Thoughts from Internet Librarian 2011

This morning I was lucky to discover the live streaming feed of the Internet Librarian 2011 conference (Twitter hashtag #il2011). The discussion revolved around ebooks, and it reflected some strong feelings on the topic.

After the Overdrive representative talked about Amazon’s opaque ebook lending model, Sarah Houghton, the Librarian in Black, delivered the smackdown (well, more politely, since it was a professional conference and all). She argues here that Amazon and Overdrive have done wrong by libraries and that the current state of affairs needs to change; when legal copies of ebooks are locked down with DRM but you can do anything with illegal copies, the system doesn’t make sense anymore. American Libraries magazine gives a good summary of librarians’ concerns about the ethics of Amazon’s lending model.

Andromeda Yeltin said that there must be an ebook publishing model that works for all the stakeholders. I’m not sure what that model would look like, but the belief that there is a better one is spreading. I think librarians are getting inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially with the similarity of the current situation with Amazon to the HarperCollins lending limits debacle a few months ago. @wawoodworth tweeted, “In the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, librarians should consider Overstay Our Welcome HarperCollins.” @techlibber added, “Occupy Amazon!!!”

I’m inclined to agree, especially with adding yesterday’s news (about bookstores refusing to carry print comics after DC gave Amazon exclusive rights to sell digital copies) to the pile of concerns. I’ve checked out two books from Amazon on my Kindle so far, but am not planning to check out any more. As the Librarian in Black said, we don’t know what Amazon is doing with this data. The lack of transparency goes against what we as librarians need: to be figuring out what privacy for library users will look like in the coming era.

It’s not all bad, though. Here are some of the more positive points I took away from #il2011:

• Michael Porter talked about Library Renewal, a community website with the goal of finding “new econtent solutions for libraries, while staying true to their larger mission.”
• Andromeda Yeltin (@ThatAndromeda) said that there should be a price at which an author should be willing to publish under a Creative Commons license. She talked about unglue.it, which will advocate for “Free books for the public. Full value for authors and publishers.” unglue.it is still in development, but for now we can enjoy its predecessor, Gluejar.
• Helene Blowers gave a presentation on “Inno’Play’ion: Libraries, Learning, and the Creative Economy.” I didn’t see the presentation, but saw her slides here. People on Twitter seemed to find it unique and uplifting.

I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the conference! Again, you can find the live stream here.

Cultural evolution and the sociotechnical perspective

I had the curious experience a few days ago of realizing just how profoundly my library science education is changing my worldview.

Thanks to various family members interested in the topic, I started reading about evolutionary psychology in high school, mainly books by Robert Wright and articles in Scientific American. I found it interesting, but not interesting enough to continue reading about, until late in college when I found out Robert Wright had a new book out called The Evolution of God. Since I was a religious studies major, I figured I had better check it out. Again, it was interesting but not quite interesting enough for me to get through more than a few chapters before it was due back at the library.

After that I forgot about the book entirely, until a week ago when I came across it in the library again and checked it out. Reading those same first few chapters was an entirely different experience this time, and I found I couldn’t finish the book – not because it wasn’t interesting enough, but because I had so many problems with Wright’s basic assumption of cultural evolution.

The goal of one of the classes I’m taking now, taught by David Levy, author of Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, is to teach us to think in terms of a sociotechnical approach to culture. The key point of the sociotechnical approach is the idea that technologies do not predetermine our reactions to them. In other words, there is no rule set in stone that we have to believe and act a certain way with regard to a given technology. For example, if not for certain political choices made by certain people after the French Revolution, we would have developed our currently held beliefs about what reading and documents and authors are – beliefs that the internet and mobile technologies have influenced profoundly – much sooner than the 1990s/2000s.

Thanks to learning about the sociotechnical approach, I can no longer buy into the assumptions of cultural evolution. Wright made it very clear in The Evolution of God that cultures are on a predetermined path – hunter/gatherers, agriculturalists/chiefdoms, kingdoms/empires, democracies  – thanks to the technologies they create and adopt, and that what people in each type of society believe is determined by their progress along this path. Not only does this perspective lack complexity and subtlety, it has to bend over backward to explain why some societies are at certain points in the path when they “should” be farther along it. The sociotechnical approach, however, maintains that technologies are merely tools we make choices about, not instruments of destiny.

So, in short, I went from blind acceptance of a theory’s premise to actively questioning it and thinking about subtleties that were not previously apparent – and I haven’t even finished one year yet. Thanks for the critical thinking skills, library school!

On Flow Theory

There are 72 chapters in Theories of Information Behavior, my LIS 510 textbook, each one summarizing an IB theory. I’ve been keeping track of how many I recognize and am familiar with each month, as the class progresses. So far, it goes like this:

September 2010: I recognize maybe 5 theories.
October 2010: I recognize about 15 and am more familiar with 5 or so.
mid-November 2010: I recognize about 21 and am more familiar with 7 or 8.

For having been in graduate school barely two months, I’d say knowing something about over 20 IB theories is pretty damn good.

The interesting part is encountering these theories where I least expected to find them. A few days after learning about Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory (notable for being one of the few IB theories to discuss IB in positive, rather than neutral or negative, terms), I was telling my fiance about it. He said he recognized the theory and had a book about it, and in a surprising coincidence, the book turned out to be Csikszentmihalyi’s explanation for laymen of his 25 years of research on Flow Theory.

Needless to say, since (except for one more article) I’m done with class reading for the rest of the term, I’m currently working my way through Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s a well-thought out discussion of the state of mind in which people are completely and joyfully absorbed in an activity, and how developing the ability to control this state of mind can make people happier.

In addition to enjoying the smooth flow of the writing (bad pun, sorry), there are two things I like about Flow so far. One is the way the author connects optimal experience to mystical religious experience, since I majored in religious studies as an undergrad and have read a great deal about mystical experiences.

The other is my own ability to recognize the theory underlying what the author is saying. The best example so far is in his definition of consciousness: he explains it as phenomenological, in that it deals with events as we interpret them (as opposed to neurochemical explanations), and as being based in information theory. I recognized the well-documented paradigm shift in LIS from studies centered around systems to studies centered around users’ experience in Csikszentmihalyi’s explanation of the phenomenological part of the definition, and of course information theory is heavily related to LIS. In short, it’s really cool to be able to know exactly, specifically, what an author means, even when he doesn’t explain the underlying meaning.