Monday
Nov072011
D. Aram Donabedian & John Carey - Pirates and Librarians: Big Media, Technology, and the Role of Liberal Education
November 7, 2011 Library Philosophy and Practice 2011
ISSN 1522-0222
D. Aram Donabedian
Hunter College Library
Hunter College, City University of New York
New York, NY
John Carey
Hunter Health Professions Library
Hunter College, City University of New York
New York, NY
Because the new processes of domination to which people react are
embedded in information flows, the building of autonomy has to rely
on reverse information flows.
—Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity
Introduction
In recent decades, advances in information technology have vastly increased the
channels by which librarians and educators can connect patrons or students with
relevant resources. Certainly, it is difficult for librarians today—whether in reference
or technical services—to imagine doing their jobs without access to online
databases, internet resources, cataloging or circulation software, and the many
other tools we now take for granted. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine contemporary
patrons voluntarily relinquishing the ability to search OPACs, export bibliographic
citations, retrieve full-text articles from thousands of journals, or contact a librarian
at all hours via e-mail, chat, or text messaging. These new information-seeking
habits of patrons drive libraries—and librarians—to keep up with new applications
of technology, whether by using blogs and social networking sites to help promote
the services we offer or by ensuring remote access to library resources on mobile
devices.
Given this centrality of technology to the evolving practice of contemporary
librarianship—especially academic librarianship—it is difficult to remember that not
all librarians welcomed the appearance of computers in libraries during the
transformative era of the 1990s. Yet if we agree with Ranganathan's most basic
principles that "books are for use" and that librarians should "save the time of the
reader," why would any librarian object to new tools that help connect more users
with more resources, more quickly than ever (Ranganathan, 1963)? Some,perhaps, felt threatened by the new skill sets required or the uncertainty of a
transitional period. However, this paper will argue that the deeper answer points to
a fundamental question of how librarians view our profession, its mission, and its
role in fostering the values essential to liberal education and democracy. The
technology that has enabled libraries to expand their roles has also led them to
depend increasingly upon powerful commercial publishers, even as governments
surrender more and more oversight to these corporate interests. Increasing
consolidation of major media channels—including sources of scholarly
communication—has allowed a shrinking number of corporations to control
distribution and access to the materials libraries offer, through licensing fees,
copyright restrictions, and digital rights management. If left unchecked, this trend
threatens to stifle access to the information students need to construct knowledge,
thereby undermining information literacy, critical pedagogy, and the development of
those critical thinking skills so crucial to the mission of liberal education.
I.
Critical Pedagogy and the Threat to Liberal Education
In order to understand how libraries arrived at this crossroads, it is instructive to
assess the traditionally agreed upon values of libraries and liberal education, and
to examine why some librarians felt those values to be under attack when
technology took a larger role in libraries. Within the larger world of higher
education, advocates for liberal education in the humanities argue that the critical
thinking skills engendered in these fields can fortify an open society against
domination by corporate or political elites. In her recently released book Why
Democracy Needs the Humanities, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that
"[a]s the critical thinking taught by the humanities is replaced by the unexamined
life of the job-seekers, our ability to argue rights and wrongs is silenced. In a
society of unreflective, undiscerning yes-men and yes-women, politics becomes
meaner and business can invite disasters such as the economic meltdown or the
BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico" (Allemang, 2010, p. F1). For Nussbaum, liberal
education imparts a sense of the importance of ethical values, empathy, and
community; without it people are isolated, unorganized, and susceptible to
manipulation by special interests. While other departments may focus more directly
on preparing students for specific professions, the humanities pursue a mission
that is at once less utilitarian but more broadly applicable. This is because,
according to Nussbaum, "[t]he first thing you get from the humanities, when they're
well taught, is critical thinking" (Allemang, 2010, p. F1). Instructors help students
develop their critical thinking skills through the practice of critical pedagogy.
Through critical pedagogy, information becomes knowledge that then informs
students' decisions in the wider world. What Harris calls "critical information
literacy" teaches students to "question the social, political, and economic forces
involved in the creation, transmission, reception, and use of information," ultimately
leading students to recognize "the complicity of the individual—and the individual
as a community member—in information-based power structures and struggles"
(Harris, 2009, p. 279). Professionally, the ACRL endorses this outcome in their
Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, where Standard
3 states that the "information literate student evaluates information and its sources
critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base or
value system" (ACRL, 2000, p. 11). This inclusion of a "value system" implies that
the authors of the ACRL standards expect students to apply these analytical skills
in public life. When they act on what they have learned, students can be said to
have developed a critical consciousness or agency. Ellis and Whatley describe
how, as library instruction programs have expanded since the late 1980s, "critical
thinking skills for students have been increasingly emphasized" (Ellis & Whatley
2008, p. 6). As the campus' most direct providers of information literacy, librarians
therefore have a vital role to play in the development of students into criticalagents.
