10 College & Research Libraries January 2000

The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age

Charles Martell

Four profound historical discontinuities—time and space, mind and body, real and virtual, and humans and technology—are reaching critical thresholds as we enter the twenty-first century. Existing within multiple environments (technological, social, and cultural), these discontinuities are seldom acknowledged, but their influence on the future of our insti­ tutions is incalculable. An awareness of them will assist librarians in (1) creating a new virtual space for libraries as physical space becomes less important, (2) adapting to states of disembodiment caused by roles deeply embedded in virtual environments, and (3) developing the new value-added services necessary for survival in this millennium. The dis­ cussion of these historical discontinuities will continue in the March is­ sue of C&RL, in which they are related to new ways of being and think­ ing about the future of librarians and libraries.

he Age of Enlightenment lives The Digital Age people must know on.1 Reason as employed by sci­ something. Maybe they know that ages ence and the idea of indefinite come and go. Maybe they also know progress are two of the build­ that overuse and misuse have rendered ing blocks of the Enlightenment. There the term age relatively meaningless. In have been other “ages”; some no longer the twentieth century, we became mas­ seem relevant. Whatever happened to the ters at manipulating language and ad­ Atomic Age or the Space Age, for example? justing its symbolic value. Accuracy of The first and second Industrial Ages are meaning is no longer an indicator of among the most frequently cited. The In­ appeal. Television has helped. Today, formation Age has been around since the an age may not last as long as a popu­ early 1960s. The Knowledge Age had a lar TV series. Years ago, we tried to brief appearance, but the realities of war keep our ages separate. They did not and despotism in the twentieth century seem to run concurrently. Has the Digi­ may have made it difficult for knowledge tal Age superceded the Information to win out over information. At least in­ Age? Perhaps the Information Age can formation seems to have held the age field be promoted to a revolution, thereby against television, although it was prob­ making room for the Digital Age. No ably a close call. Knowledge has lost out redundancy allowed. Our minds are in librarianship as well. Instead, bits and clear again. At least this author’s mind bytes have the upper hand. is.

Charles Martell is a Librarian at California State University, Sacramento; e-mail: [email protected].

10 The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 11

The death of Immanuel Kant, in 1804, by initiating a questioning of assumptions may have marked the end of the Age of and purposes.”9 These authors’ indict­ Enlightenment, but many of the ments of, and challenges to, the profession Enlightenment’s principles still guide the have gone largely unanswered.10 This actions of people today.2 For example, the serves to reinforce the accuracy of their influence of the sciences grew dramati­ observation that the profession lacks a vi­ cally in the 1800s, although the discovery able intellectual foundation.11 of the irrational has been cited as the most This author likes the ideals of the En­ singular feature of the century.3 Rejection lightenment but would blend the sciences of realism and exploration of the uncon­ and the humanities, rather than favor the scious were notable themes in the arts. former over the latter. Edward O. Wilson The idea of unlimited progress may have uses the word “consilience” to describe this worked in the first Industrial Age, but union.12 By mid-twentieth century, ac­ during the twentieth century its appeal cording to Wilson, hope for a unification has greatly diminished. Humanity’s rav­ of knowledge with the aid of science was ages against the natural environment and all but erased.13 The “failure to unify” wars of mass destruction influenced this pattern has been repeated throughout his­ shift in thinking. tory. The cause is simple. When we are unable to accept the values accompany­ The idea of unlimited progress may ing a particular event, we ignore them. have worked in the first Industrial Occasionally, we attempt other remedies. Age, but during the twentieth Sometimes the discontinuity is resolved century its appeal has greatly because the new value system is faulty diminished. and fades away. Sometimes the value sys­ tem changes or we change as time passes. Positivism flowed out of the Enlight­ What was formerly alien may become enment. Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, commonplace. first used the term to describe the exten­ The discontinuity or symmetry break­ sion of the scientific method to philoso­ ing can be of epic proportions. In Beyond phy.4 Auguste Comte narrowed the Geography, Frederick Turner found the term’s meaning by stating that the only heaven and earth, animals and humans, valid knowledge comes from science and body and soul discontinuities so typical that facts are “the only possible objects of of western civilizations missing from “the knowledge.”5 According to the Encyclo­ generative principles of archaic myths.”14 pedia of Philosophy, “positivism … denies These discontinuities are familiar themes the existence or intelligibility of forces or in literature. They can be illuminating as substances that go beyond facts and the Peter Hoeg demonstrates in a compari­ laws ascertained by science. It opposes son of the Inuit of Greenland and the any kind of metaphysics and, in general, Danes of Denmark. The heroine of Hoeg’s any procedure of investigation that is not novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow admires the reducible to scientific method.”6 Inuit “because of their ability to know, Some authors have suggested that posi­ without a shadow of a doubt, that life is tivism is the tacit philosophy of meaningful. Because of the way, in their librarianship.7 Gary P. Radford and John consciousness, they can live with the ten­ M. Budd questioned “a prevailing positiv­ sion between irreconcilable contradic­ ist orientation toward knowledge in order tions, without sinking into despair and to foreground different views of knowl­ without looking for a simplified solution. edge that have the potential of providing Because of their short, short path to ec­ alternative frames of reference from which stasy. Because they can meet a fellow hu­ to recreate the perceived reality of the li­ man being and see him for what he is, brary experience.”8 Budd’s goal is “to shift, without judging, their clarity not weak­ first thought, then discourse, then research, ened by prejudice.”15 12 College & Research Libraries January 2000

