The Erosion of Common Ground

A hive of intellectual curiosity and pursuit. That was my impression as I looked up from the new Alexander McCall Smith novel I was sampling in the New Books section of our public library. Before me, spread throughout the spacious, well-appointed library, were patrons of all ages, even college students in spite of the fact that the university nearby has several extensive libraries as well. The public library is a citizens’ space: common ground for the common good. Ours is heavily patronized by readers young and old across the economic strata. Yes, a number of homeless individuals take shelter there, reading the day away or using the pubic computers, avoiding the bitter chill of the Indiana winter. Why should they not? They are as entitled to the pursuit of knowledge or the pleasure of a good read as anyone.

Although the Digital Revolution has brought about changes in how we can engage in literate pursuits, those changes—the Internet, ebooks—have provided new options, rather than substitutes for volumes on shelves. I will gladly confess that in the course of writing five or six books since 2000, I have not darkened the door of traditional library to do the research necessary for them. The Internet has provided me with access to libraries, collections, and various media worldwide. But that does not mean that I consider traditional libraries obsolete. Far from it. Public libraries offer both traditional resources and access to digital resources, especially for those who don’t have computer media ready to hand. The emerging Digital Age is enlarging the role of public libraries, not reducing it.

That is not what those heavily invested in the Industrial/Corporate Age would have us believe. Corporate oligarchs are grasping at every possible means to extend the Corporate Age past its sell-by date, which was about the turn of the century. Much of this grasping is taking the form of attacking common ground: public places, spaces, and endeavors whose democratic mission is to foster and support the common good. The graspers are largely conservative, though not exclusively, and focused on elitist privilege, often corporate. The Digital Age is increasingly about individuation and diverse community, not about corporate personhood.

Public libraries, public schools, public—read “democratic”—anything is suspect in the eyes of corporate oligarchy, in which monied elites are focused on controlled parochialism. Gerrymandering electoral districts to ensure that candidates backed by corporate money win offices and become puppet legislators; undermining public confidence in public schools by unfounded criticism, underfunding, and the shunting of public money into corporate pockets through contracts for ever more testing, vouchers, and charter schools; widening the wealth gap between rich and poor through regressive taxes and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy—all of these are the self-serving actions of those heavily invested in a dying age, the Industrial/Corporate Age.

The Digital Age, sparked by two key Digital Revolution developments, the computer and the Internet, is not an extension of the Industrial/Corporate Age. It is a revolution-worthy new era. Too many people already understand this. Maybe they read newspapers or see the information on Facebook. Maybe they come to the public library. However, they gain their understanding of the radical changes that are marking out a new cultural era, it’s scaring the bejezus out of conservatives hoping to preserve the dying Industrial/Corporate age. But beware. Those who are afraid are always dangerous. Those of us ready to embrace the Digital Age would do well to remember Gandhi’s words: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Internet Limits Also Limit Learning

Two controversies converge around the issue of access to the Internet, our Information Highway. One involves filtering Internet content in the name of protecting children from the highway’s seamier byways, which has resulted in large measure from the decade-old Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The second hinges on current debates about so-called net neutrality, or the maintenance of equality of access and treatment of data on the Internet, something that some would like to abandon in favor of privileging certain users who can afford to use the fast lane, relegating the bulk of users to the slow lane.

An alarming number of policy makers and school officials are advocating the elimination of school librarians, something so patently short-sighted and ill-advised that it seems incredulous to thinking parents and educators. In the Digital Age the concept of “library” has expanded exponentially. Libraries have never been static repositories, whether of clay tablets, scrolls, printed books, or digital files; and librarians are more essential than ever before in history to order, select, advise, guide, and teach relative to these multimodal resources.

And so it is fitting that the American Library Association in its recent report, Fencing Out Knowledge: Impact of the Children’s Internet Protection Act 10 Years Later (from http://www.ala.org) finds that “over-filtering,” as a result of CIPA, limits legitimate access to educational resources and, according to ALA President Barbara Stripling, “consequently reduces access to information and learning opportunities for students.” This is all the more worrying in light of two current trends, namely, 1) the aforementioned elimination of librarians, who are information-savvy folk prepared to guide the young and uninitiated along the Information Highway and its many byways, and 2) the vast amount of resources now available, sometimes exclusively, on the Internet that cannot be captured or replicated in physical, books-on-shelves libraries, librarians or none.

Education is about access to information, and a too-vigorous attempt to “protect” learners blunts learning. That’s the bottom line.

But it leads naturally to the second controversy. Net neutrality is related to the “common carrier” concept, which in common law countries refers to persons or companies that transport goods or people for the benefit of the general public, in contrast to “contract carriers,” which transport only for certain clients and can refuse transport for others. Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been considering new rules that would permit Internet service providers to use faster lanes of data transmission to favor certain users, namely wealthy corporations.

Blocking or limiting access to Internet content is anathema to education for the common good. Commodifying access by privileging wealthy corporations at the expense of rendering everyone else second class risks substantial educational harm to institutions and individuals and upends the democratic ideals of equity and equality regardless of socioeconomic status and other potentially discriminatory factors.