Critical Consciousness
If critical pedagogy can lead to critical action, then information literacy takes on a
political dimension. As Harris puts it, "[w]hile some will be satisfied with the
recognition that social and political inequality exists between peoples, the being of
critical consciousness will also act in response to these findings" (Harris 2009, p.
281). It is this capacity for critical agency that threatens the agenda of elite
interests who seek to bend public opinion through the use of publicity and the
media. As Giroux writes, "[k]nowledge is increasingly controlled by a handful of
corporations and public relations firms and is systematically cleansed of any
complexity" (Giroux 2011, p. 42). Citing as example the distortions used to justify
the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Giroux argues that liberal education equips
people to challenge such narratives, and is therefore under attack by political and
corporate interests: "At a time when education is reduced to training workers and is
stripped of any civic ideals and critical practices, it becomes unfashionable for the
public to think critically" (Giroux, 2011, p. 42). This assault on critical thinking has
as its ultimate aim "a troubling form of infantilization and depoliticization" (p. 43),
seeking to undo the critical consciousness at the core of liberal education.
Michael Gorman, a former president of the American Library Association, sees this
same threat. Gorman notes the "sad irony that as American democracy has
reached its theoretical ideal [universal enfranchisement] . . . it is in danger because
of an increasingly ill-informed, easily manipulated, and apathetic electorate"
(Gorman, 2000, p. 160). Gorman sees information literacy as one remedy for our
"culture of sound bites," arguing that "[t]he best antidote to being conned by
television is a well-reasoned book, article, or other text" (p. 160). Some go even
further in linking critical information literacy and social praxis. Giroux, for example,
argues that critical pedagogy "opens up a space where students should be able to
come to terms with their own power as critical agents; it provides a sphere where
the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose of the
university, if not to democracy itself" (Giroux, 2007, p. 180). Goomansingh (2011)
also stresses the link between critical consciousness and agency, writing that
"[w]ithout critical engagement, there will be apathy for critical action which is
fundamental to the hope for democracy" (p. 46). Democracy is defined here as
"not a system of government" but more socially as "a way of life . . . that
empowers the people. . . . It's inclusive and it's empowering. And it starts the
conversation" (E. P. Morgan, recorded lecture at McNally Jackson Bookstore, New
York City, March 1, 2011, minute 1:08:40 seconds at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNIlpEgxckE). Indeed, and this conversation is
one of fundamental inquiry. For example, despite attempts by the right since the
Reagan presidency to characterize the 1960s as a time of excess and violence, it
was the values implicit in liberal education that gave the anti-war movement the
critical tools necessary to question U.S. involvement in the conflict. Through sit-ins
and teach-ins, establishment values and motives were questioned and
perspectives changed. The value given to critical exploration from within the
movement allowed its participants to see beyond the overriding narrative of
safeguarding "democracy" from communism and question U.S. foreign policy.
Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that librarians are helping to strengthen
democracy when we teach critical information literacy.
The Prophet
A more traditional, less politically engaged view stresses the moral, rather than the
political, dimension of humanities education. William H. Wisner sees librarians as
"defender[s] of the life of the mind," in a direct line from Aristotle to the present day
(Wisner, 1994, p. 131). Wisner is not alone in elevating librarians to the stature of
cultural caretakers; Gorman (2000) suggests that "library collections constitute thememory of humankind" (p. 161). Gorman makes this point as a way of
underscoring the importance of libraries to a healthy democracy, arguing that "a
developed democracy . . . depends on information, knowledge, and education"
(Gorman 2000, p. 160). Wisner begins by staking the same claim but arrives at a
different conclusion; for Wisner, liberal education is valuable not because it trains
students to critically engage in a democratic society but because it perpetuates the
"philosophical light of the West" and is a "defense of truth" (p. 131). According to
this view, libraries and universities were never broken and the mistake was in our
contemporary efforts to fix them with technology and diversification. Wisner rails
against the cultural relativism of the postmodern "overspecialized" university, in
which "the professionalization of the . . . humanities has well nigh destroyed them
spiritually" (p. 131). The biggest threat for Wisner, however, comes from
technology, which he fears is corrupting the traditional mission of libraries. "It is as
increasingly lonely defenders that we [librarians] should see ourselves," he writes,
"unmoored and alienated in a culture impatient to replace the written word with the
computerized image, a society recklessly abandoning the Logos for the LAN" (p.
