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Milano - Castello sforzesco - Michelangelo, Pietà Rondanini by Michelangelo (1564) - Foto Giovanni Dall'Orto, 6-jan-2006 - 05
Milano - Castello sforzesco - Michelangelo, Pietà Rondanini (1564)
Foto Giovanni Dall'Orto, 6-jan-2006 - 05. Source: Wikimedia; CC-BY-2.0

I've been mulling Arthur C. Brooks article in The Atlantic, "Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think" -- cheerily subtitled "Here how to make the most of it."

My first thought was: this article has an important core, but somehow was badly edited. The title seems to have been made up by someone for whom such a prospect seems distant. The subtitle is straight-up advice-column mush. Worse, Brooks seems to have buried the lede --something that he does not do elsewhere in his writings,, and is done here in such a way that it's not a sign of his alleged decline. I cannot avoid wondering whether somehow The Atlantic's editors were nervous about this article, and whether it touched some raw nerve, perhaps in an editor closer to Brook's age than the one who titled the article.

Brooks lede is important, and worth reading and emphasis. In the course of the article, he recounts their stories, and concludes, "Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin. How does one do that?"

Well, not by working for a think-tank, no matter how distinguished. Some of Brook's nervousness seems to me to be a product of the Massachusetts Avenue hothouse in DC: the American Enterprise Institute is right next door to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and across the street from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Peterson Institute of International Economics. (I regret slighting other worthy organizations on those blocks.). Just a little competitive, no? And from this perch is one supposed not to feel old past 45?

Maybe because I've always worked in higher education I'm used these past decades to being an old person amidst the young --since I was 28, in fact. I have known so many young people, and like them, work well with them, and certainly am not threatened by them. I see their youth and ingenuity up close well enough to know that being young "before professional decline" can be a great, good thing --and not, much of time. Especially now, in the age of locked-down anxiety.

Years ago a wonderful Benedictine monk, the Rev. Fr. Gabriel Coless, who has the serene, very long-now outlook of his order, taught me a lasting lesson. Coless was reflecting on a common experience: a mannerly University building operations worker was reviving a recalcitrant air conditioner on a warm September day in a seminar room, while several students gossiped about a particularly idiotic, recent scandal involving a certain professor of theology, and the spouse of another one. Just after the uniformed, sweaty, good-natured mechanic left the room, Coless commented, "the order of practical wisdom and the order of academic intelligence have nothing to do with each other." The mechanic knew nothing of Scholastic theology, but treated people well and was intensely loyal to a wife with a long-term chronic illness. His practical wisdom outshone any of the supposed academic brilliance reposing in that other asinine, arrogant professor. Young people, no less than their elders, can confuse academic brilliance with practical intelligence, and one suspects nowhere so much as in Washington think tanks.

Brooks draws on British psychologist Raymond Cattell's distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence, and finds that fluid intelligence has special valence for young people. He's right, but sparkling fluid intelligence is not much use to a considerable majority of young people, who either don't have much of it to begin with, or must cope with circumstances very different from the denizens of think tanks and the academy. Brooks example, perhaps drawn from Cattell: poets done with half their creative output by age 40, on account of the waning of their fluid intelligence? If the other half is done by, let's say, age 80, that's a lengthening and changing of creativity, but hardly its senescence. Just lately I've been reading the late W.S. Merwin, who produced such amazing work in his 80s--exactly because he was setting his mental and creative habits when he was in his 20s and 30s. His later work was nothing he might have imagined fifty years before, but he could not have done it without his earlier work. Perhaps I am merely cherry-picking a contrary example, but I believe that there are many others, as well. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, published 2004, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year later--when she was 62-63, and twenty years after her earlier well-received fiction, Housekeeping. Her writing took a long time to crystalize. Does that mean she lost her fluidity of expression and imagination, or merely removed the incidental to reveal the essential, sculpted away the unnecessary stone to reveal the true figure?

That is Brook's most arresting and poignant metaphor --shaping his life by subtracting what is extraneous.

What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.

Printed version, July 2019, page 73

After listening to the wisdom of the Hindu sage Acharya ("Teacher"), Brooks makes four specific commitments:

  • Jump (leaving his current status and prestige)
  • Serve (fully sharing ideas in the service of others, primarily by teaching at a university --more about that in a moment)
  • Worship refreshment of the soul, pursuing one's spiritual heritage, shaping work itself as a transcendental commitment
  • Connect --becoming more conscious of the roots that bind us together, each to each (as aspen trees).

Brooks avoided E.M. Forster's "Only connect" --by now maybe trite, but still just resistant enough to mere sentimentality.

These worthy commitments and important insights were unfortunately buried under a load of repetitive citations from social science and real editorial nervousness. I wish Brooks had started his article with his account of his earlier, unhappy career as a professional French Hornist. That story leads directly to Brook's specific commitments, and foreshadowed his later encounter with some famous, bitter old man on a plane. Then distill the social science before the conclusion.

That no one can maintain peak professional performance indefinitely is no news, however many people (especially men, but sometimes women) attempt it. How many failed intimate relationships are the collateral damage of such fantasies! That intelligence and imagination changes as one ages is also no real news.

