the future is in doubt: librarians, publishers, and networked learning in the 21st century

Journal of Library Administration, 52:396–410, 2012Copyright © Frank MenchacaISSN: 0193-0826 print / 1540-3564 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01930826.2012.700804

The Future Is in Doubt: Librarians, Publishers,and Networked Learning in the 21st Century

FRANK MENCHACAResearch Solutions, Gale/Cengage Learning, Farmington Hills, MI, USA

ABSTRACT. This article considers the relationship between socialnetworking tools, such as Facebook, and learning. It examinesthe consequences of personalization associated with such tools onresearch, critical thinking, and information literacy. New roles forlibraries and librarians are discussed, as are the broader social,political, and cultural implications of changes to how students areeducated.

KEYWORDS networked learning, information literacy, The FilterBubble, critical thinking, embedded librarianship

In October 2011, Project Information Literacy (PIL) published Balancing Act:How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during CrunchTime (Head & Eisenberg, 2011). One way to describe this study, spon-sored by Gale, Cengage Learning, is: what digital natives do in the desperatehours.

Part of the University of Washington’s Information School, PIL inter-viewed 560 undergraduates on 10 campuses nationwide and asked how,with their hands forced by deadlines, they actually used technology in li-braries. Their answers are surprising, frustrating, and make us question howwe, as publishers and librarians, support education in the 21st century.

“In the broadest sense,” the study maintains, “our findings led us toconclude that what the media has dubbed the ‘multitasking generation’ surelyexists, but it may not be as fractured or haphazard in its working habits aswe have been led to believe” (Head & Eisenberg, 2011, p. 47). In the weeksleading up to final exams and term papers, PIL’s subjects limited their use ofhardware. Overwhelmingly interviewees said they relied on only one or two

Address correspondence to Frank Menchaca. E-mail: [email protected]

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FIGURE 1 IT Devices in Use at the Time of Interviews. (Color figure available online).

devices, primarily cell or smart phones, and laptop computers, followed bylibrary terminals (see Figure 1).

Students were not even entirely “plugged in” via these devices to theInternet’s—or the library’s—information resources. “All in all, our findingssuggest that students, while in the library, may be trying to mindfully managetechnology when the pressure is at its most intense, using practical andreliable methods to harness IT devices for working more efficiently, stay-ing focused on coursework, conserving their ever-dwindling time, and stillremaining connected to the people in their lives” (Head & Eisenberg, 2011,p. 3; emphasis added). Figure 2 demonstrates what students said they wereactually doing.

In one sense, the findings are unremarkable. While the freshmen of2012, born in 1993, represent the first generation to grow up immersed indigital information, they also follow those before them in the time-honoredtradition of cramming. This means dialing down distractions; or, as the PILstudy put it, by the end of a semester “most respondents (85%) could beclassified as ‘light’ technology users” (Head & Eisenberg, 2011, p. 3).

In another sense, the data say something new about learning workflowsthat we need to pay attention to.

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FIGURE 2 What Were Students Doing While They Were in the Library? (Color figure availableonline).

FIGURE 3 Sources Used for Course-Related Research (2010 vs. 2009 Survey Data). Resultsare ranked from most frequent to least frequent sources students used for course work.Responses of “almost always,” “often,” and “sometimes” have been conflated into a newcategory of “use.” (Color figure available online).


FIGURE 4 Which Library Resources and Services Had Students Used? (Color figure availableonline).

THE LIBRARY IS A PLACE NOT A SOURCE

A 2010 PIL study found that, for over 8,000 students surveyed on 25 na-tionwide campuses, libraries figured prominently as sources (Head & Eisen-berg, 2010, p. 3). Scholarly research databases ranked third as go-to sites forcoursework, after class readings and search engines. Librarians, meanwhile,placed second to last, somewhere between “friends” and the freewheelingworld of blogs (see Figure 3). It was equivocal news: good if you were indigital database publishing; trouble if you were a librarian or partnered withlibrarians, as we publishers are, for discovery.

In the 2011 study (see Figure 4), we’re confronted with a startling differ-ence: students considered neither library resources nor librarians worthwhilesources—even when the need for quality, relevant information is presumablymost acute.

Equipment and snacks trump J-Stor. And when students went onlinein the library, or through its equipment, they overwhelmingly used socialnetworking sites, such as Facebook (Head & Eisenberg, 2011, p. 36).

