I’ll be signing copies of Libraries and the Enlightenment in Anaheim at the Library Juice Press booth (2769) at the Convention Center from 10-11am on Saturday, June 23.
The publisher is offering a discount on the book if you buy it before the conference and bring it to the signing.
It will be well worth your time and money because I have lovely handwriting, and the book is pretty good, too.
There’s a petition at Whitehouse.gov to require open access for the results of publicly funded research. There’s more about it at the site itself and at Confessions of a Science Librarian (which is where I first read about it).
The procedure from Confessions:
To sign the petition:
- Have to be 13 years or older
- Have to create an account on whitehouse.gov, https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions
- This first requires giving a name and an email address and then clicking the validation link sent to that address
- Click to sign the petition
I signed it. It takes about two minutes, most of which was waiting for the email confirmation of my new account. Probably the most worthwhile two minutes I’ve spent all day.
‘Tis the season when college students across the country are handing in research essays and term papers. Having graded many hundreds of essays over the years, I think I can speak with assurance that the hardest essays to grade are the bad essays. There are a lot of bad essays, and one of the reasons might be because a lot of popular reading consists of bad news articles, which are legion. I’d like to take a look at one and compare it to bad research essays, mainly as a way of celebrating the fact that I don’t have any research essays to grade this semester.
I chose an article about consumer technology, but I could easily have chosen one about politics. Consumer tech and politics both have a huge amount of insubstantial nonsense written about them, and that’s even when you exclude the ludicrous subgenre of iPhone rumors. Whether it’s the pseudoevent (“It has been announced that the President will be making an announcement later in the day”) or the article empty of real content (“Polls tell us that if people were voting today instead of six months from now when the actual election is held, they would probably vote this way, but there’s no way to know if that’s how they’ll vote in November”), political news is generally stuff and nonsense. What passes for tech news might be even worse.
So, what would research essays look like if they were written like bad news articles? We can see an example with this article: Is There a Future for Laptops?
1) They would have provocative titles that don’t represent the content well.
You have to admit, “Is There a Future for Laptops?” is a provocative title. It’s also a stupid title, because the answer is obviously “yes.” Even the writer thinks so, despite all the dithering. In fact, that’s what makes it provocative. While the title is provocative, the article itself is almost devoid of content, opinion, or argument. The concluding paragraph begins, “Although I don’t see this scenario playing out quickly, there is a real possibility that it could become a trend.” Think about that as a conclusion. The writer has pretty much strung some words together that should make a sentence, but not actually said anything or taken any stance. Plus he probably got paid for it. Now there’s a talented hack. There is a real possibility that just about anything could become a trend, and we all know it, so there’s no use writing it.
2) They would have verbose introductions having nothing to do with the topic.
This article seems to be a bad example of the five-paragraph essay. If you’re unfamiliar with the form, Google it. Plenty of examples will show up. In a diagram, the first paragraph is represented as an inverted triangle, and the advice is to start broad and then narrow to your main thesis. Thus, a bad essay about the future of laptops might begin, “Since the dawn of time, man has wondered about the future of the laptop.” This awful article doesn’t even get points for staying on topic. The first six sentences and two paragraphs are about the writer’s obsession with food and himself. A lot of so-called news articles these days begin like personal essays. As a reader, I appreciate it, because it lets me tell immediately who’s not worth reading. If your article is about some hot button political issue and you begin by talking about what you were having for lunch when you heard about it, I can tell at a glance that you don’t have a thing to say worth saying and move on. Ditto with laptops and what you like to eat.
3) They wouldn’t have thesis statements.