The poignant force of Brook's piece is that he realizes all this from his vantage point in elite Washington, and is willing to step away before others might wish he had. How different are the current, comparative cases of Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas --the later seems simply to have soured in self-imposed isolation beyond what even many conservatives can stomach, while the former must watch many of her life's deep commitments under assault every term. Her grace and wit outshines his embittered silence.

Brooks apparently desires to teach in a universtiy, and I wish him well. I doubt that he will have to get sucked into the machinery of academic life --advising, committee work, and empty sloganeering from so-called thought-leaders (much less the poisonous atmosphere of freedom-versus-safety controversies). I've certainly seen enough academic colleagues simply rot on the vine (in some cases with alcohol), and in other cases turn so rancid that their colleagues dearly desire their departure under any circumstances whatsoever. I've also watched faculty in the later years connect with students in a manner that changes their lives (both the students', and sometimes the teacher's). I hope the latter for Brooks, knowing that such connection is forged in a lifetime of experience, some of it unhappy, and in thinking and re-thinking about what is really important.

May the sculpture of his life reveal a strength and liveliness that would be lost in a think-tank, and may his students rise and bless his memory decades later. Only connect.

Barbara Fister helpfully pointed out why librarians should not be intimidated by Kanopy video's tactics with library users.
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Intimidation sculpture by Michel Rathwell from Cornwall, Canada
[CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Barbara Fister's post on InsideHigherEd Unkind Rewind (June 26) is totally correct about Kanopy Streaming Video's creepy tactics, contacting users directly when a library cancels its Kanopy contract. This is an outrageous abuse of user data and has the long-term effect of completely undermining librarians' trust in the Kanopy organization.

Barbara references the Twitter feed @Libskrat as an oblique reference to Kanopy complaining to New York Public Library management when a librarian spoke out about their practices on a mailing list (AKA "listserv" but that's trademarked in the USA). Kanopy referenced a supposed NDA and may have threatened legal action. If this violates any NDA my library inadvertently agreed to, then let Kanopy bring it on. I do not see any non-disclosure stipulated in the Kanopy TOS (terms of service), but other terms are fairly creepy: the requirement to submit to binding arbitration by the American Arbitration Association, which is as good as useless. I may seek to cancel my library's Kanopy account on that basis alone. I expect my University General Counsel may in fact require that I do so.

In addition, Kanopy's privacy policy allows them (at 2.(a)), in their view, to abuse librarians' trust outrageously:

We may ask for certain information such as your name, institution name, email address, password and other information. We may retain any messages you send through the Service, and we may also retain other information you voluntarily provide to us. We use this information to operate, maintain and provide to you the features and functionality of the Service, and as further described below.

Barbara Fister (back to her blog) makes one claim, though, with which I differ:

For librarians, my advice is to resist the shiny and trust we are relevant, to value the rights we traditionally have when we purchase content, and push for transparency and fairness in licensing deals.

I did not fail to "resist the shiny" when we began to work with Kanopy in 2014. My library entered into an agreement with Kanopy for good reasons.

We began to work with Kanopy, in the first place, because our Communications school (then department) contracted with Kanopy without informing the library--and then expected to use the library's proxy service. (Actually a rather ignorant former staffer there wanted every student to create her or his own login, an obvious non-starter for Kanopy.) The Communications faculty wanted access to the Media Education Foundation's Media Studies and Communication. Only later did the library add the patron-driven acquisition, user-initiated (PDA) model which proved unsustainably expensive in the past fiscal year. We did so because we needed to move the library into providing streaming video for curricular use, not because it is "shiny" (. . . and some of it is not!)

With Barbara's help (above), I realize that we happily dodged a bullet. Because we could not cut Kanopy off entirely (Communications still wants and has that MEF license), Kanopy has never contacted our users to deplore our decision to discontinue PDA. What we have done instead is more circumspect. We left Kanopy in our A-Z databases list, but publicly discouraged its use. We removed records for any videos that are not licensed from our discovery service.

When an instructor wants to use a video in class (we have some of those), we attempt to re-direct the instructor to Academic Video ONline (AVON), which we have leased from ProQuest at a more affordable (and controllable) price. If no suitable content is available, we will reluctantly authorize a PDA license for that one video --but we make sure the instructor knows how much this it costs for 365 days. If a student wants access for a class or paper, we gently deny the request. (We can distinguish student requests from faculty because students have a slightly different e-mail domain address.) We make sure that department chairs, program directors, and Deans know how much Kanopy costs. They completely support our plan to control expenses.

So my advice to librarians: don't discontinue Kanopy, simply bury them. Take them out of your A-Z databases list. Remove them from your catalog or discovery service. Act as though they don't exist. Make Kanopy your library's "frenemy." And refuse to knuckle under to anyone's mob-like tactics of intimidation.

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A week ago the Provost of the university I serve sent me a link to Dan Cohen's article in The Atlantic, The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper. I know Dan and like and respect him as a colleague, and what he wrote is accurate---he may have extrapolated a little too readily from his context at Northeastern to practically every other college library.

Linked image from Pew Research Center, by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

When the Provost of your university sends you a link like that, the implicit message is clear: books are already irrelevant, and libraries (the bearers of the "book brand") with them. His point did not have to be made explicit: libraries are toast. Libraries are the past; the future is STEM education.

