PLANNING FOR SIDE EFFECTS: THE CASE FOR SEMI-LUDDITE MANAGEMENT
by Marylaine Block
When I tell people what I do for a living, they always say, "Oh, you must really love computers!" Well, no, not exactly. I NEED computers, but I approach them, and their consequences, in much the same way an apprentice lion tamer approaches her charges: with respect, wariness, and a desire to let the experts handle the tricky bits like giving shots. AND an awareness that even the best lion-tamers can't always predict or control what the beasts will do.
The thing is, the Luddites were right. They knew that mechanized looms would change the rules the world was playing by and produce a new set of winners and losers, and that they would be those losers. Any technology upsets apple-carts, both by intention and through unintended side-effects; the more powerful the technology, the more profound those side-effects are.
When it comes to machines, Americans are classic early adopters; we've always rushed to embrace new technologies and worried about side effects later. We sincerely believe machines can solve social problems: School violence? Metal detectors. Education? Educational television, videos, the Internet. Even when we realize the machines themselves cause problems, like when the Internet makes porn available to children surfing the net, we look for machine solutions like filters (and don't seem to notice or care that filters don't work very well).
That's why I think it's important to have a few Luddites on the library staff; when administrators are charging ahead full steam, they're the ones who are going to say, wait a minute, what are we going to do about the unintended side-effects?
They're the ones who, when we abandoned our card catalogs and Readers' Guides and offer nothing but OPACs and databases to our users, said "What are we going to do for users who are intimidated by machines?" They're the ones who understood that long-time library users like Annie Proulx (see Cool Quote below) would really hate the new-model library.
Our Luddites told us that if we HAD to replace the catalogs, we would have to make the interface as easy to understand as an ATM machine's. They insisted we offer lots of classes to teach people about our OPACs and our databases, and how to use them from home if they had internet access. Our Luddites told us that because all the garbage on the net would frustrate our users, we would have to teach them how to find good stuff on the internet, and show them the wonderful stuff we'd linked on our home pages.
They're the ones who first understood that libraries had to respond to new competition: information sources that were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that came to the users instead of making the users come to them.
Our Luddites were the first ones who realized that Internet content would be a problem for us. Though all audiovisual technologies -- movies, radio, television, the net -- were first promoted as great educational tools, that's not how people used them; they used the technologies for entertainment and advertising, with violence and sex as ploys to grab our attention. Knowing that, our Luddites realized that kids would want to hog the computers playing endless, bandwidth-consuming games. They warned us that pornography would be an issue, and that we'd need to devote a lot of time to public meetings, hammering out internet use policies we and our users could agree on.
Our staff Luddites are the ones who keep telling gung ho administrators that machines don't do much good if you don't spend time and money training librarians and teachers how to use them, and if you don't hire somebody to maintain them. (Since that money could have been spent on hiring more librarians and teachers and giving them raises, they won't start out with warm fuzzy feelings about the machines).
Our Luddites pointed out that, by substituting educational CD-ROMs and videos for teachers, and giving kids direct Internet access to information, teachers and librarians were cut out of the loop. By failing to train teachers and librarians to know more about the machines than the kids did, school administrators devalued both. (Which kids would have understood in any case -- when school boards cut library budgets and lay off librarians, pay low salaries to teachers and librarians, and then spend lavishly to put computers on every desk, kids get the message about what matters in this world.)
Our staff Luddites foresaw how the book and the printed journal would be devalued; they recognized early on that books and pre-1995 articles would vanish from the bibliographies of student research papers. They recognized that the new problem was not availability of information, but students' ability to evaluate and make sense of it. They're the ones who talked with teachers about how to counteract the effects on students' reasoning and writing and critical thinking skills when they moved from a linear-reasoning book culture to a collage-assembly hyperlinked culture.
Luddites look at events like the one Chicago is sponsoring right now, where everybody is expected to read the same book and talk about it, and say, "we should do that in our school or campus or library." Luddite librarians work with teachers to make sure there will be good, thought-provoking books available to support whatever topic has been assigned. They work together with teachers creating writing assignments, and teaching students to evaluate web sites and other information.
I'm not saying all Luddites are right, mind you. Sometimes they guess wrong. And we all know some librarians whose resistance is based not on principle but on the devout hope that they can make it to retirement before they're forced to learn new ways of doing things.
I'm just saying that we need to pay attention to them because even when they're wrong, they warn us of misgivings our users will have. They have a stronger sense than gung ho futurists do of what's going to be lost when we adopt new technologies. Only when we understand the risks of new technologies can we plan ways to compensate for those losses.
So, cherish your Luddites. In fact, take a Luddite to lunch today, why don't you? And while you're at it, listen.
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COOL QUOTE
Nor do I do much library research these days, though once I haunted the stacks. Libraries have changed. They are no longer quiet, but rather noisy places where people gather to exchange murder mysteries. In bad weather homeless people exuding pungent odors doze at the reading tables. One stands in line to use computers, not a few down for the count, most with smeared and filthy screens, runnng on creaky software.
I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I'm a luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitious surprise through encounters with adjacent cards, information by chance that is different in kind from the computer's ramified but rigid order.
Annie Proulx. "Inspiration? Head Down the Back Road and Stop for the Yard Sales. In Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times.
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Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
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