What is a thesis statement? There are various definitions, but a thesis statement is basically an arguable and falsifiable claim. “There are various kinds of computers that suit different purposes” is a falsifiable claim, for example, but not an arguable one, since nobody who knew anything about computers could possible argue against it, but if there were no computers in existence it would certainly be false. If there is a main claim at all to this article, it’s that laptops might possibly sell less well in the future than they do today. Is that really arguable? Can’t we all agree that’s true? Yes, they might. Is it falsifiable? I don’t think so, because it doesn’t really make a claim about anything. They might, they might not. We get pap like, “If this speculative trend becomes a reality, the ramifications for the laptop vendors could be significant because they sell the majority of their laptops to consumers.” The writer can write that sentence and “I have a thousand-word column due and nothing to say” at the same time.
4) They wouldn’t have arguments.
If there’s some kind of claim, there might be some kind of argument, only there’s not. Instead of any sort of argument or analysis, we get stuff like this:
Many conversations also addressed the future of tablets in general and how they could impact the laptop landscape. Quite a few of the folks I spoke with have started to use Bluetooth keyboards with their tablets and they say that using a tablet/keyboard combo really changes their thinking about laptops. A lot of them only take their tablet/keyboard with them on short trips, leaving the laptop home.
I have heard this case repeated a lot lately by tablet users. Many find themselves spending more time with the tablet since they can do as much as 80 percent of their work on it and thus they are relying less and less on the laptop.
So “quite a few” folks this one person happens to have spoken to at a tech conference say something, and that’s somehow evidence about the “future of the laptop”? Even the writer knows it’s not, since he won’t just come out and say the laptop is doomed. “Many say”? “I have heard”? Sounds pretty dubious to me. I’ve heard many people say they will always need their laptops, because there are some things that just can’t be done on a tablet. If nothing else, I’ll say that many, many times, which should count as evidence for something.
The article is so vague and speculative that there’s really nothing to argue for. That should be a sign that it’s not worth writing in the first place. It fails as opinion, because there’s no argument, and it fails as news because of the pointless opening and the vague reporting. “Many conversations.” “I asked some execs.” If you’re reporting on a conference, this is about as insubstantial as it gets.
5) The sources would be vague and disconnected.
This article could be considered a research essay that “writes from sources.” It’s half report, half argument, and all bad, but there are some sources involved. Only none of those sources are named, none of their statements sufficiently analyzed, and they’re all left hanging loosely together. “One guy said this about tablets. Another guy said this about laptops. Someone else said a third thing about some other stuff. And I really like food.” The only way this filler could get any worse would be for the writer to write “very” 10-15 times before every adverb to boost the word count. It’s what writing teachers sometimes call a quotation quilt, except without the quotations or the quilt.
Fortunately, because of the heroic efforts of teachers and librarians to instill a capacity for critical writing into students, there won’t be many college research essays like that. Or at least none that I have to read.
If you’re interested, my latest contribution to the Library Journal Peer-to-Peer Review column is Libraries as Indoctrination Mills.
Several incidents in the past few weeks have sparked ideas for posts, but they’re not coming together as coherently as I’d like. Hence, a few thoughts related, if at all, by their occurrence outside my usual academic milieu.
People who don’t write think writing is easy. Is there any other activity that the general public treats this way? Does anyone think they have a few good tennis games in them even if they’ve never picked up a racket? Or that they could solve a few calculus equations even if they haven’t done any math since high school algebra?
Recently over drinks, someone who doesn’t write–but plans to, someday, really, when she gets around to it–asked my advice on writing. My main comment was, writers write, after which I tried to change the subject. Following some more persistent requests for advice, I may also have added something like, they don’t just sit around in bars talking about what a fascinating story their lives would make if they ever found the discipline to sit down and actually write. The person didn’t like my advice. Maybe it was my tone. Whiskey might have been involved.
Skepticism is an acquired trait most people don’t acquire. Perhaps it’s not a trait conducive to human flourishing. It didn’t help Socrates much.
Same bar, different evening, I inadvertently stumbled into a political argument with someone whose statements I should have ignored out of friendship and kindness. It was a bizarre conversation very unlike the political discussions I’m most used to, those in a classroom. Eventually, I realized the pointlessness of the debate and gave up, though I learned an important lesson: saying “Do you really believe that nonsense or are you just fucking with me?” is an ineffective rhetorical strategy.