Like many universities, my university is rushing headlong into STEM programs. The popular, pundit-led perception goes that those subjects are the wave of the future, with little use for legacy resources: the future is everything (here come the flying cars!). The reality might be different, but who cares? The sizzle of growth is all: more sizzle, more growth, more STEM.

This rush is a rational response to perceived market pressures in higher education, pressures all measured and conceived narrowly as data. Fear of failure is so palpable one can taste it: the demographics in the Northeast are grim. Adapt (and that means STEM) or die. Adaptation means success, in this view.

In higher education, success is measured by ever-narrower criteria and data for students, their parents, and higher education administrators.

Students want to earn an immediately marketable degree. Marketability and immediate application --that first job-- is emphasized through the college application and enrollment process. Success is narrow path: don't fall off.

Parents demand, ostensibly on behalf of their students, a university that provides a the path to earn such an immediately marketable STEM degree; otherwise the graduates might be left behind in a morass of doubt and student debt: the penalties for falling behind could be severe. Fear of the childrens' failure is palpable.

For university administrators, success boils down to survival. A university that fails to cater to the clientele risks falling behind and disappearing, according to similar narrow criteria. Demographics assure that enrollment will decline in the Northeast, and expensive private universities that lack substantial endowments will be especially threatened. Enrollments must be kept up: and especially male enrollment, in some places already critically low.

Among all qualified high school seniors, the supply of qualified male high school graduates will continue to decline, and that in particular threatens any university, like my own, that historically has been characterized by educations in nursing, education, health professions, and social services. The retention of all students, but especially males, is critical to the university's continuing financial success. Received wisdom has it that the balance of males and females cannot tip more than 60% in the female direction without risk of losing those males.

Hence the undeclared but transparent emphasis upon majors that are regarded as appealing to young males: business (sports marketing, accounting), and STEM subjects, such as computer science gaming, cybersecurity, and financial computing, and a few outliers such as athletic training and exercise sciences. Hence the emphasis upon varsity sports and NCAA division I status. Doubling down: these young men and their parents tend to define success by very narrow criteria: income ("bank") and corporate prestige: major firms or bro-grammer-led startups. Both their success and the university's is very narrowly conceived and measured.

Given these narrow criteria both for students, their parents, and university administrators, STEM seems to be the ticket to guaranteed success for all. Northeastern is the template of such a successful, expensive private university in the New England. Such "template" quality makes Dan Cohen's article doubly powerful: if library books are becoming wallpaper at Northeastern, then it must be true everywhere. Cohen cites Yale and University of Virginia --others in the elite class. If a university is not like Yale, UVa, or Northeastern, that college of university will face decline and extinction because it did not become like them. It's a charmed, circular logic that assures senior leadership, trustees, parents, and students that the university is providing an excellent education because budgets are maintained, money is saved, enrollment goals are met, and the number of graduates increases, especially graduates in STEM subjects. The numbers of the key performance indicators add up to doing a great job.

What's this have to do with libraries?

Libraries are identified with books, etymologically and historically. Where else by definition do you find a librum? (Yes: French for bookstore is libraire.) If the books are becoming wallpaper, then the library is becoming a museum, a lovely exhibit of what used to be, rather like Thomas Jefferson's library exhibited at the Library of Congress. Cohen, from Northeastern (that template of the future), proves it by word and example: case closed.

Or is it?

At the university level: Northeastern developed into the STEM fields earlier than many universities. Recently the number of STEM programs everywhere is increasingly so rapidly that sooner or later simple "reversion to mean" suggests that some of them will not be as successful as hoped --measured of course by those key performance indicators. When every college or university wants to do the same thing, competition will reward some and demote more. STEM education actually poses some risks. The reality that many STEM subjects are actually difficult and demanding usually goes unremarked: even the best programs and services in support of student success will not lead everyone to succeed. Academic risks (can any given student really master the subjects?), and financial risks (can any given university really afford the expensive equipment and faculty that STEM subjects demand?) suggest that failures, when they come, will be expensive and hard to overcome by other means.

Academia by definition is a vast sorting engine. The vast sorting of academic achievement will mean that not every computer science graduate (for example), or computer science program, will be equally worthwhile. When every student is urged to pursue STEM, and every university caters to STEM instruction, real market differentiation is very difficult for a university to achieve in the face of increasing competition.

At the University library level: Cohen's piece is hard to reconcile with several other influential studies and surveys. A well-sourced article in PLoS One, May 2018 surveyed over 10,000 tertiary-level students world-wide and found that national origins or school systems had little sway in choice of format (print or digital): "the broad majority of students worldwide prefer to read academic course materials in print." The rush to digital looks like, from this viewpoint, a considerable convenience to administrators, but not what students for the most part desire. Print is changing, not dead.

