the city.

Newport's other examples (Adam Grant, Jack Dorsey for example) probably work better, but tend towards the two-dimensional.  This valuable book has to be read with caution.

Cal-newport-media-kit-smallIn the end, I am left with the uneasy sense that Newport’s beloved “deep work” is really what computer scientists do.  (He is an associate professor at Georgetown.) His concept of deep work is less applicable to those whose work is primarily leading people and organizations.  I know in my own work as a library director that sometimes I have to work on a project uninterrupted.  Some interruptions are shallow, but some definitely deep: the work I do listening to coworkers, helping them develop their ideas, skill and insights, indeed pushes my cognitive and emotional capabilities, improves my abilities, is hard to replicate mechanically, and (I hope) creates value.  Every encounter with a colleague is not deep work, but I always have to be alert to the moment when it turns deep, sometimes on a dime.

I completely accept Newport’s critique of the numerous, superficial distractions of social media, e-mail, and news, and the confusion of busyness with productivity.  But his concept of deep work needs broadening and humanizing. This seems to be the work of a very confident and highly creative young professor appropriately characterized as brilliant, creative, and important, but whose very brilliance and confidence may have drawn him towards an unnecessarily narrow conception of generosity, significance, and depth of insight.  I wonder how his ideas will change over time, work, and experience.  I would really like to find out, because it will be important.

At Sacred Heart University I have been leading the first phase of a strategic directions initiative to articulate the highest-level aspirations of the organization, and to mark ways that the Library can leverage its expertise and strengths to enhance the intellectual life of the University and advance its mission.

At Sacred Heart University I have been leading the first phase of a strategic directions initiative to articulate the highest-level aspirations of the organization, and to mark ways that the Library can leverage its expertise and strengths to enhance the intellectual life of the University and advance its mission.

As part of listening, thinking, and planning together, we have read discussed some truly thought-provoking articles and reports. Two of these in particular are from MIT: Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms, and The Once and Future Library. These are very different documents: the first is a report of MIT’s Online Education Policy Initiative. The second is a report from the MIT News Office, and summarizes remarks by several MIT senior librarians made at (or responding to) a panel discussion concerning the future of the library.

Despite their differences in format and subject matter, the two documents converge on several questions and concerns about the changing role of the library is the quickly-evolving ecosystem of higher education.

  • Preserving the cultural record —both the “wild frontier” of digital preservation and the massive challenge of “analogue” preservation— complements the online education report’s call for fostering thinking communities that identify and develop the change agents and role models for implementing reforms. Without access to the materials, scholarly traditions of higher education, or the “thinking communities” that the report advocates, will be unable to realize the good intentions of the reformers. The past cannot constrain the future, but without it neither reforms can be adequately grounded both in prosaic institutional realities and perennial threshold questions that undergird scholarly disciplines.
  • The future of the collections (at MIT and elsewhere) will be entwined with increasing disciplinary collaborations across fields of research in higher education. Until the past few years it was common inside libraries to think about the “collections” that supported distinct fields of study: British literature, community nursing, entrepreneurship, or cellular biology, to name only a few. As the library’s role of assembling scholarly materials diminishes, however (insofar as so much is available digitally, with or without pay walls), the library’s role of publishing and codifying scholarly materials has grown. This suggests the simple question: What is the library for?  While the report may have intended “fields of research in higher education” to be those it named, from neuropsychology to meta-analysis and assessment, the importance of disciplinary collaborations and interdisciplinary conversation embraces widely disparate fields, and the library has a central publishing and fostering role as a digital and analogue commons. The threshold concepts that critically examine the interests, biases, and assumptions present in the information ecosystem suggest a unified field of varying forces that more hold the scholarly disciplines together than tear them apart --the threshold concepts that are fact "what the library is for" (both as purpose and as advocacy).
  • The Once and Future Library begins by noting how ancient libraries (such as Alexandria) held a lecture hall, refectory, and porch where scholars could talk, collaborate, read, and eat. Now the modern library —such as even Sacred Heart University Library— has versions of these facilities inside, and is far from merely a “reading room” or “book warehouse.” The Policy Initiative recognizes the numerous contributions of fields such as motivation and rewards in learning, health and nutrition, and learning spaces, and “the necessary mix of cognitive, social, and interpersonal skills needed for life and work.” (p. 18)  The library is both a literal and physical learning space.