131). Writing at a time when computers had just begun to appear in libraries,
Wisner condemns a world in which librarians must become "information
specialists" and students visit the library only to check their e-mail.
Today, Wisner's rejection of technology—along with his refusal to recognize
academic specialties outside the Western canon—seems increasingly problematic
and dated. Indeed, some of the formats that he felt so threatened by, like CDROMs, have come and gone. As one respondent noted, Wisner's article is "based
on beliefs that may be unfounded—certainly they are unsupported by evidence—
and on assumptions that not everyone shares" (Fine, 1994, p. 138). However,
despite all the exaggeration and denial, Fine nevertheless finds a kernel of validity
in Wisner's manifesto; perhaps, she notes, Wisner's resistance is not "to
technology itself" but to "the tyranny of technological change" (p. 139). In other
words, Wisner would certainly face a challenge persuading librarians today that
computers and the Internet have actually impeded the teaching of information
literacy; however, contemporary librarians may find that any tyranny in evidence
comes not from the tools that we all use on a daily basis, but rather from the issue
of who provides those tools and who controls access to the content that they make
available. Fine sympathetically likens Wisner to "a prophet of old, with fervent eyes
and a forceful voice, forewarning us of the dangers ahead" (p. 138). An
examination of the current state of scholarly communications reveals that this
prophet, while wrong about the particulars, may have been more prescient than
even he realized.
Media Consolidation and Scholarly Publishing
The Crisis of Scholarly Communications
Academic libraries today find themselves caught in a cycle of escalating journal
prices and declining, or at best stagnant, budgets. Whether one chooses to refer to
the current situation as a "crisis in scholarly publishing" (Helfer, 2004, p. 27), as a
serials or journals crisis, or more broadly as a "library crisis" (Quandt, 2003, p.
351), the end result is that many libraries are paying more and more for access to
fewer and fewer journals, with correspondingly fewer resources available for
acquisition of other materials. The roots of this crisis extend back several decades;
as Pfund (2004) notes, "As long ago as the mid-1970s, academic publishers were
bemoaning the crisis in scholarly publishing. Of late, however, rhetoric has become
reality" (p. 27). Writing from a producer's perspective (as a then-vice president at
Oxford University Press), Pfund notes that overall sales in the industry declined
steadily in 2001, 2002, and 2003, especially in the humanities and social sciences.
This failure to generate profit may be inseparable from the nature of the academic
publishing industry. As Davidson (2003) notes, "The bottom line is that scholarly
publishing isn't financially feasible as a business model—never was, never wasintended to be, and should not be. . . . Without a subsidy of one kind or another,
scholarly publishing cannot exist" (p. B7). She notes that the mainstay of such
publishing has always been the university press.
However, university presses are far from the only producers involved in scholarly
communications. Lawal (2001) traces the course of events that first attracted
commercial publishers to academic content. Following the Second World War, the
American effort to become the world's foremost scientific power led the United
States government to put an unprecedented amount of federal funds into scientific
research and development projects, spurring a boom in related journals. By the
1970s, Lawal notes, scientific and technical journals showed "remarkable" growth,
and "[c]ommercial publishers saw the opportunities for scientific publishing.
Extending scholarly publishing to commercial publishers also meant that authors
turned over the rights to their works, hence sowing the seeds of the current crisis"
(p. 137). Velterop and Goodman (2003) second this point in blunt language: "STM
[scientific, technical, and medical] publishing is a gold mine for the publishers who
acquire the material for virtually nothing and make $5,000 per article" (p. 73).
Scientific journals thus led the way into a new publishing business model, one that
recast scholarly communications as a commodity often supported by public
funding, produced free of charge by researchers who ask only to be published, and
yet available for sale by a commercial entity.
University presses, association publishers, and scholarly societies are now left to
compete in an environment for which they were never intended. Compounding the
difficulty is the consolidation taking place in the commercial publishing industry.
Lawal (2001) discusses a study commissioned by the Department of Justice
Antitrust Division which concluded that—with regard to the academic journals
market—"publishers' mergers of relatively modest size can cause competitive
harm" (p. 138). As these mergers continue, content becomes concentrated in the
hands of a few large houses. Quandt's (2003) assertion that these publishers are
now in a position to "reap monopoly profits" (p. 352) seems borne out by events.