Dialectic isn’t popular outside the academy. When challenged about their beliefs, people often avoid answering direct questions. If you ask, “what about this,” they will almost inevitably reply, “well, what about this other tenuously related thing instead?” When someone can’t or won’t answer a direct and easily answered question, I sense both victory and stalemate. People panic. They sense the conversation is going in an uncomfortable direction for them. They probably think I’m trying to get them to admit they believe something which contradicts something else they’ve already claimed to believe. To be fair, I am.
Political and religious disagreements are often about method, not belief. Some people are disturbed that other people don’t believe what they do. In contrast, I’m more concerned with the way people arrive at their beliefs. The two points of view don’t mix well.
In conversation with a conservative fundamentalist Christian minister in rural Mississippi (don’t ask), I was asked what I thought about New Jersey’s current governor, Chris Christie. My opinion is that he’s an improvement on the last two New Jersey governors, but that’s damning with faint praise. He called Christie a rhino. I thought to myself, well, Christie’s got a weight problem, but that hardly seems the Christian thing to say. It turns out he meant RINO, or “Republican in Name Only.” What folly to treat political parties as if they had eternal essences. The party of Lincoln is now the default party for southern racists. Political parties change. For that matter, religions change. To myself, I thought this. To him, I merely nodded and smiled. Some worldviews are so hermetically sealed it’s pointless to engage them.
Trying to see the world from the perspective of someone unlike yourself is difficult. It requires curiosity, imagination, and sympathy. Maybe that’s why so few people try. Maybe that’s why all of us give up sometimes.
Some people question whether you can ever really understand the world from the perspective of others, or perhaps The Other. If that were true, most literature would be impossible. I’m a tall, smart, white, heterosexual man with symmetrical facial features and a full head of hair living in a society that often rewards those arbitrary characteristics. How could I possibly understand what it’s like to be a member of an oppressed group of any kind? Maybe I can’t. But I know what it’s like to be poor, to be unfairly judged, to be ridiculed, to be feared or hated because of a perceived difference, and even to be harassed by the police. If I consider my worst experiences and magnify them considerably, I can imagine what it must be like to be routinely on the receiving end of American oppression. I’ve never been stupid, but I’ve been stoned. I assume being stupid is like being stoned all the time. What I can’t understand is a white southerner who claims to be unaware of racial discrimination in the south. Maybe it’s like being stoned all the time.
All that stuff academic librarians try to teach about searching for evidence, critically evaluating it, and integrating it into your worldview–that’s a lot tougher than it looks. Even tougher than writing.
The editors of the journal Library Philosophy and Practice recently put out a call to the editorial board (of which I am a member) for help editing the journal. Specifically, they “would like to identify people who would like to take on responsibility for receiving submissions, handling the peer review process, and copyediting articles that have been accepted.” The problem is that there are way more submissions than the current editors can deal with effectively. With the editors’ permission, I’m putting the call out to interested readers. If you would like to participate somehow in editing LPP, please email editor Mary Bolin [mbolin2@unl.edu] and let her know.
For those unfamiliar with the journal, I want to say a bit about it and what I like about it. According to the site, LPP “is a peer-reviewed electronic journal that publishes articles exploring the connection between library practice and the philosophy and theory behind it. These include explorations of current, past, and emerging theories of librarianship and library practice, as well as reports of successful, innovative, or experimental library procedures, methods, or projects in all areas of librarianship, set in the context of applied research.” It’s that, and something more. In addition to more philosophical or theoretical articles, it has also emerged as a journal chronicling library thought and practice on an international scale. It publishes articles on much wider range of topics than most LIS journals.
