ALAs and ALAck

Well, so much for blogging ALA. I listed The Letter Z on the ALA “Blogging Annual” wiki, implying that I would occasionally write something about my experiences there. Then I proceeded to write one goofy post that had very little to do with the conference, and now I haven’t written anything at all in two weeks. Just another example of the unreliability of wikis, I suppose.

But here is a post that is about that ALA Annual Conference, so the inclusion of this blog on the ALA list isn’t entirely untrue.

On my first day in D.C., I attended a day-long preconference session entitled “Libraries, Older Adults, and Technology,” which, aside from being very long, was excellent. It featured a wide variety of speakers, from researchers to practitioners to vendors, who presented a range of perspectives on the topic. While the whole session was remarkably interesting, there were two questions that came up several times throughout that I found particularly thought-provoking. The first is terminological: what do we mean when we talk about technology? And the second is normative: why is it important to help seniors with technology, and what should our goals be?
It was clear that what most presenters meant by technology was “computers” or “the Internet,” and occasionally — though usually in passing — “cell phones.” This is unsurprising, since these are the technologies that are newest and most visible. The only speaker who explicitly addressed the question was Courtney Deines-Jones, who began her presentation with a dictionary definition of technology, which I found really helpful. This isn’t it exactly, but it’s pretty close (from the Oxford American Dictionary): “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.” And this is a much broader definition that what we tend to ascribe to the term. And, in fact, her talk was mostly focused on how to make effective use of such practical applications of scientific knowledge as magnifying glasses, book carts, headphones, and lighting.

Why do we tend to invest the term technology with such a narrow meaning? I think that it has a great deal to do with the issue of invisibility brought up recently by Cathy Davidson in the HASTAC blog. Once technology is invisible we tend not to think of it as technology, and we forget about any criticisms we might have had when the technology was new. Deines-Jones reminded us that this may not be the best approach, and that we can pay attention to and rethink the way we use something like, say, a book cart.

We can also look critically at the very idea of technological adoption. How does this happen? What kind of effect does it have on us when we take technology for granted? And these questions are worth keeping in mind when we think about helping seniors with technology, especially since many seniors are less likely to have adopted, or be interested in adopting, unfamiliar technologies.

There are, of course, many good reasons to teach computers and the Internet (and maybe even cell phones) to seniors. Chief among these is the simple fact that important information is increasingly becoming available only in electronic form. Tax forms, health information, and job or volunteer applications are a few examples of important documents that now reside solely online. Plus, the Internet provides many informational advantages over traditional sources. And there is no reason to assume — as we usually do — that seniors are any less capable than anyone else of making use of new technologies.

That said, I’m not sure I agree that promoting and facilitating technological adoption is all sunshine and lollipops.

Helping seniors — or, really, just helping people — adapt to inevitable and uncontrollable technological change is often cast as an element of something called “lifelong learning,” which doesn’t sound all that bad, and which most libraries would probably claim is a large part of their reason for existence. Learning is good, right? And isn’t it good to learn throughout one’s life? But I think “lifelong learning” is one of those terms that sound pleasant and innocuous but which are used to refer to concepts that can be quite sinister, and which often have very little in common with the surface definitions of the words that describe them. Linguist Uwe Poerkson refers to these terms as “plastic words.” Orwell called this type of language “newspeak.”

Johannes Beck, in a 1999 conference keynote entitled “The Conditional Human,” suggests that lifelong learning

turns education into a form of positioning, an unending quest for relevance. Education no longer refers either to the acquiring of specific abilities or to an inner formation but to an unlimited and non-specific process.

Beck argues that this “scandalous” process, which follows the rule “circumstances are not to be adapted to people, but people to circumstances,” reduces human beings to “factors” who are coerced into perpetually reaching for an undefined goal that they can never attain. This “destruction of the human” facilitates an economy based on flexible, replaceable laborers.

Similarly, take the word “education,” the parent of lifelong learning. Most would consider education a positive and necessary part of learning and living a full life. But, as Aaron Falbel and others have argued, the word “education” is often used to describe something that has little to do with learning. The manipulative use of this term has been made most clear perhaps by Maoist “reeducation” camps, but its misuse is alive and well today. For example, the office of Surgeon General of the United States, the country’s “chief health educator” has been turned by the Bush administration into an office of political propaganda, according to Richard Carmona, who recently stepped down from that role.

So what should libraries do to help those who may not be interested in getting a reeducation? The answer proposed by most of the presenters at this preconference session seemed to be 1) convince them how important their reeducation is, and 2) help them to adapt as smoothly as possible. I think that in many cases this is the opposite of what they should be doing. Instead of accepting the forward march of technological change as an inevitable process that will leave all non-adherents in the dust, libraries can help people find alternatives. If Medicare Plan D is only available online, and people who need the information don’t want the Internet education that is otherwise required of them, why don’t we print it out and provide an alternative way of accessing it? I suspect that many librarians do this already, but perhaps out of a sense of exasperation with the people who just don’t get it. I think libraries should try to look at this instead as an important part of their role.

This session convinced me of the importance of providing technology education for those who want it. It also reinforced by belief in the importance of providing alternatives for those who don’t.