Helfer (2004) quotes the following statement issued in November of 2003 by the
Cornell University Libraries:
[T]he top research libraries in North America have been spending
ever more money on ever fewer publications for at least the past 15
years: The prices of serials have increased by 215 percent, library
expenditures on serials have gone up by 210 percent, and the serials
titles purchased by large academic research libraries have decreased
by 5 percent. The Consumer Price Index during the same period has
increased by only 62 percent. (p. 27)
Simply cancelling subscriptions to certain journals does not help; as Helfer (2004)
notes, one of Cornell University's complaints centered around the fact that
"Elsevier has priced its journals in such a way that, if a library cancels anything it
is currently subscribing to, the pricing of the individual journals the library keeps
increases substantially" (p. 29). The fact that publishers can so overtly detach
pricing from traditional notions of customer satisfaction or desirability underscores
how thoroughly mergers within the industry have suppressed any conventional
mechanism of competition.
Quality and Price: A Question of Culture
Even more surprising is one researcher's finding that the high prices that
commercial publishers charge for their journals does not necessarily reflect any
superior quality—at least, if one measures quality by a journal's impact factor
(Bergstrom, 2001). Willinsky notes that as giants such as Reed Elsevier, Taylor
and Francis, and Springer merge with smaller publishers and acquire their
journals, these acquisitions are consistently associated with an average price
increase of more than 20% for each journal (Willinsky, 2006, p. 18). Yet, in theInstitute for Scientific Information's list of—for instance—the 20 most influential
economics journals (ranked by impact factor), titles owned by commercial
publishers occupied only five places; the other fifteen went to journals published by
nonprofit ventures such as professional associations or scholarly societies
(Bergstrom, cited in Willinsky 2006, pp. 19–20). This begs the question of how,
especially in the face of a sophisticated community of readers and consumers, any
such market could sustain itself. Or, as Willinsky succinctly asks, "How, in this
world of consumer savvy, can you sell a product that is more than nine times as
expensive as an equally good if not better alternative?" (p. 20).
The answer comes, in part, from within academic culture itself. As journal
publishers charge more and more each year, some customers cancel subscriptions
due to the increased prices; this causes a pricing spiral, so that a dwindling
number of subscribers are forced to pay the journal's operating expenses. As
Willinsky notes, this process does not describe the free actions of informed
consumers; rather, this model works "only if the consumer is blind to price
differences and is interested only in acquiring a wide range of top-ranked
products" (Willinsky, 2006, p. 20). For professional reasons, faculty members need
access to the most influential journals in their field, regardless of the cost. In
essence, the commercial publishers are exploiting a difference in priorities
between the library and other academic departments—namely, that faculty "run on
a different journal economy than the library, one that is determined by the
scramble among them for greater research impact" (Willinsky, 2006, p. 21). As
long as tenure and promotion within academia are based on scholarly productivity,
faculty will strive to read—and publish in—the highest impact journals that they
can; universities must supply these resources or risk losing instructors to
competing institutions. Thus, in order to accommodate one of its core user groups,
the academic library must surrender whatever leverage it may have had left in its
dealings with the few remaining publishing concerns.
Open Access
To regain some of this leverage, libraries and universities are investigating ways to
maintain or even increase access to scholarly communications while controlling or
reducing costs. New developments in digital publishing and collaborative
technologies often drive these efforts. Two of the most promising areas in this
regard have been the rise of open-access journals and the related emergence of
institutional repositories.
Open Access Publishing: Definitions and Missions
According to longtime open access advocate Peter Suber, open access publishing
is "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions" (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm). A more detailed
definition was promulgated by the Bethesda Statement on Open Access
Publishing. Formulated by a group of participants drawn from the academic,
research, and library spheres
(http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm#participants) and released in
June of 2003, the Bethesda Statement declares that an open access publication
must meet the following two conditions:
The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free,
irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to
copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to
make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any
responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship . . .
as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their
personal use.A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials,
including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable
standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial
publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an
academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other
well-established organization that seeks to enable open access,
unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving. . . .
Of course, even paperless publishing requires funding, which in the case of open
access usually comes in the form of author fees. These fees often run into the
thousands of dollars for a single article. The online Public Library of Science, for
example, charges authors on a sliding scale by discipline when publishing in its
journals, with prices ranging from $1,250 to $2,750
(http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.html); however, it also offers full or partial
wavers to authors unable to pay—for instance, researchers in developing countries
or at non-elite institutions. Researchers from better-resourced institutions may
often have access to grants or other funding to offset this fee.