On the other hand, Jean Twenge et al. clearly charted trends in adolescents' media use 1976-2016, and came away with the conclusion that "the rapid adoption of digital media since the 200s has displaced the consumption of legacy media." Since 1976?--well, duh, since consumer digital media did not exist yet. Twenge's definition of "legacy media" is very broad: "print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers; TV; and movies." That age-related cohorts of users have moved away from printed media since 1976 is obvious if only because now they have many choices. By contrast, have adolescents really moved away TV? If by TV one means broadcast signal by the three major networks in the style of 1976 (plus maybe PBS), then yes --but how many adolescents now interact with digital "TV" media on phones, including full-length movies, numerous cable series, and Youtube videos? The crux comes with Twenge's verb "has displaced" meaning "taken the place of," or "removed." Her (or their) assumption is that because adolescents (as everyone else) have only some much time and attention, and the amount of time has not increased, therefore a zero-sum displacement must have occurred. On the contrary: many adolescents now interact with digital media in spaces and activities that never would have allowed similar use of printed or analog-visual media, such as transportation, exercise, and meal times. More accurate reading of the "time spent" might result in a verb such as "has supplemented," "has extended," or "has substituted." Measuring cohorts since 1976 effectively stacks the research deck: adolescents now do many things that were far less common activities in 1976: women's sports, interactive but not digital games (Dungeons and Dragons, for example), and community and social service. What activities had to be "displaced" for those to happen?

The question here is: are "library books" merely "wallpaper" (Cohen), and broad patterns of behavior only partially warrant that view. Work by the highly-regarded Pew Research Center in surveys regarding the internet, technology, and libraries give depth and nuance to the question of the public library users, engagement, and expectations.

Through a long-running series of surveys and reports, the Pew projects have identified typologies of engagement of public library users and non-users. Public library users are not a niche group: "30% of Americans ages 16 and older are highly engaged with public libraries, and an additional 39% fall into medium engagement categories" (Citation, page 4) This is seen in 2012 studies of library engagement among younger users: "Younger Americans—those ages 16-29—exhibit a fascinating mix of habits and preferences when it comes to reading, libraries, and technology." (Citation)

This scheme of user typology measures engagement, not age, although one of the groups, "Young and Restless," describes a group younger than US median age, new to neighborhoods and cities, not other civilly or socially engaged, and predominant in the South. They have lower levels of engagement and library use and do not usually know where a public library is located. On the other hand, library engagement frequently correlates with all kinds of information usage and interaction, income, and education: the groups of highly-engaged library users tend to be slightly younger but considerably more educated than the US median. Some engagement is also associated with life changes:

Deeper connections with public libraries are often associated with key life moments such as having a child, seeking a job, being a student, and going through a situation in which research and data can help inform a decision. Similarly, quieter times of life, such as retirement, or less momentous periods, such as when people’s jobs are stable, might prompt less frequent information searches and library visits.

(citation: page 4-5)

In 2017 further analyses of library engagement revealed that about half of US Millennials have visited a public library or bookmobile in the past year --53%, compared with 45% Gen Xers, 43% of Baby Boomers, and 36% of "Silent Generation." The survey question was specifically focused on the use of public libraries, not on-campus academic libraries. Pew reports "relatively high library use by Millennials might be related to changes that many public libraries have undergone in the past 20 years." When Pew asked "who doesn't read books in America?" (at rates ranging from 19% in 2011 to 27% in 2015, and 24% in reported in March 2018), the demographic traits that characterize "non-book readers" (who also seem to read little else) were mostly likely to be Hispanics, older adults, those living in households earning less the $30,000 per year, those whose education stopped with the high school diploma or did not graduate from high school. Again, this analysis was focused on public libraries.

So what about academic libraries? Cohen's report from Northeastern, buttressed by statistics from Yale and UVa, and consonant with experience elsewhere, is that college students are reading (and checking out) fewer books, but using far more e-books and other digital text (journal articles, and statistical, numerical, or geographical databases). This does not immediately translate to lower library engagement, because gate-count and head-count numbers suggest steadily rising library space usage by students who have relatively few quiet places to study (as well as one of the few places on campus with intentionally-designed small group work spaces). Cohen suggests that libraries are really seeing "a Great Sorting within the library, a matching of different kinds of scholarly uses with the right media, formats, and locations." Some books continue in high demand: bulky health sciences texts and reference works; art books and bound music, and a few other categories. "Multiple copies of common books" can still present a problem because of digital rights management restrictions imposed by vendors. Lower-use books are much more appropriately digital, and really good news at SHU is that we have far more books available to our users in digital format than we were ever able to provide in the years before e-book aggregations, rentals, and purchases.

Cohen's piece in The Atlantic centers on printed books, and the conundrum remains: why is academic book circulation lower while Pew also reports fairly high use of libraries and collections (including print) by Millennials? Millennials, like everyone else, are elective public library users: they choose to use a public library (contrasted with assigned-use in academia, for example "you need to find three peer-reviewed articles"). These different patterns and perceptions are hard to square with each other. I believe that many millennials have fairly high engagement with libraries, and believe that libraries are important to them and their communities, all while using printed books more rarely in academic settings.

Cohen acknowledges that the decline of printed book circulations "runs contrary to the experience of public libraries and bookstores, where print continues to thrive." (Note: many of those libraries and bookstores are in communities with many college-educated people.) Cohen continues, "Unlike most public libraries, [academic] libraries have always been filled with an incredibly wide variety of [resources] --different books for different purposes." Research monographs are rarely read through cover-to-cover. A 2016 study at Seton Hall University suggests that in-house use of printed books may in fact be higher than traditionally tracked by parallel circulations: is it time to bring back the in-house use count?

(How much familiarity does Cohen really have with public libraries? Many public libraries I know, even smaller ones, have a wide variety of resources, though often at less historic depth than academic, and certainly less access to specialized STEM resources, which are the staple at Northeastern. Still, many public libraries are hardly to be dismissed casually.)