I published a couple of articles in LPP a few years ago and have third coming out in September. Most likely, in the future if I write any lengthy article on my own (as in, not by invitation), LPP will get first crack at it. Why? A couple of reasons. First, LPP doesn’t require that I pretend to know or care about LIS as a social science. While articles like those are accepted, LPP also stretches to accommodate articles about librarianship from a humanistic perspective. I don’t do surveys, charts, graphs, or statistics, because quantitative research doesn’t answer the sorts of questions I’m interested in, and that I know from experience other librarians are interested in as well. LPP has a large number of mainstream LIS articles, but it’s also a place to publish philosophical or theoretical articles and qualitative research. Speaking as a humanistic writer, if there are librarians who want to find a place to publish peer-reviewed, indexed, non-quantitative articles, LPP is a great journal to submit to.
The other important fact is that LPP is an open access journal housed in the digital repository at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The content is freely available, permanent, archived, and fully discoverable by search engines. Basically, it’s the kind of academic journal a lot of us would like to see more of. As a librarian, I think LPP embodies the kind of publishing model that is best for the broad dissemination of ideas in the profession.
So if you want to support a wide-ranging, open access LIS journal and get some experience with editing and peer reviewing, this is a good opportunity.
March has been really busy with work and teaching and some family business, but I have done a bit of writing. Today, the Library Journal Academic Newswire published my first contribution to the newly reorganized Peer to Peer Review column. In addition to Barbara Fister, who has been writing great stuff in that column for a long time, the new column also includes Rick Anderson, Dorothea Salo, Kevin Smith, and me writing weekly in rotation. I was pleased to be asked, but I have to say that when I saw the list of strong contributors I felt uncharacteristically daunted for a moment. Here’s the first column: The Two Cultures.
My book on Libraries and the Enlightenment has now been published! It was just announced today. You can order a copy from the Library Juice Press or from Amazon.
The Library Juice site has a blurb, but here’s a bit more on what to expect. Chapter 1 provides a summary and analysis of the scientific and political principles of the Enlightenment, especially those that relate to the library history discussed in the book. Chapter 2 shows how Enlightenment principles led to the foundation of the first research university, and the way in which the research university model revolutionized higher education and enabled the creation of modern academic libraries. Chapter 3 investigates how the same principles inspired the public library movement in the U.S. Chapter 4 discusses examples of what I call the “universal library,” including the Library at Alexandria, Gabriel Naudé’s 17th-century Advice on Establishing a Library, H.G. Wells’ “World Brain,” Vannevar Bush’s Memex, Google, and the Digital Public Library of America. Finally, it argues that a universal library universally accessible would be the culmination of the Enlightenment in the domain of information, and that such a universal library would be built upon the current network of American libraries. There’s a lot of history and a bit of politics. It’s a good introduction to and survey of the topic for librarians, library school students, or anyone interested in the history of libraries.
So I hope you’ll buy a copy for yourself or your library (or both!).
The desire to turn every bit of reading into a monetary transaction seems to me driven by a short term strategy that in the end would be destructive for publishers, not to mention the entire country, because the system of reading that supports publishers, libraries, and general literacy depends upon non-market forces that would be destroyed if indeed the ultimate commodification of reading were successful. We might call this system of reading the lectosystem, and like a natural ecosystem it is a sensitive totality where change in one place can have negative effects in another place. The lectosystem would collapse if all reading were commodified.
The more literate a population, the more books will be read, and the more books that are read the more books will be bought, even if not all the books read are bought directly by the individual reader. But mass literacy requires that some people get books for free, whether it’s through public schools, school libraries, public libraries, college libraries, charity, or gifts. To make this impossible, which is the implied end of turning every reading transaction into a monetary exchange, would reduce the percentage of the population that can read, which will not only ultimately reduce the number of books sold, but even further decrease the educational average in the U.S., which never seems very high even in the best of times. This inevitably would lead to the long, slow decline of America as a leading country.
Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme, to blame publishers refusing to sell ebooks to libraries for destroying the country. However, there’s still a lectosystem upon which everyone involved with books depends, and that system includes not only publishers and their market relation to readers, but also libraries and the gift economy. To destroy that system would also damage the market for books. If publishers thought about the long term, they might realize this, but long term thinking is anathema to most corporations.