These convergences (preservation, collaborations, and a holistic vision of learning) strongly imply a spectrum of abilities, practices, and habits of mind, that expands and deepens through engagement with the information ecosystem.  This is close to the definition of the Framework for Information Literacy published by the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2015.  Although higher education as an introduction to “life-long" learning has become a cliché, “life-long” still has great meaning to those on the receiving end of fundamental, continuing, and painful social change.  The disposition towards learning inherent in information literacy offers a pathway through the world as we are finding it.

The confluence of a kind of lazy, informal postmodernism and casual digital culture has led many to wonder whether the constitutive commitments to truth, goodness, and beauty that have characterized Western higher education for millennia have simply ceased to be relevant. Both documents from MIT suggest strongly otherwise —and coming from one of the fonts (MIT) of all things digital, constructivist, and cognitivist, this is surprising and reinvigorating at once.

The dynamic, digital scaffold proposed by the Policy Initiative could be able (or will be able to) extend the necessary mix of cognitive, social, and interpersonal skills that are thresholds to genuine engagement without limitations by the modes of pedagogy, either on-ground or online.

The Policy Initiative proposes a “learning engineer” at the center of that dynamic digital scaffold. At MIT “engineer” is a “good” word signifying “us, what we stand for,” while for those outside MIT "learning engineer" may connote “narrow, technical, and highly specialized” instead. I understand “learning engineer” to be local MIT-speak for “instructional designers,” and the “design thinking” at the heart of educational enterprise. The Policy Initiative’s strong recommendation that such individuals need far greater support and integration with subject-based academics is heartening.  Ironically, it also strongly suggests what instructional librarians have been trying to do for a long time with little fanfare, external comprehension, or support. “Design thinking” is now at the heart of librarianship, and can only strengthen on-ground, hybrid, and digital pedagogies.  In a sense a library is a perpetual "beta" of the Initiative's "dynamic digital scaffold."

At Sacred Heart University Library, our strategic directions initiative has already moved ahead with recalling and creating “the once and future library.” We are searching for an instructional design librarian, intentionally a hybrid kind of work, and we are engaging the university community in planning further library building, collections, and service renovations (re-newing, indeed!). What is most important about this initiative is not the resulting document, but the process itself of listening, thinking, and planning together.

Library work is inherently collaborative: even solo librarians aren’t really solo, but depend on the work of librarians elsewhere. The collaboration of learner and teacher can be deep work, even when that teacher is not formally a classroom instructor. Cal Newport's book pertinently describes and advocates for deep work.

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted Work (Grand Central/Hachette, 2016), and it is challenging and invigorating.  As a historian of Christianity, much of what he says resonates strongly with the writings from religious communities of varying types: those Benedictines who work outside the cloister, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Society of St. John the Evangelist, for example.

I realize those are all very different emphases of Christian spirituality.  In common, however, is a desire to find balance between the active and contemplative life —neither simply to leave the “shallow” world absolutely (in contrast with, for example, Carthusians), nor simply to surrender any meaningful deep work and wonder.  Newport writes (briefly) about honing a skill with craft (for example, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, coders, or teachers) and the connection of meaningful, skilled work with the sacred —the world of luminous, shining, wonderful things.  He speaks from an intellectual background formed by Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class As Soulcraft, Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, and Herbert Dreyfuss' and Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining.

I’m not yet finished with Newport’s book, but I’m an engaged reader, and with such books I take my time.  Newport has reminded me vividly of the first professional library job I had (at Drew University, 1986-1992), when computers were coming into academic libraries, but e-mail, the Internet (not yet graphical), and the culture of distracted busyness were in an early stage, compared to the present.  Working with less distraction, I did in fact get more done, and more happily —one reason that I remember that job as perhaps the most satisfactory job I have had as a librarian.

I have heard it said that as academic librarians, “our interruptions are our business,” and that may be true when fielding requests for help from our students and faculty.  But they’re asking for help less than they used to, and the days of the reference question that ends with a verification of fact are long past.  Now questions have much more to do with process: how do I use this database?  How do I cite this in APA? How can I tell if an article is really peer-reviewed? —just to cite facile examples.  Academic librarians must admit, I believe, that the principle interruptions we endure most days do in fact come from each other: the relentless stream of e-mail, and the distractions of social and news media.