Open Repositories
Accompanying the rise of open access publishing has been the emergence of
open archives—the online repositories referred to in the Bethesda Statement,
usually affiliated with academic institutions or scholarly societies. After all, as
Helfer (2004) points out, "faculty are both the producer and consumer of scholarly
information" (p. 32); therefore, why hand research over to commercial publishers
who then sell it back to universities for a profit? In this effort to gain back ground
lost to commercial publishers, universities, scholars, and libraries are forming new
alliances. As Eaton, MacEwan, and Potter (2004) emphasize, "university libraries
and university presses have a shared stake in the future of scholarly
communication" (p. 216). In a discussion of joint projects between the libraries and
the university press at Pennsylvania State University, they identify three areas
targeted for long-term cooperation: "Press use of electronic repositories hosted on
the libraries' servers and network. . . . Digitization and joint access via the libraries'
e-repositories . . . and . . . Online e-journals, a three-way partnership between
faculty, the press, and the libraries" (p. 219). Such partnerships could help
universities regain control over the dissemination of research while serving the
academic community as well or better than traditional journals. As Misek (2004)
points out, through the "share and share alike" (p. 38) approach of open access,
these repositories can provide faster, cheaper communication of research findings.
If it is true that "the power is in the hands of those who control the content"
(Boettcher 2006), then open archives could represent a way for academic libraries
and universities to increase their leverage in the scholarly publishing market.
Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information argues that open archives
"are now clearly and broadly being recognized as essential infrastructure for
scholarship in the digital world" (Lynch, 2005). Three open access mandates
passed in early 2008 bear out Lynch's claim. By that time, numerous public
initiatives in support of open access had already appeared. In addition to the
aforementioned Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the year 2003
also saw the Association of Research Libraries Principles and Strategies for the
Reform of Scholarly Communication, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, and the United Nations World Summit
on the Information Society Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action (ARL,
2007). In 2004, the nonprofit Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and
Development persuaded more than thirty nations to sign its Declaration on Access
to Research Data from Public Funding, an effort to broaden international access to
publicly funded research (ARL, 2007). However, the open access movement
solidified its momentum when within the first two months of 2008, Harvard
University, the European Research Council (ERC), and—with Congressionalauthorization—the National Institutes of Health (NIH), all passed initiatives
mandating that works financed under their auspices be published in digital
repositories affiliated with those institutions. Thus, scholars are turning to open
access as a way of reclaiming for themselves leverage that had been lost to an
increasingly profit-driven academic publishing industry, reversing the long-standing
trend noted by Lawal (2001) toward giving commercial publishers the rights to their
works.
II.
Corporate Control of Distribution
Stepping back from the consolidation within academic and commercial publishing
discussed above, let us now consider the wider consolidation of the media industry
as a whole. Bagdikian in his The New Media Monopoly (2004) states "[f]ive globaldimension firms, operating with many of the characteristics of a cartel, own most of
the newspapers, magazines, book publishers, motion picture studios, and radio
and television stations in the United States. Each medium they own, whether
magazines or broadcast stations, covers the entire country, and the owners prefer
stories and programs that can be used everywhere and anywhere. . . . Their
strategy has been to have major holdings in all the media, from newspapers to
movie studios. This gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more
communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history"
(Bagdikian, 2004, p. 3). Moreover, this power extends to the selection of network
commentators, the lobbying for legislation and regulation, and the buying of
political influence through election contributions and donations to political parties
(Bagdikian, pp. 25-26). Because of the influence peddling and media manipulation
detailed above the believing public is at serious risk of acting against its best
interests. One organization, Project Censored, is determined to change the
situation by creating dialog in the press and providing access to hitherto unknown
information.
Project Censored defines "modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and
sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. . . . Such
manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and
powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal
pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and
institutions)" (http://www.projectcensored.org/censorship/). According to Mickey
Huff, Associate Professor of history and social science at Diablo Valley Junior
College, and associate director of Project Censored, such manipulation has led to
"a literal truth emergency" (http://home.sevenstories.com/index.php/news/mickey-zinterviews-mickey-huff-on-project-censored/). Huff extends this view to include "an
international truth emergency, now in evidence . . . the result of fraudulent
elections, compromised 9/11 investigations, illegal preemptive wars, and continued
top down corporate media propaganda across the spectrum on public issues"
This is of concern, Huff argues, because "the health of any democracy can be
diagnosed by the degree to which information flows freely in the culture. Anything
that interferes with that free flow of information is a form of censorship, which acts
to derail, distort, and deny the efficacy of any true democratic experiment"
(http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2010/01/23/media-democracy-in-actionthe-importance-of-including-truth-emergency-inside-the-progressive-mediareform-movement/). That interference may also be packaged as entertainment,
further misleading the public with a flood of amusements that capture its attention
and also prevent matters of real community importance from reaching viewers.