Commenting on the theme of discon­ J. O’Donnell argued that “oral commu­ tinuity in Charles Radding’s A World nication predisposes one toward collabo­ Made by Men: Cognition and Society, 400– ration and cooperation, writing is one- 1200 (Chapel Hill: University of North sided and puts new power in the hands Carolina Press, 1985), Morris Berman of the writer.”18 noted that “certain cognitive shifts can In the late fifteenth century, Filippo di occur in a civilization that are so profound Strata noted that the world had got along that there seems to be almost no mental perfectly well for six thousand years with­ continuity between one epoch and the out printing and had no need to change.19 next. This is not a question of one age The printing press and the Enlightenment having a different set of ideas from the went hand in hand, although centuries next, or even a different set of beliefs or elapsed before the book as it is now values. It is rather a total revolution in known made an appearance.20 Today’s perception, a whole shift in the way real­ libraries have their genesis in this pow­ ity presents itself to the eyeball and the erful union. Unfortunately, we are very brain. The shift from magic to science, likely to overlook the momentous and from a living world to a dead one, such negative impact of the invention of print­ as occurred during the Scientific Revolu­ ing on the world’s oral cultures. tion, is such a shift because there is, for It is not easy to adapt to a change that example, nothing an alchemist and a impacts our system of values. The conse­ chemist can meaningfully say to each quences can be profound. We may lose other.”16 sight of who we are. We may lose our The common view among librarians is sense of purpose and meaning. Soren that the changes in their profession are Kierkegaard wrote: “Be with what is so following an evolutionary, rather than a that what is to be may become.” In First revolutionary, pattern. From this perspec­ You Have to Row a Little Boat: Reflections on tive, relatively few adaptations will be Life and Living, Richard Bode responded required of them. However, this vision is to Kierkegaard: “It was sound advice, but too narrow. It overlooks fundamental dis­ before I could ‘be with what is,’ I had to locations occurring throughout the world. give up what was and could be no more— These will alter what it is to be human, and that, as my friend well knew, is a both conceptually and consciously. A new painful undertaking for which there is no ontology must be created and nurtured. known palliative.”21 Similar dislocations have been found in Holding on to ideals is good if what other stages of human history. Indeed, we hold on to is vital and valid. Far too two technologies—writing and print- often, however, we do not hold on at all. ing—were extremely destructive to the Values frequently become ghostlike, put values of earlier societies. on and taken off as if it were Halloween. Plato did not like the idea of writing. Worst of all, we have poor memories. Would it not destroy memory? Would the Plato was right. Even with libraries, it is mind not suffer? “This discovery of difficult to keep track. We hold on to mis­ yours will create forgetfulness in the leading values, meaningless values, and minds of those who learn to use it; they pseudo values. We know what we are will not exercise their memories, but, doing in the present but forget too quickly trusting in external, foreign marks, they the events of yesterday. We plan for the will not bring things to remembrance future based on today and with an ideal­ from within themselves.”17 Plato asked ized or flawed view of the past. Without the wrong questions. He assumed we an accurate knowledge of the past and its wanted to use our minds for the pur­ lessons, we will be unable to construct a poses he valued. Libraries are a replace­ full range of scenarios of potential future ment for Plato-type minds. After quot­ events. In Nineteen Eighty-Four George ing Socrates’ objections to writing, James Orwell’s “The Party” states: 22 The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 13

