More Mianderings about Information Ethics

Earlier this morning, while waiting or my my flight’s boarding, I wrote a brief blog with my phone about my continuing struggles with a librarian’s perspective of the new information environment. From their perspective, and the way that most people think about information, it is something that you keep in a container. It’s usually on paper, and more recently on microfiche, celluloid, magnetic tape… But, bodies of information were objects that had to be stored by category.

Starting with the Internet, information began to flow independent of containers. It’s been ancillary, a parallel information source, that was almost no threat to our traditional ways of thinking about libraries. It was not a revolution in the making for most people. However, the proliferation of computers and other information devices, increases in broadband access, and the growing web of WiFi has turned the digital networked information domain into a preferred source of content for many people, perhaps most people.

In a way, our attention seems to be shifting from an inward focus, into the library, into the book or magazine, to an outward focus, to a more global and ethereal information landscape. It’s almost as if we are becoming a global mind, with signals and impulses flowing around the globe, memories and concepts stored and connected logically (not in alphabetical or Dewey decimal order), and people, the neurons of this big brain, observing, reflecting, sharing, reading, processing and growing new memory, concepts, and knowledge. We live in the library! We are the library!

In my last blog, I suggested that we have faith. The problem is that this big brain suffers from a variety of psychoses. There are thought processes that are counter productive, antibodies and viruses that attack the system. that grow on their own, with their own interests, divorced from that whole organism, and poisoning its function.

It’s already happened. I do not believe that we can go back. There will certainly be those who want to, the refusnics, as PEW calls them. But the function of the world and global citizens will be governed through the digital networked realm.

So how do we cure this illness? How do we brain it all back into alignment. I’m not talking right and wrong, good and bad. I’m just talking about making the organism work, such that it can be used by us to help us become a better us.

No Doubt, education plays an integral and critical role. Teaching ethics is an imperative. But what do we teach and how do we teach it? I would toss out, once again, some factored-down elements of ethics as a joumpin off place for any continued conversations.

  • Seek and express truth,
  • Do no harm with information,
  • Be accountable for your information work,
  • Respect the information and its infrastructure.

Comments?

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3 thoughts on “More Mianderings about Information Ethics”

  1. I realize I am missing parts of this conversation, but let me jump into the flow.

    I’m a librarian at a large suburban high school. I get what you are saying about how we all ARE the library now. We’ve been promoting blogs and wikis as a way of knowledge sharing and building for our teachers and students.

    I do think many librarians are aware and embracing this change. We do understand the issues behind some of these knowledge management issues, that’s for sure, because we have been dealing with them for a long time.

    But I completely agree that we have to be teaching students to use information wisely, not trying to prevent them from seeing information. I liked the example I heard in David Jakes’ presentation at Tech Forum–We don’t try to teach children to cross the street on a fake street!

    I talk to students about Wikipedia, but I try to share information with teachers and students that helps them gain a more complex understanding of it–not just a “bad or good” understanding. I think schools could learn a lot just from the eagerness of editors on Wikipedia to publish and translate that into schools.

    And I agree we can’t go “back”…nor would I want to. It’s an overwhelming and exciting time to be a librarian! It’s like the whole world is embracing being librarians, in a way–because everyone is “tagging” and picking subject headings, and everyone is creating their own library, and everyone is making those choices. So I see it as very empowering!

    I will say, it is difficult with 2500 students and over 250 faculty to get some of these complex ideas across in the limited time we have to dialogue about things.

    But trying makes all the difference!

  2. We have a ‘media center’ in our middle school that has lots of books a couple of internet capable computers, and one digital camera (oh and a VCR/DVD player…but the remotes are locked away…don’t want to lose them!)

    It’s very quiet there…partly because there are usually only a few students around…usually sitting at a table looking at magazines.

    Compare this to the scene in the gym before school…noisy, kids listening to iPods, talking, gesturing, interacting…conversing! There’s more information exchange going on in the gym than in the ‘media center!’

    It’s got to change and fast…or the students will literally leave us behind.

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