After analyzing how students used these sites, PIL noted somethinginteresting:

[We] found respondents were using the top 15 Web sites almost twice asmuch for coursework (48%) than for communication (25%). At the same

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time, few respondents were using any of the top 15 Web sites primarily tosupport entertainment (16%), personal research (10%), and or schedulingactivities. Taken together, these findings suggest that the students in oursample were using Web sites primarily to support coursework far morethan they used them for leisure activities while in the library during thefinal weeks of the term. (Head & Eisenberg, 2011, p. 38).

Rather than forsake research and learning at crunch time, studentsseemed to use social media and entertainment sites in the library to im-provise a new solution for those activities.

They were fashioning individualized information spaces.

INDIVIDUALIZED INFORMATION SPACES

The PIL study characterizes these as aggregations “students had created ontheir primary devices . . . . Individual information spaces consist of Web sitesand applications students use to study, research, communicate, play—andmultitask” (Head & Eisenberg, 2011, p. 4). These resources do not announcethemselves for learning and information. Yet they were ingrained in studentworkflows for both.

The PIL study showed that students preferred to use these self-configured environments in the physical library at crunch time. As one in-terviewee put it: “It’s the vibe in the library that brings me here—everyoneis working on something, everyone is getting something done—it spreadsthrough the room” (Head & Eisenberg, 2011, p. 7). In this study, at least, thelibrary had re-asserted its relevance as a place.

What if that place were re-tailored expressly to support the use of in-dividualized information spaces in learning? Drexel University seems to beasking this question in recreating its undergraduate library. Overcrowding inthe main campus library drove the university to remake a breezeway nearundergraduate living quarters as a “bookless learning center” (Howard, 2011,p. B19). Called the Library Learning Terrace, the center, inaugurated in June2011, is a configurable space: students can move furniture around to creategroup settings. The terrace is open 24/7. Students can elect to work with a“personal librarian” who serves the role of a research coach. Faculty is wel-come, and information resources exist in a Data as a Service (DaaS) model:they can be turned on and used at point of need. “Drexel wants the learningterrace to bring the library—or some of its services, at least—to students ina flexible setting they can configure themselves” (Howard, 2011).

NETWORKED LEARNING

The Drexel example represents a model for librarians and publishers asparticular kinds of contributors to emerging forms of networked learning.


In 2011, John Seely Brown, author of the classic The Social Life of In-formation, and Douglas Thomas, of the University of Southern California’sAnnenberg School for Communication and Journalism, self-published onAmazon A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a Worldof Constant Change (Brown & Thomas, 2011). The entire enterprise seemedrefreshingly unorthodox: a former corporate scientist for Xerox (Brown), anda gaming researcher (Thomas), working outside traditional publishing, de-clared a vision for 21st century education based on the combination of socialnetworking, gaming, and information manipulation.

Brown and Thomas hold that networked digital information has alterededucation by keeping that information unfinished and unfinishable. This hasde-stabilized the linear transference of learning from teacher to pupil thatcharacterized 20th-century education. Even as that paradigm persists, a “newculture of learning” is evolving within and around it.

This new culture responds to continual change by relying oncollectives—people engaged in networked communication. These collec-tives have roots in gaming and in social media sites where information isnever permanent, and users make sense of the flux together. Today’s fresh-men, Brown and Thomas seem to be saying, developed habits as digitalgamers in childhood, that now manifest themselves in the types of behaviorPIL’s researchers uncovered in libraries: applying entertainment Web sitesand social media to learning problems.

A New Culture of Learning’s authors argue that, if correctly structured,this learning produces students better equipped to succeed in knowledgeeconomies. The new workforce consists not of those who possess informa-tion. In a world where a search on the word “information” itself produces11.4 billion results in .14 seconds, this is foolish and impossible. Knowledgeworkers are those who can make unfixed information into meaning that canbe acted upon.

Central to this is an understanding of context.

Today, new media tools let users restructure content in a way that al-lows content to remain stable but with a change to its meaning. Think,for example, of a remix that does not affect a movie’s visuals but altersthe soundtrack to obtain a different effect, such as putting music fromKeystone Kops in a chase scene from Jurassic Park. Through technology,imagination, and play, any given movie can be changed into any othergenre—drama, comedy, thriller, and so on. Meaning, therefore, nowarises not in interpretation (what something means) but from con-textualization (where something has meaning). (Brown & Thomas,2011, p. 95; emphasis added).

Gamers and social networkers grow adept at understanding meaning inchanging contexts. And this helps them make decisions.

