Academic Librarian

I read a good book last weekend that I think a lot of librarians might find interesting: Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, by Cass Sunstein. The book concerns the way information is used in society to improve decision making, among other things.

There’s nothing in it necessarily specific to libraries, but I found some of the issues about the use of information in society thought-provoking. I’m not going to provide a review, since there seem to be plenty around. I just want to mention a few representative issues.

Consider the “Condorcet Jury Theorem,” which says that if a group of “people are answering a question with two possible answers, one false and one true,” and that there is a better than 50% chance “that each voter will answer correctly,” then “the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100 % as the size of the group increases”(25). The converse holds as well. If people have a better than 50% chance of being wrong, then the possibly of a right answer declines with every new voter. Think about that the next time you step into a voting booth.

Deliberating groups often fail, though it’s been the view of many since Aristotle that when more people come together and share ideas there’s a greater likelihood of making a wiser decision. Apparently Aristotle isn’t always right, but the fault isn’t deliberation itself, which can aggregate knowledge and lead to better decisions, especially if including people in the decision process and getting their consensus is itself important for the decision. Some problems: deliberating groups work best when most people in the group already have the correct or best answer; groups tend to reinforce the prejudices of the majority within them and lead to group polarization (e.g., with conservatives getting more conservative and liberals getting more liberal); people bow to social pressure and don’t share knowledge they think might be unpopular; they amplify errors; “hidden profiles” (knowledge which should become common but doesn’t, thus hindering the deliberating capacity of the group; “informational cascades, or what happens when you agree with her because you respect her and I agree with you both because I don’t know any different, and he agrees with all of us because how could so many smart people be wrong.

Chapter 4 has a fascinating discussion of “money, prices, and prediction markets.” I wasn’t aware of the extensive use of prediction markets. Guess I should read more economics. Anyway, groups set up markets with various rewards for the right prediction, and this provides incentives for people to use their dispersed information to profit. In deliberating groups, people may stay quiet, because “by speaking out, they provide benefits to others, while possibly facing high private costs. Prediction markets realign incentives in a way that is precisely designed to overcome these problems” (104). There’s a list of urls for prediction markets at the back of the book, but he discusses the Iowa Electronics Markets among others.

Sunstein likes wikis and the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is successful because so many people come together to share knowledge and a core of people work hard to correct errors. Despite the lack of prices, some have considered the Wikipedia to be partly explainable in terms of F.A. Hayek’s criticism of socialist economic planning, that such planning is theoretically flawed because no person or group of people could possibly have all the information necessary to make most economic decisions in a society (or perhaps even in a large organization). Prices provide us with the dispersed information available through billions of transactions. I tend to think the Internet and Wikipedia works this way, and was recently reminded that way back in 2001 I was noting the way “ask an expert” services on the web took advantage of useful dispersed knowledge. Sunstein disagrees, at least in respect to the Wikipedia. “Because Wikipedia uses a “last in time” rule, because no literal price is created, and because economic incentives are not directly involved, Hayek’s central arguments about that “marvel,” the price system,” do not apply, at least directly” (159).

While he thinks wikis can be great ways to share and aggregate information, Sunstein isn’t as sanguine on blogs. He specifically criticizes Richard Posner’s “blog triumphalism” for claiming blogging is “a fresh and striking exemplification of…Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge.” I tend to agree with Posner, but Sunstein points out that blogs have all of the polarization and other errors of other deliberating groups, with political blogs perhaps being the worst. Bloggers tend to create their own “information cocoons,” only reading or linking to like minds, and information cocoons often result in bad decision making, whether the cocoon is a political blogger or a CEO. At their best, though, blogs get many ideas out quickly. Hmm, maybe this blog wasn’t such a good idea.

If you’re interested in how information can be better used in society, or perhaps just in your organization, you might want to read Infotopia, and think about polarization, information cocoons, hidden profiles, etc., and how in our own libraries and communities we can make the best decisions by aggregating dispersed knowledge, and perhaps how as librarians we can facilitate the use of information in society.