In January I heard Jim Honan of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education reflect on a phrase he took from a librarian in New York State, “Our data does not do justice to our story.”  What is our story as a library, what is our value proposition: how does what we do matter, to whom, and how do we do it?  Responsible and apt answers to those questions have to go beyond the shallow work of day-to-day institutional librarianship to the deep work of the field.

Do academic librarians have “deep work” to do, or is it all in the shallows?  Newport defines deep work (page 3):

Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.  These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Do academic librarians do any of that?  I must answer yes —but in metaphors or images that differ from the kinds of deep work that Newport seems to presuppose as a computer scientist and mathematician (his work concentrates on distributed algorithms, designed to work through and among interconnected processors).

Librarians fundamentally connect learners (inquirers) to sources of information and knowledge —learners who are taking responsibility for their own learning.  As such a learning-centered library is necessarily a polymorphous, polyglot, multifocal place (physical or digital place, or both at once).  The new value that librarians create (to use Newport’s words) will reside in the minds of those inquirers with whom the librarians interact.

The value proposition of libraries ultimately lies in improving the skill of independent learners to set their own terms and extent for learning, to take responsibility for what they know, and want to know —both know cognitively, and know how to do.

The strategies librarians employ —how are they going to do this— involve both interactions with learners and intellectual resources and tools.  This is the truth behind David Lankes’ contention that “a room full of books is simply a closet, but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library.”  A library is fundamentally what librarians do more than what they have.  The academic public, of course, usually sees it the other way around.

Academic librarianship suffers in spades from the major distractions that impede deep work(pages 53 et seq.).  Newport’s “metric black hole” afflicts most of the field: not only is it nearly impossible to measure what makes an academic librarian effective or distracted, it is hard to measure the impact of this professional work in the first place.  The ACRL has undertaken significant initiatives to show the value of academic libraries, but none of the strategies or paths so far are completely persuasive.  

This difficulty with metrics leads to following the paths of least resistance: absent the clear and compelling evaluative mechanism of a bottom line (or other metric), librarians (among other workers) tend to choose the behavior that is easiest and easiest to rationalize at the time.  Being a librarian means doing what other librarians do, even if that’s not very deep, and how would you know that, anyway?

Hence, in the absence of clear indicators of what is really means to be valuable and productive, like other workers librarians can make busyness a proxy for productivity: do lots of stuff in a visible manner (hey! look at us over here in the library!).  So it has to be valuable and productive, right?

I haven’t yet finished the book, so I don’t want to give the appearance of reviewing it.  I have a question for Newport, however.  Is his operational concept of deep work in the book in fact overly determined by the kind of deep work he does as a computer scientist?  If he were a linguist, a psychologist, or a  performing artist, would he have written the book differently?

By no means to I wish to trivialize his work (either computer science, or this book).  Newport’s leading example of deep work is Carl Jung and
the tower he built near his rural house in Bollingen Tower a two-story stone house with a private study (not very far from Zurich).  Jung would go there to write undistracted, unlike his busy practice, family, and cafe life in Zurich.  Without question “the Tower” was crucial for Jung’s thinking and writing, producing the remarkable insights and books that not only took on Sigmund Freud, but changed depth psychology and real people’s lives.  His work was “deep” in every sense.

Newport tends by implication to characterize Jung’s work in Zurich, by contrast, as shallow.  Newport sympathetically  and consistently characterizes shallow work as significant and unavoidable —the everyday work of professional duties and communications that require attention, but not deep engagement.  In his several examples of Richard Feynman (physics), Adam Grant (business and work behaviors), or Rick Furrer (blacksmith), Newport associatesdeep work  strongly with isolation and often solitary craft —whether craft of steel, wood, or words (writing), and shallow work with all the other stuff.

Yet much of Jung’s work in Zurich was anything but shallow.  His numerous cases show up all over his writings, and his deep analyst-analysand encounters inform every page of his writings.  His challenge to Freud and Freudians required not only courage and persistence, but skill —a skill that cannot be characterized as “shallow” in any sense.  Newport never characterizes it as shallow explicitly, but the implication remains strong; while he writes explicitly, “don’t work alone,” he encounters conceptual and definitional difficulties when associating deep work with collaboration.  Although Newport describes Jung's pattern as "bimodal," his description cannot help but privilege the deep over the "shallow," even though without Zurich there would have been no Bollingen (and vice versa).  Is it not possible in each place Jung was engaging differing and distinct Gestalten or formulations of deep work?