The ground-level realities of public and academic libraries usage patterns, levels, and engagement by Millennials and late-Millennials (so-called "Gen-Z") are quite different than those perceived by their elders, who tend to substitute their own experience for the actual and observable behavior of those who are young now. The message that printed books are irrelevant, and libraries, distinguished as the "book brand," are irrelevant, too may disclose a lot of wishful thinking among academic administrators regarding STEM education, higher education finance, and the behavior of the young. Cohen did not intend to show in his Atlantic article that "libraries are now irrelevant," but that is how his article can be taken by those simply looking for confirmation of their established point of view. To which I can only reply, watching millennials use libraries: engagement is as engagement does.

Estonia has found a path forward for secure, social computing on a small scale, a humane, digital way of life that does not depend upon surveillance from giant corporations and semi-governmental entities. What might a humane, digital way of life look like in the USA, at a vastly larger scale?
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In December 2017 Nathan Heller published an article, Estonia, The Digital Republic in The New Yorker. Heller frequently writes on digital topics, events and personalities in the Silicon Valley, books, and higher education --recently The Hidden Radicalism of Chris Hughes's Call the Break Up Facebook (May 14, 2019). Heller's "Letter from Tallinn" received some notice, notably from Rainer Kattel and Ines Mergel at University College of London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. The subject had also gained the interest of Ben Hammersley, a contributing editor for Wired.

Estonia has found a path forward for secure, social computing on a small scale, a humane, digital way of life that does not depend upon surveillance from giant corporations and semi-governmental entities. What has happened since 2017? What are the questions yet to be addressed in Estonia? What might a humane, digital way of life look like in the USA, at a vastly larger scale? How might academics (and academic librarians in particular) advocate for a manner of social computing that is fundamentally different from our troubled, troll-filled present?

Tallinn, Estonia, via Wikimedia

Estonia's story as a nation is deep-rooted and troubled. Emerging from pre-history in a the Scandinavian, Viking cultural orbit, Estonian origins are obscure and combine several groups connected by language. (Estonian, like Finnish, Hungarian, and Maltese, is not of Indo-European origins; but those four languages are only distantly related to each other.) The name Aesti was used by Tacitus in Germania 45 but it is unknown whether than name has anything to do with the ancient marahvas, the Estonian self-descriptor "country people."

The forcible Christianization of the "country people" 1206-1227 was one of the last such campaigns in Europe; Estonians were then dominated by Baltic Germans and Swedes. Estonia became Lutheran in the 1530s, about the time when monarchies of Muscovy, Sweden, and Poland/Lithuania sought to expand; the following centuries Estonians were dominated by Swedes and Russians in bloody conflicts that sometimes halved the population. The Estonian nationalist awakening began with the reclamation of the language mid-19th century, using the term eestlane, and Estonian epics, songs, theatre began to be recovered. (Recently the historic religions are regaining adherents and visibility.)

Estonian independence was declared in the violent confusion of German defeat and Bolshevik revolution 1918-1919 but lasted only twenty years; the Soviet Union annexed Estonia and reconstituted is as a Soviet republic in 1940. The war years 1940-1945 reduced the population by 25% as Estonians were killed, exiled, or fled as refugees; Soviet Russians began a program of forcible Russification to cement their hegemony and annihilate remnants of the Estonian resistance in the 1950s. The Estonian Republic was proclaimed in August, 1991 and the Russian army decamped by 1994. Estonians now comprise 88% of the population; the largest minority groups are Russian, Swedish, and Finnish; the latter two are official recognized cultural minorities.

For Estonian digital life, the defining event was a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack in April and May 2007 that paralyzed the country. The attack was traced to undoubted Russian coordination and origins, especially since it started soon after Estonia relocated a Soviet war memorial from the center of Tallinn, and culminated on May 9 (Russian commemoration of victory in World War 2) and then suddenly disappeared. The 2007 attack was a template for later attacks against the Georgia, Denmark, NATO, the NASDAQ, and Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. In response, Estonians vowed "never again," and have hosted the NATO Cooperative Defense Centre of Excellence. Estonia now also hosts Locked Shields, a "unique international cyber defence exercise offering the most complex technical live-fire challenge in the world." (https://ccdcoe.org/exercises/locked-shields/)

External threats, largely Russian, influenced the fundamental design of Estonia's digital society. The Estonian government's Information Systems Authority developed X-Road, a "centrally governed distributed integration layer between information systems," first released in 2016 under an MIT license (free, but permitting reuse within proprietary applications). As a distributed integration layer between systems, X-Road permits (and even requires) fundamental Estonian policies: information is entered only once; an individual owns all information about herself or himself; information can only be used with the permission of the owner.

Such distributed information means that there is no central databank of information and no assembling of individual profiles without that person's knowledge (excepting law enforcement). It's all done on-the-fly and the owner of the data has to give permission. With no central databank, there is no single target for cyberattack. X-Road itself is protected by K.S.I. technology (Keyless Signature Infrastructure) that uses blockchain-like public ledger that appends a record of events to each successive event, and uses a "one-way cryptographic hash function" that encode data but is irreversible --no one could reconstruct the data from the hash values. The integrity of data is assured, and cannot be breached through any mere appearance of normality: every footprint can be traced. A massive network of meshed devices --the "internet of things"-- essentially asks every other device it contacts, "Are you OK?" The distributed effect of such device security is that a hacker has to penetrate the defenses of not only one object, but of a host of objects, all protected by a series of one-way encrypted queries.

