I’ve said this two or three times in different ways in the past few months, but I figure it was time to copy and paste it so I could share it with y’all.
Books are artifacts of our culture and will continue to exist for a long time, and maybe some will exist forever. At one point, books may have been the most significant contemporary cultural artifacts we had; they came to symbolize knowledge, culture, and literacy. Libraries symbolize the sum of all that knowledge, the enduring aspects of our culture, and the democracy enabled by all of it available to everyone.
But the cultural significance of books is changing. Books are now coming to symbolize finite knowledge, a slow exchange of information, and the old way of doing things. The threat is that libraries will (or have) come to symbolize these things as well. So the challenge for me - a working theme for my work - is to help libraries hold (or progress) our places in our cultures and communities while the place of books slips away.
I’m calling it ‘working’ because I finally cracked into one of the books about critical literacy studies that I borrowed from my brother. After only about 40 really dense pages, I have the sneaking suspicion that my assumptions about libraries and their value in our culture (world?) might be crap. Or at least, they might be crap under the under the lens of critical literacy studies.
Related/unrelated, books I have read since my last blog post are:
She - H. Rider Haggard
The Conquered - Naomi Mitchison
Maps and Legends - Michael Chabon
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The reason I might care about how library values and ideals might look through the lens of critical literacy studies is that about a month ago I read several short articles and blog posts referencing a release from IBM predicting “Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years“, including the prediction that You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back, which got my brain unhinged a bit.
Literacy/literacies come into it partly because IBM is saying you won’t need to read or write to use the Web, and partly because one of the things I know about information retrieval today is that it is almost entirely text-based. We can come up with exceptions, and we may say well, the exceptions will become the rule, but my quick conclusion is that keyboards and screens are the primary ways that humans interact with computers and will continue to be.
We make text on keyboards, text is a representation of language, and language is damn useful.
But that got me thinking - and here is where I get unhinged - what is text, in the ASCII or UTF-8 sense? What is text in the writing sense? What is a text? What is language? Wikipedia and the Dictionary of the History of Ideas both let me down, but I’m excited that I might take the time to explore these ideas at what they might mean for libraries.
Your thoughts and suggestions are most welcome!
I also wonder how this will affect the perceived (and real) educational value of the Web. Right now, studies show that time spent on the Web by kids is a good thing because it enhances literacy and writing skills. While talking is something that every baby can see has value in the grown-up world, it takes seeing active examples of adults reading and using text to understand the value of literacy. Will kids “need” reading as much as they do now to get around?
In some ways, it seems that overcoming the language barrier is more important than the literacy barrier when it comes to technological advancements in communication. I’d rather be able to converse to more people who aren’t like me–in text or voice–than to be able to talk to my computer in just one language.
Nina, I’d love to see links or citations to the studies you refer to. One study referred to recently on librarian.net showed that access to computers and the internet (not use!) had a statistically significant correlation with lower standardized test scores.
I have all sorts of ideas about the political uses of standardized tests, but I’ll spare the rant for now. My assumption/conclusion about the study is that that standardized tests measure and encourage a certain kind of classroom learning that is separate from the learning that happens with a computer. There is a literacy of using personal computers and the world wide web that distinct from but not exclusive of institutional school literacy.
But you say there are other voices that should be heard in this story? Neat.
Interestingly regarding your comments, ‘real time translation’ was an IBM prediction from early 2007, and they explain that it’s already being used for cross-cultural
surveillancecommunication in the Middle East.But I think you are right that language and communication are a broader and more important idea than reading and writing. One of the initial problems I had with the IBM prediction about talking to the web is that it assumes the continued dominance of text, if not as media then as an encoding of language and media that computers can store, categorize and transform.
Does text really need to be central to everything we do? Is text necessary? Should we assume text? What I’ve picked up so far from Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identity is that writing is neither cause, result nor prerequisite for our civilization as we know it.
Given that letting someone turn our voices into text and back into voices again can give them enormous power over us, maybe for once we won’t let them do it.
Bringing it down to earth, whether we assume text or not, it’s what we’ve got. I hope that questioning the primacy of text can lead us to interesting places - and hopefully ones where libraries and other institutions serve our communities better.
can you explain (with examples/evidence from the dry academic book you bummed from your academic brother) what you meant by this statement:
“I have the sneaking suspicion that my assumptions about libraries and their value in our culture (world?) might be crap.”
thanks!
Well, heavy emphasis on “might” and “suspicion”.
Collins and Blot discuss a lot of other people’s papers in building a “complex argument”. I haven’t got so far yet, and already since writing that, I’ve come to some other conclusions. I’d like to put some more emphasis on the idea that this post discusses ideas that are not fully formed yet.
The book includes persuasive ethnographic evidence from a series of studies by Shirley Brice Heath, including one that compares pre-school literacy practices in different communities in North Carolina (”Questioning at Home and at School: A comparative Study” in G. Spindler, ed., Doing the Ethnography of Schooling: Educational Anthropology in Action, 1982.) In the middle class white community, parents communicated with their children mostly through questions and answers. In the working class black neighborhood parents and their children hardly used questions and answers at all. She observed this behavior for something like five years. In the children’s schools, interaction between teachers and students was also largely done through questions and answers. Guess which group had an easier time at school!
This says nothing general about middle class white or working class black communities, even in North Carolina, but it does show that there is more than one type of literacy, and that the literacies a person has or lacks can affect how we interact with institutions such as schools.
So I jumped ahead, without finishing the book first and thought, gee golly gosh, if schools can fail people because they aren’t prepared to learn in the way they are expected to learn, then libraries can fail people in the same way.
I haven’t done any ethnographic studies on the subject and I probably wont. But the good news is that I think libraries are a different sort of institution than schools are, and we encourage a different sort (or sorts) of learning. Hopefully by the end of all this, I’ll have some ideas about what to do about it.
Sorry I missed the comments–this blog seems not to offer an option to be able to follow when there are followups to comments.
I was referring to this frustratingly unclear snippet: “The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.”
in an otherwise fascinating New Yorker article about why reading is good for us: namely, it doesn’t occupy all of our brain, which allows us to think while doing it.
Thanks for the tips! A slow loping conversation is fine. I think part of the reason we write things down is so that we don’t forget to get back to the discussion later.
I poked around for a WordPress plugin to send comment notification by e-mail, found one, upgraded to Wordpress 2.7, installed the plugin, and can’t get it to work. I might try again later, or if anyone knows a good plugin to do this, let us know.
[...] Some weeks ago, I used the example of an anthropological study that showed that certain social groups were more likely to communicate with their children through questions and answers, and that these children were better prepared for school. (Shirley Brice Heath, ”Questioning at Home and at School: A comparative Study” in G. Spindler, ed., Doing the Ethnography of Schooling: Educational Anthropology in Action, 1982.) [...]