What's the place of futurists?

Predicting the future is easy. It’s trying to figure what’s going on now that’s hard.
Fritz Dresser

One of the more interesting characters in literature is Cassandra from Homer's Illiad. She was a Trojan woman so babe-i-licious that the god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. But when Cassie told horny Apollo to get lost, he put a little curse on her: While her predictions would be dead on, nobody, but nobody would believe them. Which turned out not to be a wise move by the Trojans, as you know.

I thought about Cassandra reflecting on a comment to my post Dangerously irrelevant libraries. Michael Doyle eloquently responded:

Futurists are charlatans, and they know it, we know it, but it's fun to gaze into crystal balls, so we play the game.

Like fortune tellers and seers, they state the obvious in deep and mysterious ways, which is not hard, since the future is (in our heads, anyway) deep and mysterious.

Scott McLeod [whose futuristic comments about libraries lead to the comment] has a nice side job stirring folks up. So long as he doesn't get swallowed up in his own hype, he performs a necessary service, and he performs it well.

Any man who believes "we are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet" then proceeds to predict the future anyway gives me pause. (I think the quote was Karl Fisch's, and to be fair, it was originally meant for a school presentation where hyperbole is encouraged.)

The last question posed (#9: "There is no conceivable future....") either reflects brilliant tongue-in-cheekiness, or a lack of imagination.

We are human. We eat. We breath. We poop and we pee, We play to make more of us. We get old. We die. We will always need food, and food will remain tied to the sun, the the earth, to the air.

The recent shift in ownership in this country is frightening; the unemployment rate is not just an accident of economics. We cannot educate ourselves out of replacing people with machines.

The McLeod's of our culture have found themselves a nice niche. If we ever took the time to deeply look at any of the questions posed above, we might have a wonderful discussion about what it means to be human, what it means to use a tool, what it means to place value on things ultimately useless.

Those kinds of discussions are not glittery enough to hold our attention, and we would not like the conclusions if we could sit still long enough to think them through. We've become more magpie than human.

I enjoy your blog because it encourages the kind of reflection shunned by so many other blogs. Posing a list of McLeodisms jars the reader seeking BlueSkunkisms, but it's a good reminder of what many of the tech elite believe.

Since I often play the role of futurist/charlatan in my own talks, Michael's strong words made me pause. What impact does predicting, warning, excoriating, and building dread or hope in teachers and librarians really have in how we actually act?

By describing the future are we creating a better future ... or is it just a coping mechanism for dealing with the present? Do we do a disservice to ourselves by not fully processing the implications of future trends and putting perspective to them?

Michael, thank you for your comments. You've give me deep pause.

By the way, Cassandra came to a rather bad end. She was raped, lost the power of prophecy, was taken to Greece as a war prize, and was promptly whacked with an axe by a jealous wife (as I remember). Perhaps futurists have never been all that popular.

Cassandra warns the Trojans. Engraving by Bernard Picart (1673-1733)
Online Source: http://hsa.brown.edu/maicar/Cassandra.html

Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs...

Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs
Blockin' up the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign - Five Man Electrical Band

I walk into too many libraries with signs like this:

What might happen if we replaced our welcome signs with ones like these?

Where would kids learn best?

OK, let me have it.

Dangerously irrelevant libraries

My friend Scott McLeod at the Dangerously Irrelevant blog posts a list of hard questions about books, libraries and librarians in "10 questions about books, librarians, and schools." He's been using these questions as the foundation of some (very good) keynotes given at library conferences, including one here in Minnesota.

Now I don't normally cut and past large blocks of other folks' blog posts, but I'm going to do so now. His full post ought to be read, however.

Two things: First it's incredibly important we have people like Scott from outside our profession giving us attention and asking us to think. (Gary Harzell has done a great favor to us this way in the past - and continues to do so.) We tend to be a professional echo chamber in our journals, blogs and conferences. That critical eye from the non-librarian can be one of our best learning tools, albeit sometimes an uncomfortable one to use.

Second, how we respond to folks like Scott says a lot about us. Can we explain our values and mission and realities without sounding defensive, self-serving or reactionary? Read the responses to Scott's post, put on your classroom teacher, principal, or parent hat and evaluate!

Random questions

1. What constitutes a “book” these days? When books become electronic and thus become searchable, hyperlinkable, more accessible to readers with disabilities, and able to embed audio, video, and interactive maps and graphics, at what point do they stop becoming “books” and start becoming something else?
2. The Amazon Kindle e-reader currently allows you to annotate an electronic book passage with highlights and your own personal notes. Those annotations are even available to you on the Web, not just on the Kindle device itself. As Seth Godin notes, there hopefully will be a day when you will be able to share those notes with others. You’ll also be able to push a button on your e-reader and see everyone else’s notes and highlights on the same passage. What kind of new learning capabilities will that enable for us?
3. If students and teachers now can be active content creators and producers, not just passive information recipients, doesn’t that redefine our entire notion of what it means to be information literate and media fluent? Are our librarians and classroom teachers doing enough to help students master these new literacies (for example, by focusing on student content creation, not just information consumption and/or interpretation)?
4. The Cushing Academy boarding school in Massachusetts may be the first school in the country to have its library go completely electronic. In addition to using library computers, students now check out Kindles loaded with books. How tough would it be for other schools to move to this model (and what would they gain or lose as a result)?
5. When books, magazines, newspapers, reference materials, music, movies, and other traditional library content all go electronic and online - deliverable on demand - what does that mean for the future of the physical spaces known as “libraries?” Mike Eisenberg said to me that we already should be taking yellow caution tape and blocking off the entire non-fiction and reference sections of our libraries. As content becomes digital and no longer needs to be stored on a shelf, with what do we replace that now-unused floor space: couches, tables, and cozy chairs? computer stations? meeting space? And if we head in these directions, what will distinguish libraries from other institutions such as coffee shops, community centers, and Internet cafes?
6. Our information landscape is more complex than ever before. We still need people who know how to effectively navigate these intricate electronic environments and who can teach others to do so. But does that mean we still need “librarians” who work in “libraries?” Or will their jobs morph into something else?
7. How much of a librarian’s current job could be done by someone in a different location (for example, someone in India who answers questions via telephone or synchronous chat) or by computer software and/or an electronic kiosk? I don’t know the answer to this question - and I suspect that it will vary by librarian - but I do know that many individuals in other industries have been quite dismayed to find that large portions of their supposedly-indispensable jobs can be outsourced or replaced by software (which, of course, means that fewer people are needed locally to do whatever work requires the face-to-face presence of a live human being).
8. Can a librarian recommend books better than online user communities and/or database-driven book recommendation engines? For example, can a librarian’s ability to recommend reading of interest surpass that of a database like Amazon’s that aggregates purchasing behavior or a dedicated user community that is passionate about (and maybe rates/reviews) science fiction books, and then do so for romance, political history, manga, self-help, and every other possible niche of literature too?
9. If school librarians aren’t actively and explicitly modeling powerful uses of digital technologies and social media themselves and also supporting students to do the same, should they get to keep their jobs? And if they are doing so individually (which is what we want), what’s their responsibility to police the profession (and lean on those librarians who aren’t)?
10. There is no conceivable future in which the primacy of printed text is not superceded by electronic text and media. If that future is not too far away (and may already be here), are administrators doing enough to transition their schools, libraries, and librarians / media specialists into a new paradigm?