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“A QUESTING DISPOSITION”

Write Brown and Thomas: “Games have grown up, and playing them is nolonger reserved for children. In fact the ability to play may be the singlemost important skill to develop for the twenty-first century. In this context,play involves what we think of as a questing disposition” (Brown & Thomas,2011, p. 114).

This is where publishers and librarians can be “particular kinds of con-tributors” to learning I referred to earlier. To define this role in the negative:it does not involve grafting game interfaces onto information databases orturning former book stacks into an arcade.

It may well, however, mean altering how we think of what we do. Formuch of the latter half of the 20th century we have both been in largely thesame business: answering questions. Publishers aggregated information intosearch and retrieve products to respond to queries. Libraries measured theireffectiveness in the numbers of reference questions answered.

What if we begin to think of ourselves as guides to defining and refin-ing questions? At Gale, this challenge has led us to create a new generationof online products that strive to go beyond traditional databases. Our Busi-ness Insights: Global product brings together kinds of information—statistics,case studies, company and industry profiles—that are quite typical. The prod-uct differentiates itself in the user experience (UX). Modeled on the work-flows of personae representing business students and faculty, the UX guidesusers in fusing familiar data points into a new continuum, or story, about aparticular change or phenomenon in a business, in a global context. Ratherthan provide a set of distinct answers about that change or phenomenon—aset of what’s, if you like—we chose to help students ask about how’s: howrevenues changed over time, how foreign economies influenced perfor-mance. This is the way businesses run in the real world: by telling theirstories to employees, investors, and customers. And this is the way busi-ness students develop their careers: by turning how’s into strategic deci-sions. Facts are only one pre-condition to success, and not enough on theirown.

We’ve applied similar challenges to our original reference publishing. Inlate 2011, we published Cuba, a two volume electronic and print book wedon’t call an encyclopedia, in order to avoid what the word itself implies—anorderly course of instruction, the A to Z of a subject. Instead, we engagedseveral hundred writers worldwide, over half of whom live in Cuba, to pro-vide original perspectives on Cuban history and culture as lived experience.There is no potted biography of Fidel Castro. We leave that to Wikipediaor to other reference publishers. There are, instead, myriad perspectives onthe figure, who amounts to a liberator, Satan, or an amalgam of the two,depending on context. We encourage the questions: how does Fidel Castrohappen, and how is that answer different, depending on whom we ask?


The making of meaning in a networked society: it has implications notonly for how we educate 21st-century students like those in the PIL study:habituated to non-traditional sources; it also determines what new kinds ofinformation industries will provide sustainable economic growth. The criticalthinking skills it engages may even shape the future of democracy. Publishersneed to develop their businesses in its service. And, I believe, librarianscan equip themselves to be among the best people to institutionalize thismaking.

I want to propose that networked information is evolving to a pointat which all of these—responsible education, pedagogical authority, criticalthinking, democratic society—are potentially risked.

THE PERILS OF PERSONALIZATION

In January 2012, two bills went before the U.S. Congress for approval: theStop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Known bytheir acronyms SOPA and PIPA, the bills proposed legislation that wouldblock Web sites containing unauthorized copyrighted materials. Owners ofthe unlicensed intellectual property (IP) would have legal recourse to preventsuch Web sites from operation. Non-domestic U.S. infringers would be cutoff from advertisers and removed from search results.

Sharp resistance to the bills manifested in dramatic and unprecedentedacts. Wikipedia went offline for a day. Google draped itself in black. Andthousands of other sites joined in the protest. At issue was whether copy-right and IP protection would be used to, as many saw it, censor the Web:eliminating sites, such as YouTube, which rely on unlicensed content, andare now ingrained in global networked communications. Supporters of thebills, which included the Association of American Publishers and the Mo-tion Picture Association of America, argued that they would protect therights of copyright owners—including artists—in how their works were usedand monetized. Regardless of which side of the debate one took, the billswould have profound consequences. Perhaps sensing the size of the impact,Congress postponed debate on the bills in late January 2012.

While the SOPA and PIPA controversy reached a rolling boil, I wasreading a book that made me wonder whether, at least in some sense, thequestion of Internet censorship has already been settled. Eli Pariser’s TheFilter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (Pariser, 2011) arguesthat the Internet in general, and social networking Web sites like Facebookin particular, are already controlled through personalization.

Despite its roots in the non-commercial worlds of academia and the mil-itary, the Internet has been a commercial enterprise for nearly two decades.Its driver is, of course, advertising revenues. The biggest players did not takelong to realize that the better they could correlate search results to a user’s

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query, the more likely the user would be to click on advertising related tothat query—thus producing revenue.