How does this pertain to librarians? Library work is inherently collaborative: even solo librarians aren’t really solo, but depend on the work of librarians elsewhere.  The collaboration of learner and teacher can be deep work, even when that teacher is not formally a classroom instructor.

Newport’s concept of deep work is not flawed, but it needs to be broadened and adjusted for several lines or other metaphors of work —I’m thinking about librarians and parish clergy, lines of work that I know personally and best (there are many others, of course).  Such adjustments cannot --must not--detract from clarity or pertinence.  Librarians almost certainly do spend too much time on e-mail and connectivity of fairly trivial sorts —for example, the rush in the recent past for librarians to tweet their work even though the very medium of Twitter tends to trivialize it.  It is very easy for librarians to mistake busyness for productivity.

Telling the library’s story, showing its value proposition and strategy can be deep work.  Deep work requires librarians not to confuse busyness with productivity, and not to follow the safe paths of least resistance and sheer habit.  Librarianship is a craft, service both to the living and the dead, collaborating with both learners and resources.  It can be a variety of soulcraft.  (I never forget that I hold a degree from Columbia University’s School of Library Service.)  Clearing the mind for this deep work does in fact afford a glimpse of the sacred trust of learners, traditions, and change.  Newport’s book gives librarians' deep work a robust boost, a clarion recall to mental clarity.  I'm privileged and happy to be able to continue reading it.

A library is probably one of the last places where one can pursue interests and information unobserved. A mere few years ago this was a sign of obsolescence rather than currency.

In 2009 Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, was asked whether users should be willing to share information with Google as if it were a trusted friend --and Schmidt famously replied, "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."  The Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that this is very close to the famous phrase, "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about" --beloved of those who are seeking greater law-enforcement powers or processes.  It implies that people who seek to preserve privacy are doing something to worry about, not those who place them under surveillance.

That was then.  In the aftermath of Edward Snowdon's revelations --in particular those that detail the very cozy relationships between the NSA, major firms such as Google, and telecommunications giants such as Verizon-- privacy has returned as a positive right, not merely a historical left-over.

A library is probably one of the last places where one can pursue interests and information unobserved.  A mere few years ago this was a sign of obsolescence rather than currency.  Libraries made data surveillance difficult because they weren't high-tech enough.  That has changed too.  Suddenly that obsolescence has become a feature (as in, "that's not a bug, it's a feature!").

Why does it matter?  If there is one thing that Pew survey after Pew survey has found --as well as OCLC and other survey producers-- that thing surely has to be: people feel positive about the library "brand."  They want a vibrant, useful library in their academic, residential, or business community whether or not they intend to use it (or have used it).  A library is a "good thing."  People trust libraries, and trust librarians.

Trust is a huge asset, not to be thrown away or discounted casually.  Just ask General Motors, or for that matter, the NSA itself.

In general, libraries do a fairly accurate job of maintaining trust, but could do a lot better.  Circulation records of tangible items are not easily available for public discovery, depending on the laws of state and local jurisdictions.  (Connecticut has alarming little provision of the privacy of library records, for example.)  In any case, circulation records are hard to locate digitally because they are held in highly particular formats in integrated library systems, formats that don't translate readily to standards and common practices outside.  That's wasn't a bug, and now it's a feature.

Library use of external databases is a different matter.  In many systems, all traffic routed through a library proxy will be seen by parties outside the proxy as coming from one machine, one Internet Protocol address.  Separating the sessions would be far harder.  That doesn't cover all library database transactions, however, or even a large portion of them.  Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon --in French, GAFA-- can monitor a great deal of transactions on library workstations unless those are properly protected.

Eric Hellman has written persuasively (to my mind, at least) about the Library Digital Privacy Pledge here and here.  It's an interesting concept, whether or not the pledge ever receives wide adoption.  Eric's primary focus at this point is to get libraries to use the secure HTTP protocol --HTTPS-- as much as possible.  Library digital privacy has, of course, many other aspects that will need to be addressed.

Recently the small New Hampshire public library in West Lebanon (near Dartmouth College) was for the most part bullied away from using the secure browser system TOR by the NSA --although now they have recovered their courage.  TOR has been targeted in the past as the province of drug-dealers, pedophiles, and terrorists --what lovely company-- and who would want to be associated with them?  The topic invariably circles back to law enforcement: if you haven't done anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide (even when grammatically challenged!).