Who controls the past controls the exploring more extensively the context of future. Who controls the present our lives, personally and professionally, we controls the past. may begin to understand the nature of the path we must take toward a more enlight­ Do we need a philosophy? Budd and ened future. If we do not, it is OK:26 Radford think we do. But James Zwaldo does not; he believes “we’re confused and the future enough already.”23 Are we positivists? will be no less vast without us. Budd and Radford say we are. Accord­ ing to Michael K. Buckland, library sci­ Ekaterina Iosifova ence must satisfy the following criteria to qualify as a science: 24 This author uses a barometer to judge • The subject area and the phenom­ the value of the direction in which librar­ ena to be studied must be specified. ies are moving. Movement toward higher, • The basic descriptive concepts must life-enhancing values represents an in­ be clarified. crease in value-added services. Move­ • The fundamental quantitative laws ment toward lower, thing-enhancing val­ peculiar to the subject must be developed. ues represents a decrease in value-added • A theory able to relate a multiplic­ services. A downward movement creates ity of phenomena must be developed. an uncomfortable feeling. T.S. Eliot gave One could conclude that we are posi­ this barometer to us. Life, the highest tivists without a science. Postmodernists value, is at the top of the scale; informa­ would understand this contradiction. tion is at the bottom. This author has Contradiction was a symptom of life in taken the liberty to update Eliot by add­ the twentieth century. ing a new last line (in italics), believing that Eliot would approve of the logic: 27 The image(s) being formed will • Where is the Life we have lost in change constantly as new informa­ living? tion allows the reader to increase his • Where is the wisdom we have lost or her understanding and intuitive in knowledge? connection to issues that are con­ • Where is the knowledge we have founding, upsetting, and mind- lost in information? bending. • Where is the information we have lost in digits? Some of us are in the process of actively This author’s barometer indicates that constructing the digital library for the movement from information toward dig­ Digital Age. Bits and bytes will define us its will create a lower value-added ser­ in the future just as books and buildings vice for students and faculty. have defined us in the past.25 We are lost. The stage now is set for a viewing of Once again, we are placing our identity four extraordinary discontinuities. Each in things not in our expertise. We need to has been a subject for philosophers and remake ourselves to avoid becoming ob­ other thinkers throughout the centuries. solete. We need to create a range of ser­ Advances in computer science and biol­ vices unthinkable in the twentieth cen­ ogy provide added interest. The four tury, but mandatory in the twenty-first themes are time and space, mind and century, if we are to provide society with body, real and virtual, and humans and the value-added services it will need from technology. its professionals. No one can provide a picture of the fu­ The concept of the librarian has grown ture. This author can only offer pieces, but weak and brittle as we have stood in the the pieces are significant. Some readers shadow of the library. An old story, an ob­ may not have thought a lot about them, solete structure, and a valueless digit. By but other readers have. The method is re­ 14 College & Research Libraries January 2000 ductionist. The pieces are like those in a Time and Space puzzle, but the reader will have to shape Time them to his or her specific reality and val­ We often take time for granted. Time is a ues. It is hoped that the reader can use them subject for astrophysicists and the good to build something. He or she should think people in Teddington, England, who of the pieces as malleable. The image(s) maintain a cesium-beam atomic clock. being formed will change constantly as They adjust time for us. We do not have new information allows the reader to in­ to trouble ourselves. Oh yes, there is day­ crease his or her understanding and intui­ light savings time or its reverse and the tive connection to issues that are confound­ replacement of batteries or cells. The ing, upsetting, and mind-bending. Some author’s favorite way to relate to time is of the pieces will be colored by the man­ through observations of the sun and the ner of presentation and by what is included moon. or excluded in this discussion. This may Jeremy Rifkin does not take time for help the reader see patterns or relation­ granted. In Time Wars: The Primary Con­ ships not previously discovered. Person­ flict in Human History, he discusses the ally, the author does not yet have a picture human race’s primary time-allocating but, rather, an instinct or gut feeling. The devices: biotic rituals, astronomical cal­ author has a little bridge, a connection, for endars, clocks and schedules, and com­ linking things together. puter programs.29 “With the introduction In the continuation of this discussion of each new device, the human species in the March issue of CR&L, information has detached itself further from the bio­ from the four themes will be distilled in logical and physical rhythms of the order to consider new ways of being. A planet. We have journeyed from close section on libraries in the future will fol­ participation with the tempo of nature to low. In these sections, an effort will be near isolation with the earth’s rhythms.”30 made to show how traditional thinking Three Seconds of Eternity is a superb about libraries and traditional ways of book of photographs taken by Robert thinking generally may have to change. Doisneau in his hometown of Paris, Students and faculty are telling librarians France.31 He chose the title to reflect the things all the time. Many connect their elapsed time in which photographers live information needs to their lives. We do and in which their fame may be forever not see it. We do not hear them. We are secured if those three seconds are well creating and maintaining