As a librarian, I’m particularly concerned that grand visions of digital libraries may entail trade-offs whose full implications are not being attended to. One immediate thought: we might all want to consider carefully whether Google’s (or AltaVista’s, or anyone else’s) streamlined “single search box” is sacrificing systematic and substantive scholarship on an altar of visual elegance in design. (Perhaps “Less is not more”; perhaps less really is less.) We might also ask whether the Web, being geared toward the pictorial, the audio, the colorful, the animated, the instantaneous, the quickly updated, and to short verbal texts, is a tool whose biases may be conditioning us in ways that will have deplorable consequences for education.
What will happen when all of the books in dozens of large libraries are digitized, and we find that, because we’ve also abandoned standardized cataloging in exchange for keyword access, no one can find the texts efficiently or systematically without being overwhelmed by tens of thousands of “noise” retrievals, outside the desired (but no longer existent) conceptual boundaries created by subject cataloging and classification? What happens when we take off our visionary lenses and see that no one really wants to read lengthy texts on screens (anymore than our predecessors wanted to live in the mass projects designed for them)–and, in the meantime, we’ve sent the physical books to remote warehouses and increased the hassles not only of identifying the relevant books to begin with, but also the retrieval time needed for hands-on access? In decreasing, on a wholesale basis, the ease and convenience of reading lengthy texts, won’t we have succeeded in steering more students away from books and toward formats that require only shorter attention spans? Is that a good thing without qualification? Mr. Gorman makes a valid point that “information” is not the same thing as knowledge or understanding; the latter levels of learning require formats that facilitate sustained reading of complex and lengthy texts.
Perhaps, too, there is actually more – much more? – to “organizing the world’s information” than just digitizing it and providing access through “relevance-ranked” keywords. Our successors may shake their heads in wonder that our generation apparently swallowed whole the notion that there is not much more to determining a record’s “relevance” to a subject than just counting the number of online links to it. What about other works on the same subject, in multiple languages, that use entirely different words to discuss the same concept, and that get overlooked to begin with by one’s failure to type those words into that single search box? While electoral majorities are necessary in political processes, are “vote counts” adequate to guide substantive research? Is it possible that important sources may not be seen at all, let alone voted on as relevant, even by a large group of people? (My experience at a reference desk indicates that this is not just a possibility–it is the more like the norm.) Modernism distorted the definition of “equality” to make it fit into a designer’s world; aren’t we doing the same with the word “relevance” to make it fit into a programmer’s world?
Is it conceivable, further, that adding “tags” to records is no more a complete solution to retrieval problems than is the relevance ranking of keywords already within the records? Tagging is the practice of untrained indexers contributing their own unsystematized keywords to online records; the computer then generates a ranked-order listing of these terms to display the “collective judgment” of the work’s subject (or associations) by its readers. It is justifiably popular in many Web sites because it compensates for the patent shortcomings of relevance-ranked keywords derived only from the texts themselves; it is unjustifiably popular among library administrators because it holds out to them the vision of free indexing done outside the library, apparently (in their minds) eliminating the need for systematic (and expensive) professional cataloging. The latter managerial vision is based on faith that an “invisible hand” will guide the aggregate of tag choices to overall accuracy and adequacy.
“Invisible hands” produced by “collective wisdom” in information science, however, may quite possibly lead to problems comparable to those created by the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s capitalism, whose operations were found to require major corrections by laws regulating hours of work, minimum wages, job-safety considerations, pollution levels, etc.; by unions closely monitoring actual day-to-day work conditions; and by enforceable codes of ethics in stock markets. History would seem to indicate that unregulated “invisible hands,” when left to themselves, always wind up holding mirrors that reflect our own non-re-engineered human nature, good and bad, rather than our utopian ideals. (We might well ask: if the “mind of God” is emerging from the collective intelligence displayed by the Web, why is it that the deity is so preoccupied with gambling, pornography, hook-ups, plagiarism, piracy of intellectual property, and Viagra knock-offs?)
Many wonderful things came of Modernism; its problems lay, in part, in trying to apply technological solutions to problems that were not technological to begin with. Justice, liberty, and political equality could not be brought about by steel frames, streamlined railroad cars, or more powerful dynamos, all of which were found to contribute just as readily to oppressive as to liberal political regimes. The fact that a massive World War–the most devastating on in history, due precisely to all the new technologies–immediately followed the Modernist decades would seem to belie its vision that human nature would improve along with all of its new gadgets. And yet people’s faith in the transformative effects of gadgets–nowadays, of course, computerized gadgets–never goes away. We still read today such things as the following prediction by a prominent digital-age futurist:
This future learning system will start outside our existing education systems sometime within the next two years, and cause a revolution to begin. . . . schools as we know them today will cease to exist within ten years. Their replacement will be far better.
This new system will be able to unlock the hidden potential within us, creating a new grade of human beings - human beings 2.0. It has the potential to increase the speed of learning ten-fold, and many will be able to complete the entire K-12 curriculum within one year. People graduating from the equivalent of high school or college in the future will be a factor of ten times smarter than graduates today.
Yes, you can Google any phrase from this optimistic paean to find its source; whether making that connection will also make you smarter, I’m not sure. The achievement of Utopia through new technology is a persistent human dream; but, as Mr. Gorman points out, it can also be a Siren song. We do need to worry about the panaceas of projectors who are naive about human nature, and who have given no thought to the reasons that all Utopian projects of the past have failed. The rocks surrounding the Sirens’ island are as real as the song itself, and they will destroy us if we overlook their existence. Good intentions that are not grounded in reality have a way of producing unintended consequences that do more harm than good; a naive faith in “the new” can all too readily overlook proven channels through the rocks. We should be wary of discarding any tested practices of how we can best relate to each other and to our world, simply because previous practices are “old” and not at the “cutting edge” as defined by technology.