Fortunately Stephanie the CogSci Librarian commented on a post of mine last week, or I wouldn’t have discovered the debate regarding better instruction or better interfaces that was going on within Facebook last week. Maybe I should hop onto the Facebook bandwagon and try to make more Facebook librarian friends. On the other hand, while the debate was going on I was helping prepare a Halloween party for my daughter. When it comes to an interesting library discussions versus party planning, I’m not sure where my loyalties lie.

My own preference would be for better interfaces, but it seems we have so little control over them. The world of information is so chaotic these days that sometimes I don’t even think better instruction will work well. A couple of weeks ago I gave research introductions to some juniors as they prepare to begin researching their independent junior papers, and unfortunately I had to acquaint them with the chaos without providing much order. I’m not cynical enough to think they all want to search nothing but Google, because I don’t find that to be the case with students I talk to. They perhaps all want to search Proquest and JSTOR, but even then they’ve moved beyond thinking that everything is on the free Web. Then I had to bring them back to the Web to show them how to find what we couldn’t find with traditional tools.

Teaching the traditional tools doesn’t bother me, either. Librarians for decades have tried to bring order to chaos, and scholars are familiar with catalogs, subject headings, and other standard library fare. The traditional tools still work up to a point, and they have to be taught, because otherwise much will be missed. In the world of printed books, still of great importance in the humanities, catalogs still serve a useful function unlikely to be usurped anytime soon. The structure of traditional indexes still works to some advantage. As painful as it might be for students, and I share their pain, to find some resources efficiently it’s still necessary to think like a librarian.

Add to this all the other useful ways to find books and scholarly information, from web-searching to footnote-chasing, and it’s easy to understand why students may be overwhelmed and want simpler, better, more powerful interfaces that organize information more effective. I do, too. I just don’t see how that can come about for a long time, if ever, what with so much undigitized information, so much proprietary information, so much expensive information, so much information, period.

It was typical that in a demonstrative search on one of the juniors’ topics we found a great article indexed in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts that wasn’t in full-text, and that the library didn’t subscribe to, and that didn’t show up in Google Scholar, but which did show up in Google and turned out to be in an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. What lesson does this teach us?

The only hope might be more and better instruction, and even then the battle might be a losing one, because to thoroughly search these days requires becoming a Juke Box Hero, not a Guitar Hero, and who besides the serious scholars have the stamina for that? Most students have no desire to be serious scholars, and they never will be. I don’t think we can blame them for that. Try as we might, there’s only so much of the chaos we can teach students to control. That’s not a reason to get rid of instruction, just because it’s not perfect, but it might be a consolation for our inevitable failure to turn everyone into a human search engine.

As a postmodern librarian might say, or might have said back before we gave up postmodernism for whatever we have now, the grand librarian narrative that made sense of information has collapsed, and we live among the wreckage. One of the few useful terms I picked up from my mostly wasted years of studying postmodern theory was the concept of bricolage. Here’s the definition from the Wikipedia, which might be as good as any:

“Bricolage … is a term used in several disciplines…to refer to:

• the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available;
• a work created by such a process.

It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler - equivalent to the English “do-it-yourself”, the core meaning in French being, however, ‘fiddle, tinker’ and, by extension, ‘make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose).’

Bricolage as a design approach - in the sense of building by trial and error - is often contrasted to engineering: theory-based construction.

A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur: someone who invents his or her own strategies for using existing materials in a creative, resourceful, and original way.”

We are the postmodern, or perhaps post-postmodern, librarians. Of necessity we are bricoleurs. We use what tools we can and build where we are able, putting pieces of the information universe haphazardly together for each research project, organizing the chaos where we can, inventing our own strategies in creative and resourceful ways because we no longer have the safety of using only the old, known ways. Despite improving interfaces, my suspicion—neither a fear nor a hope—is that this will be true for a long time to come, until the World Brain digests and organizes all knowledge.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Bricoleurs can be artists practicing a useful trade or creating masterpieces. But it does mean giving up some amount of authority and control, which is alien to the librarian mindset. We like authority and control over information, but if such authority and control are these days necessarily limited, it does us no good to bemoan the fact. Rather than nostalgia for the days when we could master (or pretend to master) the information universe, instead we can get satisfaction from our bricolage, knowing that we’re doing what we can.