Although entertained, the public is left wanting for good information, except for a
minority who venture outside of corporate channels to the countercultural media of
the small presses and the Internet.
Internet under Threat
In contrast to the controlled media's corporate fare, the Internet, although far from
non-commercial, remains at this writing a relatively uncontrolled outpost of shared
thought and information. Non-hierarchical, inclusive, informational and relational it
is, in its openness, Big Media's greatest fear. As long as the web is a forum where
Morgan's democratic conversations are free to question and challenge the
dominant narrative of endless growth and materialism, it represents perhaps the
greatest long-term threat to the military-industrial-academic complex: a counternarrative based, like the work done by libraries, on information sharing, needs
assessment and community building.
The Internet in this regard is an especially powerful tool when users network with
each other not only online but also face-to-face, in the street. The infrastructure of
the net "after all, simply amounts to the latest kind of community infrastructure, one
that . . . allows all people to be productive and prosperous, not merely those who
already have achieved that condition. In today's world . . . broadband is a
necessity, one that has fueled economic development, transformed
communications, fostered free speech, unlocked new services and innovations,
and engaged millions of people in civic participation" (Huff & Philips, 2010, p. 415).
Because the internet is all of these things and more, attempts to tame, control,
monopolize and profit from this revolutionary mode of exchange are in full swing.
The corporate players involved include powerful media interests who would like to
end net neutrality and see a tiered service model in its stead. In this scenario, the
commercial content provider would choose the type of content delivered and
determine the speed with which it loads. Heavy usage of bandwidth would come at
extra cost. This threatens to effectively create two classes of users, the information
rich and an impoverished underclass. Most at stake with regard to the future of
broadband is "that infrastructure's ability to offer people a platform to distribute
their own messages in an alternative manner to that of the dominant commercial
media" (Huff & Philips, 2010, p. 416). If these efforts to reroute the infrastructure of
the net are successful, users would lose this platform for civic participation.
A related threat comes from the issue of surveillance and self-censorship.
Although the right to privacy is guaranteed by the 4th Amendment to the
Constitution, and the Privacy of Act of 1974 served to strengthen this protection,
increasingly government measures have been taken to surveil the web since the
September 11, 2001 attacks. These changes have been justified in order to keep
the population and country safe from enemies of the "homeland." Although
surveillance is nothing new, "today's surveillance systems are much more
extensive and penetrating and are legitimized by permissive anti-terror legislation
that removes many previously operational constraints. They are also increasingly
operated and controlled not by the state but by private actors. As with just-in-time
blocking, surveillance . . . is . . . a very powerful force of information control and
can create a stifling climate of self-censorship" (Deibert et al., 2010, p. 9). Indeed,
"[w]ith respect to surveillance, the United States is believed to be among the most
aggressive countries in the world in terms of listening to online conversations"
(Deibert et al., 2010, p. 381). If citizens feel that their constitutional liberties have
been violated and that by sharing information they will be censured or, like First
Class Private Bradley Manning be imprisoned and reportedly tortured, the utility of
the net as an enabler of free speech and civic participation is called into deep
question.
As the United States continues to face economic decline, multiple and long-term
wars abroad, high unemployment and growing social unrest, it appears to be
positioning itself for a possible takedown of the Internet. Indeed, according to
proposed legislation, "if the President declares a 'cyber emergency,' the
Department of Homeland Security could issue mandatory orders and directives to
'critical infrastructure systems'" (Zittrain & Sauter, 2011). While there has beendebate over how such capabilities might be used, some internet freedom
advocates see it as another sign that the sharing of free thought and uncontrolled
information is under increasing threat.
Digital Rights Management and the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act
Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 at the
behest of publishers determined to recover their vanishing copyright profit streams
in a fast changing entertainment industry. With the signing of the act, it became
illegal to disable technological protection measures—encrypted audio files for
example—which are already chipped with Digital Rights Management (DRM)
software (Puckett, p. 13). This one-two combination of both DRM and DMCA also
limits what a listener might hear as the fair use exemption or non-profit use is ruled
out a priori. In section 107 of the copyright law, there are four factors to weigh in
determining fair use:
1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted
work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted
work
As Pucket has written, "[t]he combination of the DMCA and DRM can make a
crime out of an otherwise legal information use. '[O]ne must not only have a fair
use right to use the material but one must also have the permission to gain access
to the work to make a fair use of it in the first instance....It is as if the landowner is
allowed to...erect a locked gate across the public walkway or point of access
leading to the park or public space. Even if one 'sneaks' over the fence to make a
lawful 'fair use' of the land, the law will still see harm in the act of fence hopping'"
(Lipinsky 829-30 quoted in Puckett, 2009, p. 14). Thus, rather than simply
preventing illegal use, the DMCA and DRM also limit even fair use. Yet users have
found ways around DRM and, as we will see, the content industry has found such
barriers ineffective in preventing file-sharing.