Amazon.com led the way in recognizing that harvesting informationabout a user’s behavior—buying patterns, likes and dislikes—allowed itto suggest, with increasing accuracy, new merchandise that user mightbuy. Google and Facebook, Pariser points out, extended and expandedsentiment profiling. Pariser assigns a date to Google’s leap forward in its ef-fort, December 9, 2009. “Starting that morning, Google would use fifty-sevensignals—everything from where you were logging in from to what browseryou were using to what you had searched for—to make guesses about whoyou were and what kinds of sites you’d like. Even if you were logged out,it would customize its results, showing you the pages it predicted you weremost likely to click on” (Pariser, 2011, p. 1) Facebook, meanwhile, becamethe single largest repository of personal data in the history of communica-tions media.

Pariser posits these information giants, in seeking to scale the basic ser-vices they perform—search and social networking—actually morphed into:

Prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who youare and what you’ll do and want next. Together, these engines create aunique universe of information for each of us—what I’ve come to calla filter bubble—which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideasand information. (Pariser, 2011, p. 6).

These alterations are both far-reaching and profound. Consider, for ex-ample, that an estimated 36% of Americans under the age of 35 rely onsocial networking sites like Facebook as their primary source of news(Pariser, 2011, p. 7). This means that if I like and comment on my friends’post and Web sites, Facebook’s algorithms show me more of the same. Soonthe only sources I encounter may be those I like. My information on BarackObama, or Syria, or best new cars, is different than yours.

Few of us ever read a newspaper cover to cover. We skimmed thepages, paused on articles that caught our attention, and read a few beforemoving on. And who decided what was printed on those pages to beginwith: editors and publishers. Weren’t they another form of filter? And now,aren’t they paternalistic has-beens from whom power has been wrested anddelivered to the masses?

If Pariser is correct, “the masses” means some of the masses. Or, moreprecisely, that portion of the masses that we call our friends. Or, perhaps,those friends whose online behavior mimics and reinforces our own, in a fewdelivery mechanisms. And if newspaper editors are paternalistic has-beens,they at least exposed us to the choice of reading or passing up certainstories in the name of balance and journalistic integrity. When they failed tolive up to those standards (however compromised they may have been byadvertising or bias), they were called out by their peers.


Pariser shows us socially constructed information as a circle of associa-tion that contracts tighter and tighter, until we’re locked inside a world basedon a complicity that was created in the first place to drive click-throughs. Thisis an irony worthy of Jonathan Swift: history’s most powerful communicationtool reducing the world to millions of tiny information monarchies, for whoseregent and court the news is daily tailored, based on their preferences.

“OUR LITTLE GROUP HAS ALWAYS BEEN AND ALWAYSWILL UNTIL THE END”

So snarled Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in the face of stifling self-contentment.

The Filter Bubble cites numerous social practices that can be nullifiedor altered—not for the better—by personalization. One is dealing withsocial issues.

One of the troubling side effects of the friendly-world syndrome is thatsome important public problems will disappear. Few people seek outinformation on homelessness, or share it, for that matter. In general, dry,complex, slow-moving problems—a lot of truly significant issues—won’tmake the cut. And while we used to rely on human editors to spotlightthese crucial problems, their influence is now waning. (Pariser, 2011, p.151).

Seen in the context of the filter bubble, the information in networkedlearning—what John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas extol, and in whichPIL’s subjects engaged in libraries—is a resource derived and reified in ad-vertising. It is built on what we like.

It may not be what we need to learn. Daniel Kahneman, the psychologistand 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics, points out in Thinking, Fast andSlow that humans solve new problems in a manner quite opposite to howthe filter bubble operates:

As you become skilled in a task its demand for energy diminishes. Stud-ies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated withan action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved.Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort tosolve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activ-ity. A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physicalexertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving thesame goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding courseof action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisitionof skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is builtdeep into our nature. (Kahneman, 2011, p. 35).

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The promise of networked learning is real. Yet the information studentsutilize may be conditioned by its familiarity to support the “law of leasteffort.” We can argue that students have lived by the “law of least effort” foryears; its widespread institutionalization via social media is, I think, new.