In the library no one ever used to track your reading, and no one should now: 3rd article of the American Library Association's Code of Ethics.  Trust is easily lost.  Privacy is easily lost.  A library is a great place to think, write, and read privately.  It's not a bug, it's a feature.

 

Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion. I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.

. . . Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion.  I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.

I’m a librarian and a book person (who’d have thought?) and therefore probably against the grain of American culture right now.  Books have been enormously influential in my life; they gave me an outlet, vision, and ambition when I was very young, and (some of them) have continued to challenge, delight, and astound me ever since.  Some books I count as old friends, and its a diverse lot: Lucretius, Søren Kierkegaard, Frederick Buechner, Karl Barth, Flannery O’Connor, Robertson Davies, Nora Ephron, Peter Brown, P.D. James — probably my educational and professional background shows there,  and some (like Brian Greene) I don’t understand very well.  I continue to read both printed books and digital texts; my current project is John Eliot Norton’s Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven.

To sum up a counter position: A “book person” is an anachronism: the world is digital, information moves at blazing speed, and care, nuance, and precision are luxuries of the past.  Readers have become users; teachers have become suppliers, and students have become customers.  The competition for attention drowns out the sustained attention any book requires, and the mark of the contemporary is multi-tasking, even though humans have been shown to do that very badly.  Instead of nuance, we have media scolds and bludgeons; instead of discussion we have talking points and position papers; instead of reading we have scanning or surfing.  Is it any wonder that we wind up with in a bitterly contentious, polarized society marked by increasing, sharp differences between the very rich, the poor, those caught in the diminishing middle, —where everything is on the market, and humans are either the customers or the product?  Disruption is the word of the moment, nevermind whether it is a well-establish and solidly argued social good or simple mediocrity —that it’s disrupted is enough to draw the line between the tired old and the shiny new.  Aaron Bady’s sharp questioning of Clay Shirky reveal how possible futures become taken for inevitable outcomes, and the slippery proposition that those outside any institution, profession, or work are bound to understand it better than its practitioners.  “Open is open” seems to end all discussion, period.  It is alleged, if you are part of “closed” (read “old) system, you couldn’t possibly understand.

Printed books are an “old” format bound for disruption, right?  Turns out: not so fast.  People continue to want them, and sales remain strong, despite Amazon’s assault on bookstores.  (And I do mean assault.)  The “friction” (or difficulty) of obtaining a print book —you have to go somewhere to get one: library, bookstore, or online— is also a friction for the publisher (lately restyled as the “intellectual property owner” —but that’s another blog entry).  Once published and sold, a print book can’t be disappeared in an Orwellian or Statist (Fascist) manner.  Case in point: last summer the merger of Penguin and Random House led to the disappearing of 1,400 Random House digital books from the SHU library catalog —the terms of the deal seems to have indicated that the new management (mostly from Penguin) would not continue the contracts with digital book aggregators (in our case, eBrary Academic Complete).  Suddenly links didn’t work, and a few weeks later records displaying them were deleted from our library system.  Had we purchase those 1,400 books as printed, the library would still have them available.  At least a few of them are bound to have been of enduring value and related to SHU’s curriculum (it was Random House, an “old” and “quality” publisher).  Now we have to pay more —either acquire print copies, or find where they are available digitally.

This doesn’t get at why books really matter, of course.  I’m thinking of academic books: scholarly books, and high-quality books for the wider market (such as Robert Caro’s everlasting biography of Lyndon B. Johnson).  What matters is not their format, but their content, their intellectual, nuanced exploration and exposition of a subject.  Format is not incidental, but neither is it crucial.

Books are critical to education and the life of a culture because of the sustained attention required to write and to read them.  Books are critical because they encode or contain thinking that can become part of a public discourse —can be challenged, confirmed, critiqued, welcomed, despised, all the possible outcomes of seriously considering a proposition or an argument.  A book sticks around in a stable form so that the author cannot suddenly alter  its contents to suit latter convenience, prove herself or himself right, or respond to critics.