Estonians know that the Russians will likely attack again: it is just a matter of time, as has been the case since the 13th century. One solution has been to backup the entire Estonian infrastructure on servers in Luxembourg with the same legal standing as any Estonian physical embassy. When the invasion comes, Estonia's elected leaders, scattered as necessary, can reconstitute their government and assure a secure integrated system remotely, on the cloud. The same backup will provide service continuity in the case of a massive cyberattack that is even partially successful.

The fundamental Estonian commitments to data ownership, integrity, and authorized use on-the-fly, foster a meaningful conversation about the basic values of Estonian society: What kind of society do people want? Where are the borders and the limits, whether tangible or digital? Who makes important decisions, and how are those decisions made? How can transparency and trust be assured?

In Estonia (and elsewhere) this will, in the long run, have to extend to questions only now emerging: what is a person's "digital estate" after death, and its status? How do healthcare and legal proxies work in a fully digital society? Does financial bankruptcy mean digital bankruptcy, and are they connected? Can anything ever really be forgotten? Many thorny issues remain to be addressed, from the difficult to the wicked, and they all hinge on cultural values: what is important and necessary.

These are fundamentally humanistic questions: they belong to the humanities, or at least to those humanists who believe they have something to contribute. Estonians do not have an luxury of distance, or any comfort from history, and their technical relationships with Finland and elsewhere cannot make up for their well-founded sense of unease. So the questions that Estonians are asking in a digital society are forerunners of those only now emerging publicly in the USA, EEC, and elsewhere. Events since 2017--the revelation of the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, in the Brexit vote, attempted interference in France, continuing mischief in Italy --all have confirmed the message of 2007: no nation is safe, and Putin's Russia is more than willing to host and facilitate any bad actor that might come along. Cyber chaos is not just a tactic: it is a strategic goal itself, and interrogates ideas such as truth and justice. Teachers of the humanities who are unwilling to address the profound question, what makes a society human and humane?--simply abdicate their real responsibility to their students and readers. Martin Kaevats, Estonia's national digital advisor, said to Nathan Heller, the "gadgetry . . . is not important. It's about the mind-set. It's about the culture. It's about the human relations--what it enables us to do."

So what do we do? Where do we go from here?

What does a liberally educated person do? William Cronon's list (discussed in this blog previously) answers as well as any. Liberally educated people have mastered a inter-connected set of skills:

  • They listen and they hear;
  • They read and they understand;
  • They can talk with anyone;
  • They can write clearly, persuasively, and movingly;
  • They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems;
  • They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth;
  • They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism;
  • They understand how to get things done in the world;
  • They nurture and empower the people around them;
  • They follow E.M. Forster’s injunction from Howards End, "Only connect . . ."

That's a lovely list, but where do we go from here? What's the point?

In 2017, when Heller asked Kaevats "what he saw when he looked at the U.S.," he responded: "A technical mess. Data architecture was [is!] too centralized. Citizen's didn't own their own data; it was sold, instead, by brokers. Basic security was [is!] lax." Convoluted and backwards ideas of legal and digital protection have resulted in what some might call a "wicked" problem: "a systemic loss of community and trust."

To regain this trust takes quite a lot of time. . . . There also needs to be a vision from the political side. It needs to be there always--a policy, not politics. But the politicians need to live it, because in today's world, everything will be public at some point. . . . You need to constantly be who you are."

Estonia: the Digital Republic: Letter from Tallinn, by Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, December 11, 2018

Being constantly who you are (emphasis mine) connects Cronon's list and Kaevat's visionary diagnosis. Such humane "being who you" are starts with listening, continues with literacy, humility, and practicality, and ends with connection. That connection is perhaps the only source of renewed trust still available to us in fractured, divisive, fear-filled America today. It's about the culture: how do we change it, how to get that change done. It's about living the policy of humility, real security, personal dignity, and genuine respect (not hostility) for others who are bound to disagree.

In Rainer Kattel's and Ines Mergel's words, "Economic efficiency gains are not enough as value frameworks for digital transformations." They go on to note that while digital infrastructure and systems are sine qua non, so are the institutional arrangements that would create "countervailing powers to existing powers and routines within the bureaucracy. . . Public sector organizations need new forms of capabilities that centre on socially conscious design and software skills. . ."

The liberally educated person in that context will understand many frameworks of value, the importance of "countervailing powers" (Kattel & Mergel credit the phrase to J.K. Galbraith), and be able to get on with the "new forms of [public] capabilities that centre on socially conscious design and software skills." That is: they will be able to solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems, respect rigor as a way of seeking truth, and connect people through reason, argumentation, and literate communication: the core of Cronon's list.