On the other hand, publishers probably don’t have that kind of power. If the current lectosystem is damaged, it might repair itself and end up bypassing current publishers. A recent news story reported on a study by Columbia University which found “70 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had bought, copied or downloaded unauthorized music.” The story was about music “piracy,” but I’m sure a large percentage of that cohort who read books do the same thing. (I put piracy in quotation marks because I find it amusing to compare this with this.) It’s a fear of “piracy” that drives publisher support for SOPA. They really seem to think that the laws can lock technology down to the nineteenth century standards that publishers seem to like so much, just like Amazon thinks its DRM really keeps determined readers from doing what they like with their Kindle ebooks. Or just like a decade ago, when movie and music corporations thought the DMCA would help control what people did with the media they thought they had purchased. Legally, you can’t copy the video from a DVD you’ve purchased to play it on a portable device. The reality is quite different, and unless you’re sharing the file with a torrent service or something there’s not much anyone can do about it. If millions of people flout a law and don’t feel the slightest bit bad about it, that’s a good sign that the law isn’t in the public interest, and that’s what routinely happening with online “piracy.”
People who read are going to read more than they could afford to read if every book read was a book individually purchased, and the more expensive the books the more that will be the case. If publishers try to make that impossible, so much the worse for the publishers. Platforms like Amazon are already allowing writers to connect to readers and also make some money. There’s no inherent reason that public libraries couldn’t set up a similar system to connect writers to readers that would get more reading into the hands of more people while still allowing writers to profit. This would be parallel to the movement in academic libraries to support open access. It’s not that everything would be free or freely provided, only that the costs would be lowered through technological efficiency and the absence of a need for the content provider to also make a profit.
The purpose of publishers, from Elsevier to Penguin, is to sell stuff to make a profit. The purpose of libraries, both academic and public, isn’t to buy books and journals. The purpose is to connect interested readers with interesting reading, whether that’s a scholarly article on philosophy for the philosopher or a mystery novel for the general library user, or for that matter, a mystery novel for the philosopher who might want to read something besides scholarly articles. Libraries of some sort are crucial to the lectosystem because they’re the most popular places to read more widely than one can afford to read if every act of reading requires an individual purchase. Publishers used to be crucial, but are much less so now. They’re easier and easier to bypass, whether it’s through non-commercial open access journals or self-publishing at Amazon. I’m not that worried about the future of libraries, because I think libraries will be able to adapt and continue their contributions to the lectosystem. I would be more worried about the future of my industry if I worked for Elsevier or Simon and Schuster.*
*I was already working on a draft of this post, but a stimulating lunch conversation today with Pete Bromberg of the Princeton Public Library influenced my thinking in the last couple of paragraphs.
The shift from markets to networks and from ownership to access, the marginalization of physical property and the ascendance of intellectual property, and the increasing commodification of human relationships are slowly leading us out of an era in which the exchange of property is the critical function of the economy into a new world in which the purchase of lived experiences becomes the consummate commodity.
–Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access
Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.
–David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
A society in which every transaction must be mediated by the market, in which everything is privately owned and strictly controlled, will come to resemble a medieval society—a world of balkanized fiefdoms in which every minor grandee demands tribute for the right to cross his land or ford his streams. The flow of commerce and ideas—and the sustainability of innovation and democratic culture—will be serious impeded. Furthermore, such a market-dominated society is not likely to cultivate the sense of trust and shared commitments that any functioning society must have….
The truth is, we are living in the midst of a massive business-led enclosure movement that hides itself in plain sight.
–David Bollier, Silent Theft
I read John DuPuis’ post Penguin ebooks & The Research Works Act: Publishers gain, communities lose with great interest. I’d already been thinking about his tweet from last week (that I caught on Facebook): “Publishers want to monetize all reading and sharing transactions. Are publishers basically saying that they are opposed to the core values that libraries represent?” The final question is one I’ve been thinking about lately, and I believe the answer is, yes, they are saying that. Publishers are indeed opposed to the core values of libraries. However, it’s more than that. Corporations are opposed to the core values public goods, public space, and and other values that resist commercialization and commodification. Libraries are merely part of an international trend in contemporary capitalism and are just starting to feel the impact of trends that have been building for the past forty years or so.
