NB: This is a paper written in the heat of passion after reading Harris, Hannah & Harris (H3). It is probably disrespectful, ill thought through and missing the central point of their paper “Librarians Confront the Post-Industrial Era”, and that’s because when I got the feeling they were opposed to great technological change (a notion based on word choice in the article), I skipped directly to the summary, and then did my own reading. The overall point here is that technology is here. You can quibble with the “paperless” part of Lancaster’s article all you want, but that won’t make e-books go away.
Yelling at Clouds
There have always been two ways of looking at the future, from the dystopic Asimovian world of humans are beguiled and cuckolded by machines, to the Gene Roddenberry-esque adventures with other versions of our own humanity. Some things about the future never change. The first is that it is a critical unknown. The second is that technology will be the ringmaster.
I read H3 with a growing sense of disbelief. What began as an introduction to streams of thought about technology and their origins quickly dissolved into a three-headed hydra. What, they asked, was the role of the library in the modern world? Was the library, that public good, to be privatized and become pay-to-play? Why did people believe “simple-minded… mastery of technology” would save the future for librarians and for the population at large.
I certainly don’t want to criticise or trivialize the concerns raised in the paper. The issues raised are deep and central to information work. Information, and the accessing of it, has never been such a big topic in social discourse, but I feel like H3 have missed something critical here. That something is opportunity. I feel like they’re facing the future, and they are afraid.