The U.S.A. is exponentially larger and more complex than Estonia, and both available and potential transformations will not have the same results in every location, sector, or class. American society so lacks any kind of civility and trust that is sometimes seems that the only way to save this village is to burn it down. Estonia cannot afford such a way of nihilism --because those who would burn it all down, and be happy to do so, sit just across a historically fragile border. Neither can the U.S.A. afford such nihilism in the face of the catastrophic challenges of climate change, financial mismanagement, generational inequity, and political polarization that will shortly become unavoidable. We have to change our cultural, legal, and commercial understanding of data security, ownership, and privacy. We have to follow something like Chris Hughes' advice to break up Facebook, and not just Facebook, but (in Nathan Heller's words) break up "the way the tech industry runs, changing the flow of investment capital, the strategies for growth, the people to whom the spoils of efficiency go." It won't be easy: Only connect. The Estonians can do it; we can do it, too. If only we will constantly be who we are (really).

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, plea
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A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to another another, and to our past and to what is still to come. I realized that this entire time, learning about the library, I had been convincing myself that my hope to tell a long-lasting story, to create something that endured, to be alive somehow as long as someone would read my books, was what drove me on, story after story; it was my lifeline, my passion, my way to understand who I was. . . .

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

--Susan Orlean, The Library Book, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 309-310

--Whispering post? See this article from Rochford, Essex, England. Rochford is approximately 70km east of central London.

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An Easter vigil at St. Paul's Chapel in Lower Manhattan last year featured ancient and modern chants.CreditLeo Sorel/Trinity Wall Street,
via The New York Times

Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels, and let
your trumpets shout salvation for the victory of our
mighty King.

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
bright with a glorious splendor,
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.
Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church,
and let your holy courts, in radiant light,
resound with the praises of your people.

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Christ Church, New Haven, CT
(Source: Wikipedia, Public Domain)

“You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?” Cordelia asked [Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s novel]. “Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas . . . it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it.” --Brideshead Revisited

Incipit lamentatio Ieremiae prophetae:
ALEPH. Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo: facta est quasi vidua domina gentium, princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo.
BETH. Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimae eius in maxillis eius: non est qui consoletur eam ex omnibus caris eius: omnes amici eius spreverunt eam, et facti sunt ei inimici.
Ierusalem, Ierusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum.

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O Dieu dont le Fils unique, par sa vie, sa mort et sa resurrection, nous a merite, les recompenses du salut eternel, faites que, meditant ses mysteres dans le tres saint Rosaire de la bienheureuse Vierge Marie, nous mettions a profit les lescons qu'ils contiennent afin d'obtenir ce qu'ils nous font esperer. Par la meme Jesus-Christ, votre Fils notre Seigneur. Amen.

A longer perspective of religious traditions can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac of social media.
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A longer perspective of religious traditions can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac of social media.

Iona Abbey, Easter 2013
Iona Abbey, Easter 2013 (Larger)

Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism (see previous long entry) has led him to "stumble across this growing tension between social media and religion" which he details in his April 8 post. The real issue is not the existence of social media itself, but the manner in which it fragments and dissipates focus and attention --and attention is a common element to religious practices in many streams of faith or traditions, both Eastern and Western.

I noted previously that Newport pays attention to figures as diverse as Aristotle, Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln, and acknowledges the depths of the discussion of focus and human flourishing, "but he avoids getting pulled off task." Well and good --but the relation between focus, attention, and human flourishing (becoming a better human being) is a very old concern with a long, long literature (to say the least!). Newport's book is not primarily addressed to those in any faith community or tradition. Those who are such a community, however, cannot fail to pick up the resonances of this discussion.

One might first point out that social media is hardly the first significant distraction to come around, and the idea that "social media might be accidentally undermining religion" needs perspective. Religious practices, whether or not reified into something that contemporary Westerners understand as a "religion," have been around a very long time. Social media is not yet quite 20 years old ("The Facebook," launched February 2004; Friendster 2002). The view that social media can or will quickly and significantly undermine practices going back thousands of years so could be superficial. Intellectual ideas of about what a religion is have changed, and practices have changed; but those practices have been severely challenged before and somehow persisted. Will runaway social media usage really accomplish what centuries of pogroms, persecutions, and cultural coopting have failed to do? Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris might be so lucky.

This observation does not dismiss Newport's question. That social media do in fact seek to capture, control, fragment, and dissipate users' attention is a feature, not a bug. They do that by design, as Newport showed and skewered brilliantly. This is why the great Zuck's "regrets" about fake news and hate speech ring so hollow: those who write and spread fake news and engage in hateful communication are using social media exactly as intended. Social media was meant for everyone to share, and do the trolls share! The idea that platform does not foster content is ideological sleight of hand, a fib to deny culpability. Much of the content of social media is nevertheless utter poison, and it might be even more threatening to many religious traditions than the fracturing of attention itself.

A longer perspective can offer significant insights into what seems to have become a cultural cul-de-sac.

Decades ago I was privileged to study with Diogenes Allen at Princeton Theological Seminary when he was in a very productive period of his life. An Oxford (Rhodes) scholar, he was a searching and provocative reader of texts classic and modern, and three books in particular have stuck with me: Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death and Works of Love, and Simone Weil's Forms of the Implicit Love of God (and her related "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God"). These are my sources for the following reflections.