Copyright/Copy Left
While copyright has been interpreted variously since 1787 when it was first
mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, there's no real arguing that these days it is one
more corporate mechanism of access control. The lengthening copyright coverage
granted the entertainment industries, new strictures against reproducing protected
material or the outright denial of its use are several ways in which copyright
protections have been tightened to profit the copyright holder (Boynton, 2004). In
turn, progress in science and the useful arts has been weakened as the commons
have grown bare. These changes can be seen in the growing cost of downloading
pictures, music and text in various formats. In contrast to those who might want
copyright control in perpetuity, a group of contrarians champion a different vision of
copyright. This group is comprised of
lawyers, scholars and activists who fear that bolstering copyright
protection in the name of foiling 'piracy' will have disastrous
consequences for society -- hindering the ability to experiment and
create and eroding our democratic freedoms. This group of
reformers, which Lawrence Lessig...calls the 'free culture movement,'
might also be thought of as the 'Copy Left'....What they...share is afear that the United States is becoming less free and ultimately less
creative. While the American copyright system was designed to
encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch
it. They see themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of
intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to turn copyright law
into a tool for hoarding ideas. (Boynton, 2004, p. 40)
The original idea behind copyright law was to reward the creator but after a
reasonable period of time allow for reuse in order to make the ideas and content
therein available for repurposing and invention. It is this notion that the Copy Left
group is working to recover.
Creative Commons
Copy Left's sharing-positive attitude towards intellectual property has been
strengthened significantly with the advent of Creative Commons licensing. A
statement on the Creative Commons website summarizes the aims, objectives and
results of the movement: "The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools
forge a balance inside the traditional 'all rights reserved' setting that copyright law
creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and
institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their
creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing
digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed,
and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law." Licensing can be
granted by the copyright holder either for "noncommercial use" or commercial. A
"noncommercial license option is an inventive tool designed to allow people to
maximize the distribution of their works while keeping control of the commercial
aspects of their copyright" (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ, viewed 3/29/11).
With the embrace of Creative Commons licensing, the value placed on immediate
profit is abandoned in favor of deep sharing and leaving the room necessary for
experimentation and creation. This innovation-friendly approach intersects with the
open access movement to liberate content from access control.
III.
The Fight against Access Control
In the face of the alarming price increases of information resources, the question
naturally arises, How much influence should the market wield? Clearly the
elimination of most competitors and the centralization of power by a small group of
publishing giants encourages price-fixing and correlates with the stratospheric rise
in library subscriptions in recent decades. This underscores the need for open
access to serve as a countervailing force in scholarly communications against the
commercial plundering of our library budgets.
Pirates and Librarians
Between Big Media interests and the growing supporters of open access stands
the librarian, who must engage and negotiate with them both. To the side in the
shadows is a third figure, who like the librarian also delivers information to the
public without charge at the point of delivery. This much misunderstood figure lives
outside the law and with a price on his head. Yet this robber, this "pirate" is closer
to the open access-supporting librarian in spirit than one might, at first, think. Both
are agents of liberation. Like the pirate, the open access librarian seeks to do
away with the pay wall and liberate the information that has been, for many years,
hoarded by the few. However, while the librarian works through channelssanctioned by society, the pirate is willing to go further to separate content from its
proprietors. Through channels such as torrent sites that undermine conventional
notions of ownership, the pirate is prepared to give the user what libraries and
publishers can't or won't. In addition to other media, this now includes an active
market for textbooks.
As we shall see below, over most of the globe, piracy has been the means to
address the systemic failure of affordable access. In 2011 the Social Science
Research Council released a groundbreaking three-year study of media piracy in
emerging economies and developing countries. The report notes that efforts to
defeat piracy have largely failed and that "the problem of piracy is better conceived
as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets"
(http://piracy.ssrc.org/about-the-report/). Moreover, "[t]he failure to ask broader
questions about the structural determinants of piracy and the larger purposes of
enforcement imposes intellectual, policy, and ultimately social costs" (Masnick,
2011). The report notes that despite enforcement efforts, piracy has in fact
increased in the past decade, due to "high media prices, low local incomes,
technological diffusion, and fast-changing consumer and cultural practices"
(Masnick, 2011). The SSRC also dispels the myth that media piracy is
systematically linked to organized crime, noting instead that "criminals can't
compete with free". In short, more open access to content would reduce motives
for piracy.