Today’s futurists might profitably read the Federalist papers. The authors of these essays, which provide the rational grounding of our Constitution’s framework of checks and balances, had no idealistic illusions about the perfectibility of human nature. To the contrary, they assumed that short-sightedness, selfishness, and ignorance are constant factors in human life, and that we are always in need of protection from each other. The system they crafted, based on such assumptions, continually prevents the accumulations of power to which unregulated, unchecked, and unbalanced “invisible hand” operations lead. The French, in contrast, assumed that human nature freed, from the restrictions of the old ways (the ancien regime), would automatically drift, if not positively spring, directly towards Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. What they found in practice, however, was that unchecked human nature led, instead, to the Terror and the guillotine. Their naive assumptions proved disastrous in less than a decade; French society was rescued from chaos only by a strong dictatorship.
The American Founders’ creation, however, has endured for more than two centuries. While the Founders did not give us a Utopia such as promised by the French (or the later Marxist) revolution, the frame of society they left us, with all its many imperfections, has come closer than any alternative to actually bringing about justice, liberty, and equality for all its citizens. They discerned that human energies needed to be channeled by laws and institutional constraints, not left to collective whims or fickle majority votes, if we were to succeed in living together.
We might profitably reflect on the fact that they accomplished this feat in the complete absence of the high technologies we take for granted today–and that, in fact, their own liberal educations were not dependent at all on the amount of, or the speed at which, “data” could be transferred across oceans or continents. Nor was their learning based on “relevance ranked” keyword searches or reliance on the collective “folk” wisdom that manifested itself, when all restraints were discarded, in the French revolution. They did not confuse data transfer with either understanding or wisdom. To think that such education as theirs can be matched, let alone surpassed, simply by means of improvements in technology is gullibility in the extreme – one might even say it is Foolishness 2.0.
23cc
June 27th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
With regard to the first paragraph, keywords facilitate searching books, articles etc, in the case when one does not look for anything specific, ex. does not look fot a title of a book or an author, but is interested in a particular topic.
Web is not a tool with biases, it is a tool and that is all. If one wants to publish lengthy texts, it may well do so. And that is what I have done one time on my university site. I heard people saying that they do not like to read long texts on a computer, but they can be printed (if someone does not have a problem to use trees, when it is not really necessary).
With regard to the second paragraph, this technique is not used just by the internet search engines.I do not really know any search engines in librarian computers which would not use keyword option for searching library items.
With regard to the third paragraph, the number of links to the site is not the most important category which the internet search engines use to determine the order of selected websites.
As to the search of the same concept in another languges, it is all possible in an advaced search option. Or one can just type a string in another language. It is really useless to show the option in all languages if one knows only two, for example. As much as search engines are mechanic, they are for people who know what they are looking for. Those who do not know what they are looking for will not find it.
June 28th, 2007 at 3:26 am
I would agree with you that the visions and claims of technology champions of the internet, or web 2.0, or w3 bringing world peace and justice are exaggerated. But they’re not exaggerated due to any inherent lack or aspect of the internet.
Likewise, what conditions were present for the “founding fathers” to draft what you are citing as nothing short of mankind’s only hope for justice and equality is something that I can not parse from your article. Perhaps you are confident in what qualities those were, but I’m more cautious and dubious that nurturing mirror-image conditions (if we really can understand how to define them) will result in anything. I’m also confused about the relevance of the founding fathers’ creations to a consideration of the utility of tagging systems: it’s not as if the founding fathers created their work at the height of the Dewey Decimal system and subject-cross-referenced library catalogues.
You write,
“Good intentions that are not grounded in reality have a way of producing unintended consequences that do more harm than good; a naive faith in “the new” can all too readily overlook proven channels through the rocks. We should be wary of discarding any tested practices of how we can best relate to each other and to our world, simply because previous practices are “old” and not at the “cutting edge” as defined by technology.”
In this phrase there are several good messages interwoven with some abstract and undefined fears. Of course, discarding tested practices and old systems is a foolish move. Creating and implementing a tagging system, or wikis, or google single-box searches does not invalidate other organizational schema nor make it any less useful. What would seem to be ideal, if the goal is to truly create the most accessible body of knowledge, is a mixture of older organizational systems with newer crossreferencing systems; a mixture of librarian-driven organization systems and collective-judgment organization systems.
As a scholar who sifts through tens of thousands of sources in order to find relevant research materials, I appreciate great libraries with hard-bound journal and book collections, and find many sources through old-fashioned combing of the stacks. But many many sources I would never find through any sort of physical search. It’s through cross-referencing and tag-based systems that I am able to aggregate that knowledge. As a scholar, I have much more available to me when I can make use of both systems to their utmost. It’s my responsibility to produce good scholarship, regardless of the novelty of the tools I use in order to accomplish that task.
19b5June 28th, 2007 at 9:01 am
The references to “2.0″ in this excellent and thoughtful essay leads me to surmise that Mr. Mann and his readers will find the related text work, 2.0 - A Simple Idea for a Troubled World, at to be most fascinating. It was just released yesterday.
June 29th, 2007 at 6:41 am
Thomas,
Well done. Thank you.
Brent,
Do you have a link for that? Googling it doesn’t seem to work. :)
June 29th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Thomas Mann expands on this theme in much greater detail in a piece titled “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries.” This 41 page (!) essay is available online at: http://guild2910.org/Pelopponesian%20War%20June%2013%202007.pdf
February 2nd, 2008 at 8:26 am
Nathan,
Here is that link:
http://www.tiite.com/2.0.htm