INFORMATIONISTS AND THE PERSONALLEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Librarians and publishers can bring value to social learning, and new rel-evance to themselves, by inserting themselves into students’ workflow asresearch sources. Research is, necessarily, the art of identifying the build-ing materials of new ideas, often with a partial notion of what we want toconstruct. When we research, we do not know; we are trying to know. Theprocess requires difference. This difference goes by many names: cognitivedissonance, surprise, doubt. Research is, in some sense, the engagement ofthe other side, contrariety, a position incompatible with “personalization.”The poet William Blake made one of his “Arguments” in The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell—maxims referring to the antithetical thinking he calleddemonic—the following: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attractionand Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Humanexistence” (Blake, 1982, p. 34).

In a world of “prediction engines,” I want librarians and publishersto claim a future as doubt engines. Embedded librarianship is one meansof enabling to flourish the qualitative difference librarians can make. JohnsHopkins University Welch Medical Library had a problem opposite to theDrexel case mentioned earlier. Students needed its resources, but not theirbrick-and-mortar housing. The university decided to close the library anddistribute the librarians among students and faculty. Referred to as informa-tionists, these librarians became information case workers of a sort, helpingstudents research complex problems and critique the quality of the results:

Recruited to help assess a specific medical trial or treatment, for instance,a Hopkins informationist will put in as much as 40 to 60 hours searchingthe relevant medical literature, then import the results into a citationmanagement system, filter them, and come up with a master list theresearchers can analyze. (Howard, 2011, p. B20).

This is a very different kind of filter than the one of which Pariserwarns. The analysis is collectively sourced via citation calculation, not aLike button. How we scale this practice for undergraduates across multi-ple disciplines may be one of the most important problems we solve. AtCengage, our own version of the personal learning experience, MindTap,aligns research materials—from Gale and from other sources—directly to


classroom assignments, through the integration of curricular and referencetaxonomies. We want to go beyond discovery services and resources di-rectly into students’ and teachers’ hands where learning happens. The toolalso links products like Business Insights: Global to topics being taught,as a means of fostering narrative creation—questing—versus simple searchand retrieve. MindTap aims to be a bridge: between the classroom and thelibrary, between traditional learning management systems and self-configured networks, by including tools like Google docs and Facebook,and education apps.

One objective is to drive usage of library resources and help librariansprove their value and the value of their investments, by syncing these withlearning outcomes. This is one of several new forms of metrics Gale isdeveloping with the library community at all levels, that go beyond gatecounts, collection size, and number of reference questions answered. Webelieve that helping libraries demonstrate return on investment in the formof improved learning outcomes, student engagement, faculty output, andincreased information literacy are the values that will lead the way towardfunding and sustainability in the 21st century.

There is a role for the library as a place. There is a role for librari-ans and publishers as qualitative alternatives to personalized information inincreasingly-used social networking. And, I would argue, there is a crucialrole for all three as social institutions to which we must draw the attentionof faculty, administrators, and funding sources.

Let me conclude by illustrating this with a case study.

WALTER LIPPMANN, BRADLEY MANNING,AND THE FUTURE OF DOUBT

In the early 20th century, American democracy’s uneasy relationship withthe media entered a new phase. During the interwar period (1918–1939),Europe and Asia were being reshaped by German and Japanese nationalism.The U.S. economy went from the Roaring Twenties to the Depression in lessthan a decade. The nation itself emerged on the threshold of World War IIas an ascendant world power.

The free flow of information collided with financial crisis at home, and aglobal position that balanced security with influence. Journalist, media critic,and editor, Walter Lippmann was the dramatist of this tension. In “Journalismand the Higher Law,” from his 1920 Liberty and the News he writes:

Everywhere to-day men are conscious that somehow they must deal withquestions more intricate than any that church or school had preparedthem to understand. Increasingly they know they cannot understandthem if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they

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are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wonderingwhether government by consent can survive in a time when manufac-ture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. (Lippmann, 1920,p. 4).

Gender bias notwithstanding, a century later his comments abide. Ourworld has been reshaped, this time not through the surge of nation-states,but of non-nation-state entities. We’ve yet to recover from another financialcrisis. And a new set of global conflicts—in the Middle East—challenges thebalance of the need to know, and the consequences of knowing. Add to thatthe presence of the most powerful and pervasive communications mediumin human history, and we are again unprepared for the intricate questionson which Lippmann reflected. Not only is it difficult to understand the facts;it is difficult to tell who is in charge of them: Google? “The algorithms thatorchestrate our ads [that] are starting to orchestrate our lives,” as Eli Pariser(2011, p. 9) puts it? The Department of Homeland Security?

The “friendly world syndrome” that characterizes our preference-drivenonline experience belies a reality fraught with doubt. And if we are to edu-cate a new generation, whose paradigms for information are constant, col-lective, and changing, we have to make that doubt manifest for analysisand understanding. Or else our i-Pads, i-Phones, e-readers and any othervowel-prefixed devices, are largely useless.