Will the content industry succeed in its monopolization of knowledge? It would if it
could, once and for all, lock information behind a pay wall and keep it from its
liberators. But since technology evolves and corporations cannot control the many
that would liberate and distribute knowledge irrespective of cupidity, it never will.
IV.
Conclusion
Liberal Education and Invisible Government
As demonstrated earlier, critical thinking skills are crucial for the development of an
informed citizenry capable of shaping the future and resisting political and
commercial manipulation.
In his seminal work Propaganda, Edward Bernays recognized that "manipulation of
the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in
democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country"
(Bernays, 1928, p. 9). Without the tools to analyze and contextualize the content
presented to us by competing narratives, we are all Nussbaum's undiscerning yesmen and women.
Indeed, Bernays presciently recognized that a population without critical
consciousness leaves itself vulnerable to the type of exploitation by authorities that
Nussbaum fears. The difference is that Bernays favored such an approach as the
only way of organizing what he saw as the "chaos" of modern life: "As civilization
has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been
increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and
developed by which opinion may be regimented" (Bernays 1928, p. 12). In fact, the
means of regimentation have grown exponentially since the time of Bernays'
writing; witness the manifold media messages, images, and incitements of our
contemporary media environment. We are not so much being sold product but a
fantasy and consumptive lifestyle where the images of the war dead do not intrude.
By contrast, the act of deep inquiry that is fundamental to liberal education enables
learners to look beyond the boundaries of a dominant media discourse andexamine its assumptions.
Liberal education, however, and the inquiry that it fosters are under threat. While
critical information literacy, as mentioned previously, has received more emphasis
in library instruction since the late 1980s, it has not changed the dominant
narrative on campus. The decreasing popularity of the liberal arts, the adoption of
the corporate model by academia, and the culture's embrace of business and
professional training reflect a significant shift in the perceived value and role of
education as a whole since the early part of that decade. Indeed, "[w]ithin
Universities…the language of education has been very widely replaced by the
language of the market, where lecturers deliver the product . . . where students
have become customers . . . where 'skill development' at Universities has surged
in importance to the derogation of the development of critical thought. (p. 9)" (Hill,
quoted in Goomansingh, 2011, p. 40). This growing corporatization of the academy
weakens and limits the democratic conversation that is vital to critical inquiry. As
the primary practitioners of critical information literacy, librarians can take a central
place in this conversation. As previously seen in examining the ACRL information
literacy standards, librarians can and should help students incorporate new
knowledge into their existing value systems, and Giroux and others have mapped
the process by which critical pedagogy leads to critical consciousness, so that
learners can apply their critical thinking skills in society. Restrictions on freedom of
inquiry, whether commercial or otherwise, jeopardize this mission.
The Way Forward
Wisner's sensitivity to the threat of technological change has been warranted when
we consider, as demonstrated above, the few commercial concerns that control
access to electronic content. Yet technology also offers librarians a way around
this obstacle. The open access movement opens up a space where the scholarly
community can organize together to assert their vision of a system in which
researchers are free to share and reuse knowledge. In fact, this type of organizing
and advocacy is essential if libraries are to not only reassert control over their
collections but also support liberal education—especially at non-elite institutions or
in developing countries. As Willinsky argues, "[h]ow do those who are interested in
seeing the university resist the powers of the state or the economy imagine that
such resistance can take place as long as they are so little interested in making
available the . . . basis of that resistance to anyone who lives and works outside of
. . . the small circle of well-endowed universities?" (2006, p. 148). Thus, despite
the often grim fiscal constraints libraries now face, online collaborative technologies
and open access offer librarians an unheralded opportunity to create a more
inclusive scholarly community.
Librarians today find themselves operating between a content industry inherited
from the past and a more fluid model of scholarly communication that is still
forming. As we strive to ensure that we have leverage in shaping any emerging
system of scholarly communication, we must maintain a parallel focus on the role
the library can play in safeguarding and promoting freedom of access to
information. At stake are two competing visions of the future. In one direction
awaits a society in which liberal education helps to foster ethical values,
strengthen democracy, and build a sense of community. Down the other path,
however, lies an atomized society in which isolated individuals with poorly
developed critical agency fall prey to government and corporate manipulation,
competing against each other in an increasingly forbidding marketplace.
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