I don’t normally discuss books on the blog, mainly because I rarely read books with any relationship to libraries. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws or Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (to name two books I’m currently reading) seem to be of little relevance to librarianship, though I suppose the same could be said of Aristotle’s ethical theory and Rawls’ political philosophy and I’ve managed to draw connections between them and reference service and collection development.

This week I did read a book of some library interest, or at least I think it might be: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). I ran across it because someone mentioned it in a comment on this blog (thanks, John!).

It’s a quick read, though perhaps a bit depressing. Mostly it’s about the way that the Web and other modern communication technology and trends are exacerbating a problem inherent in the human psyche. We have a tendency to see what we want to see or believe things that reinforce what we already believe rather than challenging ourselves or seeing another’s point of view. We tend to believe what we want to be true. The book mentions several psychological experiments that seem to confirm this. With what the author calls the splitting of reality, it’s easier than ever to get just the news and views we want, which tend to be the ones that confirm what we already think it true. Of necessity, we act as if what we believe is true, which implies that we all think people who disagree with us are wrong. With the Internet and niche television, we can now insulate ourselves from the Other. A mission of higher education should be to challenge our own thinking and make us more able to empathize with others. In the last post I wrote that if we can’t understand why people would hold political views very different from our own, then the problem is our own lack of knowledge and imagination. True Enough is in one sense an examination of willful ignorance and an absence of empathetic imagination. There are chapters on the swift-boating of John Kerry, 9/11 conspiracies, and the “stolen” presidential election of 2004 that investigate why people seem to believe things that have by any reasonable standard been unproven. Some people just want to believe that John Kerry was a bad soldier or that he really won the 2004 election or that the US government blew up the World Trade Center, despite the lack of real evidence.

The chapter on 9/11 conspiracies resonated the most with me because I’ve watched a lot of the conspiracy videos (such as Loose Change, which Manjoo discusses) and seen a lot of the websites in my exploration of this bizarre shadow world. In my writing seminar I use a 9/11 conspiracy website and the 9/11 Commission Report in an exercise on evaluating sources. How does one debunk conspiracy theories, since the people holding them are apparently incapable of seeing any evidence that doesn’t affirm what they already believe? If True Enough is true enough, then one doesn’t debunk them for the true believers.

There was even a Princeton connection, which I’m sure will be fascinating for the three of my readers at Princeton. The author describes different perspectives on a 1951 Princeton-Dartmouth football game that Princeton won despite what some Princetonians claimed was Dartmouth’s dirty playing. Princetonians watched the game and saw Dartmouth playing dirty. Dartmouthians (is that the right word? probably not) watched the game and just saw a rough game. The point is that everyone sees the same thing going on, but processes it according to their own biased perspective. We see what we want to see, and perhaps more importantly don’t see what we don’t want to believe. We all witnessed the news in the months leading up to war in Iraq. Some of us saw a compelling case for going to war with an evil dictator who had attacked the US on 9/11 and who had weapons of mass destruction he was just itching to use on America, while others of us waited in vain for any substantial case for war and wondered why other people were gullible enough to believe the unjustified lies daily emanating from the White House. Reality is what we want it to be.

We’re in the business of information, and how information is manipulated and propagated is probably of interest to a lot of us. I’d recommend True Enough as a good quick read about some ways information is now disseminated in society. I’ll conclude with a quote from the book:

“Propagandists have become experts at mining the vulnerabilities of the many-media world … . They’ve adopted a range of methods to exploit the current conditions—some are as benign as the covert placement of products in films and TV shows, but others are more questionable, such as planting VNRs [video news releases] on the news, or buying up pundits, or spreading their messages anonymously and “virally” through blogs, videos, and photos on the Web.

Technically, what these operatives aim to do is capture one or many of the forces I’ve discussed so far: selective exposure, in which we indulge information that pleases us and cocoon ourselves among others who think as we do; selective perception, in which we interpret documentary proof according to our long-held beliefs; peripheral processing, which produces a swarm of phony experts: and the hostile media phenomenon, which pushes the news away from objectivity and toward the sort of drivel one sees on cable.

In practice, what propagandists are doing is simpler to describe: they’ve mastered a new way to lie.”