I don’t have a full blown thesis at the moment, and am using this post to sketch out the broad outline of what might be my next research project (my research agenda seems to be to take whatever I happen to be reading about at the moment and stick “Libraries and…” in front of it). There has been a movement afoot to commodify every aspect of human life, to make every human exchange a market transaction, and to reduce every domain outside the market as much as possible. Call the movement what you will–neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, the monetarization of reading transactions, or the commodification of culture–but the dominant belief is a faith that private property and markets are always good and everything outside those markets is bad, or at the very least that everything outside those markets is inefficient, and inefficiency is in itself always evil. The most important thing is the protection of capital and ensuring its free movement, regardless of any other values that might interfere with that goal: human rights, popular sovereignty, a social safety net, or free access to information by citizens of a (nominally?) democratic republic.
This ideology can play itself out on an international scale, such as the power debtor nations might cede to the World Bank or the IMF, or on a national scale, such as when financial institutions “too big to fail” are bailed out by the government but not, say, homeowners duped into buying mortgages they could really never afford. It ranges from Margaret Thatcher saying there’s no such thing as society to Elsevier paying members of Congress to support the Research Works Act. Privatizing public schools, eliminating public funding for higher education, or defunding libraries are some ways that governments acquiesce to the neoliberal dogma that the private sector always knows best. Private-sector corporations act rationally and merely do their best to ensure that governments institute laws favorable to corporations, even if at the expense of the public good.
I’m not saying anything particularly new. Included below are a few books I’m currently reading that touch on these issues. The “commodification of human culture,” as Jeremy Rifkin calls it, isn’t a new trend; nor is it yet complete. There are still spaces of resistance within commercialized culture, spaces motivated by noncommercial values. I say “noncommercial” deliberately, rather than anticommercial. As David Bollier notes in Silent Theft, “the issue is not market versus commons. The issue is how to set equitable and appropriate boundaries between the two realms—semi-permeable membranes—so that the market and the commons can each retain integrity while invigorating that other. That equilibrium is now out of balance as businesses try to exploit all available resources, including those that everyone owns and uses in common.” Libraries are examples of spaces dominated by noncommercial values, a semi-permeable membrane between the market for books and the democratic need for a knowledge commons. A noncommercial ethic can coexist alongside markets, and all can thrive. But public goods and noncommercial spaces can’t coexist with a market fundamentalism that believes all public goods and noncommercial spaces are evil, at least not if that market fundamentalism controls the laws. The more or less successful drive to extend intellectual property rights into perpetuity and to wither the public domain into nonexistence is a good indication that the ethic motivating libraries isn’t winning many political battles.
In his post, John is right that “private interests are attacking the public good.” They always have been, but at the moment their power is increasing because of legal and technological changes seemingly beyond our control, as well as the successful ideological campaign to persuade people that freedom means the freedom to engage in commercial transactions but not the freedom to read. Can the public good or noncommodified culture be saved? I have no idea. The problem is so much larger than libraries or open access scholarship or ebooks or any of the specific issues we address piecemeal. The best I can hope for is that we think globally and act locally, which requires understanding the larger context behind the specific challenges to the public good while doing what we can to fight against those challenges. This is the briefest of sketches because I’m still trying to understand that larger context.
Further reading:
Bollier, David. 2002. Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. New York: Routledge.
———. 2005. Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Hess, Charlotte. 2007. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice / Ostrom, Elinor. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kallhoff, Angela. 2011. Why Democracy Needs Public Goods. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.
Miller, Laura J. 2006. Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rifkin, Jeremy. 2000. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Saad-Filho, Alfredo. 2005. Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader / Johnston, Deborah. London ; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.