The fragmentation of attention was brilliantly and lucidly addressed by Kierkegaard in 1849 in Sygdommen til Døden (The Sickness of Unto Death). SK was deeply enamoured of the Danish language, and thoroughly embedded in Danish history: the events of unsuccessful revolution of 1848 in Copenhagen "have been of world-historical significance and have overturned everything . . . . Every system has been exploded. In the course of a couple of months, the past has been ripped away from the present with such passion that it seems like a generation has gone by." (From The Point of View for My Work as an Author, written in 1848 and later published in 1859, also below). In other words, a world not unlike our own in many ways.

But when "the threads of intelligence broke," and when "everyone who has, in various ways, been a spokesman in the past has been reduced either to silence or to the embarrassment of being forced to purchase a brand-new suit of clothing," a new way forward could break open, and SK searched for language and forms of life for that new world. He found it in his word for despair, fortvivlelse, an for- intensification of tvivl (doubt or question); for+tvivlelse is both mega-doubt and raises the stakes: meta-doubt. In despair, such meta-doubt is to be of two minds: not only split apart from one's self, but split apart from God. An anti-Hegelian, SK saw an irresoluble polarity of temporal/eternal, freedom/necessity, consciousness/unconsciousness in human experience, which is fundamentally an experience of divided-ness or fragmentation.

SK rings the changing forms of fortvivlelse (despair) through these polarities. All humans experience despair or fragmentation; the depth is despair is to live unaware that one is in despair: the fragmentation that admits no fragmentation. This condition is universal, and the only way out of this condition is for the self to live "by relating itself to its own self, and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it." (English transl. by Lowrie, p. 147) . To be "grounded transparently" is to do the works of love, which is the Summary of the Law.

The person who truly admits, holds on to, and focuses this despair (fortvivlelse) will open oneself to the Reality of world (or creation) it its beauty, order, in service to others, in respect for practices that focuses this attention, and in friendship. These are, in Simone Weil's terms, the forms of the implicit love of God. God (the Power which posits us) seems absent, and we can only love (or focus upon) God through the forms of Reality by which God's presence is implicit and mediated. The "right use of school studies" develops a lower kind of attention, which is "extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer, on the condition that [studies] are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone." Weil writes, "the key to a Christian concept of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention." (Waiting for God, p. 105)

When I read Newport's Deep Work three years ago, I was very much struck by the sense in which deep work could be extremely effective training to the power of concentration and attention. (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.") Deep work rightly undertaken can train a form of energy (a habitus) for prayer and focus upon the "meta:" Reality, God, Emptiness, Submission, Torah among other names in varied traditions. This is not really the "deep work" that Newport meant, who was writing at a different level for a different audience. The resonance is unavoidable for those who have ears to hear.

As a librarian, my work is collaborative and can sometimes feel trapped in the shallows, not the depths. My writing and focused reading helps me to return to the depths. Library service, at its best, is a soul-craft that provides a glimpse of the sacred trust of learners, teachers, and traditions as they undergo necessary and unavoidable change. That glimpse does not substitute depth for mere metrics of productivity. A librarian's deep work is not necessarily solitary, but does require clear boundaries for time with colleagues and time alone.

This sounds high-flown but it has direct, practical implications. During "crunch time," students do in fact limit digital social media. Project Information Literacy learned in 2011 (.pdf) that "students use a “less is more” approach to manage and control all of the IT devices and information systems available to them while they are in the library during the final weeks of the term." Further study (.pdf) has shown that they use a "hybrid approach to conducting research and finding information. " While this study needs to be updated --students in 2011 had a different experience of social media on smart phones than do students in 2019-- the PIL study suggests that at least the seeds are present for a successful critique and debunking of the casual "the more sharing, the better" slogan, beginning with high-stress times like the close of the semester.

Shifting focus away from the forms of despair that feast upon distraction, and towards purposeful existence, is always going to be a tough sell for many. As Annie Savoy says about Ebie Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh in Bull Durham, 'The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness." By contrast I know three young individuals who voluntarily went off social media this past year, because they wished to serious attention to learning surgical nursing, biochemistry, and vocal performance (music). In the words of one, "enough of the self-created drama." If that insight is possible for a few, it might be possible for just enough at a tipping point.

To return: does social media in fact undermine religion?

If by "religion" one means what one sees in an ordinary church, synagogue, or mosque on an ordinary sabbath, then on a superficial level the answer is yes. The great mass of those who lead lives of quiet desperation may never become aware of their own fragmentation or despair --and social media is intended to fragment, to snuff out any intimations that something is not right (almost in the sense of Neo's choice to accept the blue "normal" pill in The Matrix, further reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland's choice of potions).

If by "religion" one goes further not only into self-reflection and self-awareness, but into active contemplation of the order of the universe, then the answer is probably no. In that perspective, social media shrinks to a mere mosquito-buzz level of irritation, or worse, a poisoned well. Despair is a general condition of the human race, neither created nor extended by mere social media. But social media can be its tool.

Social media as a channel of despair will admit no alternative. It becomes reality; reality's fragmentation is both its content and its platform. No wonder the Silicon Valley elite will not allow their own children near it. Only true disruption (not mere "innovative disruption") will reveal fragmentation and despair for what it is --and disruption, "moving fast and breaking things" is what social media was originally all about. In the polarity of despair, its infinitude of disruption has become a finitude of being shared: a world in every way Zucked-up.

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It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries--and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

--Susan Orlean, The Library Book, pages 11-12