So here’s the example. We’ve all heard of Wikileaks, the online infor-mation collective that describes as its mission: “to bring important news andinformation to the public” (Wikileaks, n.d.). Among its innovations on howthat news and information are conducted, Wikileaks publishes documentsin their entirety. It utilizes an encrypted “dropbox” into which controversialand classified materials can be submitted without the source’s identity beingrevealed or even traceable (Fecteau, 2011, p. 595). We recall that in 2010,Bradley Manning, then an Iraq-based American soldier, passed classified andsensitive information on military operations there to Wikileaks. This includeda video of civilians under fire from a helicopter by American soldiers, whoseaudio track registers suspicion over the civilians, conviction of their threat,and gloating over their murder, in several short, brutal moments.

The U.S. government reacted by arresting Manning on charges of aid-ing the enemy and condemning the actions of Wikileaks and its founder,Julian Assange. Manning’s disclosure, the military maintained, compromisedpotentially hundreds of lives of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians collaboratingwith the U.S., whose names were un-redacted.

Manning claimed his leakage of the documents was an act of conscience.Records of his Twitter exchanges with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker and“minister” in the Universal Life Church, obtained by Wired magazine, showa much more complicated context for Manning’s motives: gender identityissues leading to isolation in the military (Jardin, n.d.). In 2012 Manning was


facing military court martial. For his part, Assange was detained on chargesof sexual misconduct in Sweden which, to some, were trumped. He wasreleased and took up residence at the English country estate of a supporter.Instead of reporting the news of the case, established papers, chief amongthem The New York Times and The Manchester Guardian, assumed the jobof sorting, analyzing, verifying, and interpreting the Wikileaks documents:the journalist as information literacy expert.

The entire episode demonstrates how unreliable knowing has becomein our digital world. It is difficult to get a fix on the case’s facts, much lessspeculate on the motives on those involved. Rather than being an anomaly,Wikileaks may constitute the norm for us, the audience we publish for, andthe patrons whom we serve.

The questions it raises could not be more important: Where does pro-tection become censorship? When does security shade over into secrecy? Ifits impact can be instantaneous and global, can an act of civil disobediencebe considered a crime? How can we judge facts, if there is no agreementover them in the first place?

If publishers and librarians do not equip users to ask these questions,who will? What will happen to our institutions if they fail to be about suchambiguities? Could there somehow be less valuable work to invest in, andmeasure?

In more than one way, the future is in doubt.

REFERENCES

Blake, W. (1982). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Complete Prose & Poetry ofWilliam Blake. D. V. Erdman (Ed.) New York, NY: Anchor Books.

Brown, J. S. (2000). The social life of information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard BusinessReview Press.

Brown, J. S., & Thomas, D. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imag-ination for a world of constant change. CreateSpace

Carr, N. (2011). The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. New York,NY: Norton.

Fecteau, L. (2011). U.S. Department of State responds to WikiLeaks. In H. Kerri-gan (Ed.), Historic documents of 2010: Includes cumulative index, 2006–2010.Historic Documents Series. Gale Virtual Reference Library (pp. 595–598). Wash-ington, DC: CQ Press.

Gleick, J. (2011). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. New York, NY:Pantheon.

Head, A. J., & Eisenberg, M. B. (2010, November 1). Project information literacyprogress report: “Truth be told”: How college students evaluate and use informa-tion in the digital age. The Information School, University of Washington.

Head, A. J., & Eisenberg, M. B. (2011, October 12). Balancing act: How collegestudents manage technology while in the library during crunch time. ProjectInformation Literacy Research Report.

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Howard, J. (2011, May 13). Tomorrow’s academic libraries: Maybe even some books.The digital campus. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jardin, X. (n.d.). Was alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning’s crisis also one ofpersonal identity? Retrieved from Boing Boing website: http://boingboing.net/2010/06/20/was-alleged-wikileak.html#previouspost

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss andGiroux.

Lanier, J. (2011). You are not a gadget: A manifesto. New York, NY: Vintage.Lippmann, W. (1920). Journalism and the Higher Law. Liberty and the News.Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the internet is hiding from you. New York,

NY: Penguin Press.Shirky, C. (2011). Cognitive surplus: How technology makes consumers into collabo-

rators. New York, NY: Penguin.Wikileaks. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikileaks website: http://wikileaks.org/About.html

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