Books are destructible, and tyrants have long sought to destroy them.  Book burnings became a badge of totalitarianism in the 20th century.  But otherwise all the copies of a book are hard to destroy.  A widely distributed supply and market system made it highly likely that somewhere, somehow, a copy might survive.  This has mattered in the face of tyrant, and it matter most during the period when so many texts went underground during the great disruptions of the early Middle Ages.  This list of ancient authors who survived to be read later on the basis of a single copy is a long list, and includes works by Aristotle, Lucretius, and Tacitus.

The idea that books as a technology of learning are obsolete takes a very short view.  To be sure: some books are obsolete: who bothers to look up past market prices for securities in a printed volume?  A much longer view sees the value in the conversations among and between generations.  Partisans of the “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution need to know what those original views are; partisans or a more evolutionist view need a sense of difference over time, of intervening realities and developments.  At the far end of this this longer horizon is the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand’s striking question: what are we doing that could make any difference 10,000 years from now?  (See The Long Now Foundation)

A neo-liberal university in which the customer (students + parents) is king may be able to “satisfice” their information needs by simply pulling random hits from a casual Google search.  That sells students and learning short, perhaps disastrously short.  Learning is more than simply a private good to be parceled out to those who can pay.  I believe in books, because books give witness to thinking that might propell such a university away from a view which spells long term disaster for learning, for universities, and for free society.

 

 

A book isn't an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity.

My prevous post took a brief look at the religious ideas that permeate not only Jaron Lanier's Who Owns The Future? (whether he explicitly acknowledges those ideas or not). This post considers what he contributes about books, and the future of books.

(Lanier, author of Who Owns The Future? appears on the SHU campus on Wednesday, October 9, 7:00 p.m. Schine Auditorium)

Books have become a cultural flash point that inspire "maniacal scheming" (see pages 352-360) --an unwitting testament to books' enduring iconic, cultural power.  What bothers Lanier is that current development of networks --the Siren Servers that seek total computational awareness and control--might lead to losing "the pattern of what a book is in the stream of human life and thought." (353)  After sketching some possible future scenarios about the fate of books, authors, and readers, Lanier offers a definition (one of the very best I have ever read):

A book isn't an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity. The economic model of our networks has to be optimized to preserve that synthesis, or it will not serve [hu]mankind.(358)

Lanier here touches upon the emotional salience and cultural power that books evoke.  The uneasiness Lanier shares with many is not just about texts (tomes, bindings), but about human lives.  "Human life is its own purpose," he continues.  "Thinking about people in terms of the components on a network is--in intellectual and spiritual terms--a slow suicide for the researchers and a slow homicide against everyone else."(360)  The ingestion of millions of e-texts into Artificial Intelligence divorces what humans write about from who they are, and what makes their lives meaningful to them.  "Whether we will destroy culture in order to save/digitize it is still unknown."(353) (Lanier references that metaphor to the Vietnam war.)

What makes a liberal education liberal--freeing--is the strong association (synthesis) of particular texts with particular people, moments, events, movements, points of view.  The real intellectual problem with Wikipedia isn't its alleged accuracy or inaccuracy. Rather, it "proposes that knowledge can be divorced from point of view." Note that Lanier writes knowledge --not data, not information, not the "flashes of thought" that might be "inserted meaningfully into a shared semantic structure" (ibid.)  Knowledge is what humans make for other humans.  Strictly speaking, computers can store, locate, index, and transform data, but can't know in the same sense.

These are my own thoughts, sourced in Lanier's text, which I found to enormously helpful in articulating the fundamentally different business model of a library from a database, even a sort of meta-database (a database of databases --a discovery service, in other words).  What libraries are about is the discovery of knowledge in human communities and continuities, in a symmetrical transaction that celebrates unanswered questions (intellectual risk) and acknowledges the presence of other sources of knowledge --whether living persons, libraries, databases, search engines, or other human syntheses of any and every kind.  

This transaction (process, pedagogy) thrusts libraries into an educational process squarely at odds with Siren Servers that are naracisstic (as though they alone collect data), risk-externalizing (questions and uncertainties never belong to the Server, always to the user), and depend upon extreme information assymetry --users can't know what the Server already knows about them, and how it seeks to modify their behavior.

Understanding the cultural term "book" a "a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity" respects authors, readers, and the economic and intellectual chain of power and responsibility that connects them.  This also illuminates why some (many?) people care so passionately about books --what they care about is human continuity, personhood, what makes a human life worth living.  What better question could a liberal arts education pursue?  What could be more "relevant" to the challenges of living in a "flat," networked world?

Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read."

Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read." (Lanier visits SHU on October 9, 2013.)  It's a wild, occasionally bumpy ride through simultaneous developments of technology, economy, and social thinking occasioned by the massive computing power ("big data") of arrays of servers.  When such an array achieves dominance in such a manner that it can aspire to omniscience, Lanier calls it a "siren server" --a software-mediated social vision that believes it's the only game in town, marked by radical information assymetry and outsources risk as much as possible.

There are so many elements of this book that I will pick out several for consideration, but one at a time. This piece concerns the religious elements of the social vision that advanced software engineers (called by synecdoche "Silicon Valley") seek to monetize and compell social acceptance.

Lanier does take this on in his fifth interlude, "The Wise Old Man in the Clouds," with the double meaning intact. Silicon Valley (or at least, many there) anticipate The Singularity, when software comes to write itself and computers outstrip human interaction, when the memories, emotions, and thoughts of an individual can be uploaded into "the cloud" and when the body died, the person lives on --when illness, death, scarcity (want), and human limitations of every kind are overcome (p. 325-331), when robots can provide satisfying sex.  (Really! --see pages 359-360)

As a technologist Lanier (who is both a technologist and a philosopher) wants to skitter away from religious questions.  Speaking for technologists, "We serve people best when we keep our religous ideas out of our work." (p. 194) --and yet this book is shot through with religious sensibility and ideas, including non-traditional human development ideas famous in the Bay area.  The questions of limits and Ultimate Concern, of human closed-in awareness and the unexpected in-breaking of The Other, keep returning again and again.  No one has yet successfully addressed these questions as regards technologists.  (And by "successfully," I don't mean that I would agree with that writer, but that such a writer both acknowledges these questions and moves discourse forward.)

Lanier's makes frequent reference to visionaries (H.G. Wells, Alan Turning, Ted Nelson), philosophers (Aristotle, Hobbes, Malthus, Marx) and science fiction writers or characters (Philip K. Dick, Dr. Strangelove, Star Trek the TV series, especially the original series).  All of these raised questions broadly classes as theological or religious --although apparently in the Silicon Valley "religious" means such Concern as narrowly defined by California-flavored evangelicalism, western Mormon sensibilities (whether orthodox LDS or not), and the spectre of fundamentalisms of every stripe.  ("Spiritual" is a very different word, suggesting all the happy feelings of Eastern philosophies mixed in with self-affirming slogans.) No wonder Lanier wants to restrict technologists to keep religious ideas out of their work.  

But does "religion" have to be defined that way?  (The fact that violence-prone religious fundamentalists share a small bit of thinking in common with "religion" makes other religious people guilty of crimes against humanity to the same but narrowly limited extent that chemists are guilty because they share a small amount of thinking with DKFarben, makers of the poisons used by the Nazis.)  The Silicon Valley amounts to being the paradigm of, among other things, "spiritual but not religious."  But that's a feint, simply deflecting attention.

On the one hand, "what does it mean to be human" (which Lanier re-phrases as, "whether people are 'special'", p. 196) is not a technological question and can't be answered in those terms and limitations.  On the other hand, those terms and limitations beg that question.  The adjustment of software and information to reality is imperfect --reality consistently outstrips human ability to encode it.  (For all the hype that information lies at the heart of the universe --such as DNA encoding for example-- it takes humans to translate that reality into symbols or code.)  The religious and philosophical questions raised by massive "cloud" computing are inescapable, and only a resolute will to face them for what they are will sing a song over against the Sirens strong enough to modify their behavior.

Finally, someone else takes on Clay Shirky.

Finally, someone else takes on Clay Shirky.  (See my own posts below.)

I especially appreciate how Bady's remarks about how Shirky stacks the rhetorical deck in his own favor, so that anyone inside higher education is incapable of questioning higher education.  Oh, but I'm a librarian, so I'm not capable of questioning so famous a writer. I must be part of the problem, and I'm solely hell-bent on self-preservation, apparently.

One might add, by Shirky's logic, that anyone inside capitalism is incapable of questioning capitalism --this is the classic "false consciousness" rhetoric: your consciousness is false, so you are unable to see that your consciousness is false.  This is another variety of the rhetorical move made in previous decades by Michel Foucault, for whom power was everything --and if you question Foucault, you obviously do so because you resist Foucault's power with your own.  Huh?