structures for spent. Three seconds would allow them, and we are frequently doing it from Doisneau or any photographer to take the inside out starting at the bottom of three hundred photographs at 1/100th of the barrel with information or digits. If a second per photograph. we open our minds as fully as possible Computers move beyond seconds to without preconceptions, perhaps we will nanoseconds. The time interval required do better. As the twenty-first century to snap one’s fingers is equivalent to 500 progresses, students and faculty will be million nanoseconds.32 How do we relate changing in ways that parallel our own mentally and psychologically to dimen­ changes, but to hear we will have to un­ sions of time that “lie between the dimen­ derstand a new language and to minimize sions of human experience: fractal dimen­ the filters and ideologies that language sions”?33 The answer is probably quite imposes on our understanding:28 simple. We cannot—at least, not yet. Rifkin calls the new time associative And the word, an umbilical cord rather than linear. “It is a stepchild of psy­ clinched like a noose chological consciousness, just as the con­ around the facts of life, lived or cept of linear time was a stepchild of his­ merely dreamed torical consciousness… Time loses the Liliana Ursu independent status it enjoyed during the The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 15 clock culture. Time is now a resource, not The word cyberspace was first used in a reference point.”34 William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. According to Scott Bukatman, “The Since then, the meaning of the term has digital, processed graphics of electronic been altered and most often is used to technology … produce a constant muta­ depict the Internet. Gibson’s vision is tion divorced from the metamorphoses of bold. His metaphor is powerful. It dwarfs human time and experience. The weak­ our common perceptions of the Internet. ened representational function of these His understanding of cyberspace was decorative and malleable images produce formed by reading reports from MIT com­ little sense of permanence, history, or puter labs and watching kids playing bodily investment at all… The screen op­ video games at the arcades on Granville erates as the frontier between the two re­ Street in Vancouver. “These kids clearly alities, physical and electronic. It is a space believed in the space these games pro­ without center or ground, and with only jected.”39 a vector-graphic simulation of perspective (too crisp, too perfect) to guide a human The chasm between his images of eye that has suddenly become distinct the future and the visions of the from its corporeality, its spatiality, its tem­ future as depicted in library litera­ porality, and its subjectivity.”35 ture is enormous. And this is This discontinuity with time is not a worrisome. recent phenomenon; however, the move beyond the dimensions of human expe­ Marie-Laure Ryan believes cyberspace rience is. But other factors are complicat­ became a compelling and enchanting ing the situation. Lance Olsen suggested “metaphorical space when the idea of that as we move into the realities of traveling information was replaced with cyberspace we “move from the realm of the idea of a traveling user.”40 Frances chronos to that of kairos, from a prosaic Cairncross confronted the same theme in geography registering realistic chronol­ The Death of Distance: How the Communi­ ogy, logic, and stability to a transcendent cation Revolution Will Change Our Lives.41 one registering fantastic timelessness, The concept of the traveling user paral­ alogic, and possibility.”3 6 How we adapt lels the popular imagery about the to the new time dimensions will influence Internet widely circulated in the media our workplace and the services and prod­ and library literature. In California, one ucts provided therein. Workplace consult­ surfs the Internet; in West Virginia, one ant John Kao has found that “design must mines it. The terminology may change accommodate the increasingly project- from state to state and nation to nation, oriented, temporal quality of work. The but the meaning is the same. We become idea of lifelong work, of going to a physi­ explorers and adventurers without mov­ cal location and doing one thing, is ing from our chairs. What moves? Our gone.”37 minds do. The image of cyberspace depicted by Space Gibson qualifies as a “specialized media­ tion” in Margot Lovejoy’s sense of the A graphic representation of data ab­ phrase: “We can only see the world by stracted from the banks of every forming a picture through various spe­ computer in the human system. cialized mediations … We now lack a con­ Unthinkable complexity. Lines of vincing vision.”42 light ranged in the nonspace of the Lovejoy’s reference to specialized me­ mind, clusters and constellations of diations strikes a responsive chord with data. Like city lights, receding …38 this author, who arrived at an intuitive and compelling, but only vaguely con­ William Gibson scious, image of cyberspace while read­ 16 College & Research Libraries January 2000 ing two books lent to him by his son dur­ the very technologies they operate so ing a trip together in the Italian Hill Coun­ masterfully. Ronald Schmitt suggested try a few summers ago. For brief moments that “if any pattern emerges from this author saw cyberspace—and under­ Gibson’s mythologizing of technology stood it. A bridge had formed, however and humans’ relationships with technol­ narrow. Coincidentally, both books, Vir­ ogy, it is the emphatic denial of the mecha­ tual Light and Idoru, were written by nistic image of humans in a technologi­ Gibson.43 Further reading about cal culture. The use of primitive mythic cyberspace dragged this author into a to­ entities and practices like ghosts, demons, tally unanticipated range of topics, in­ sacrifice, the shaman, etc. is clearly a cluding postmodernism, the space–time means by which Gibson can humanize continuum, possible worlds, virtual real­ these unhuman, cold, and impersonal ity, and many other themes that helped technological forces that increasingly form the substance of this article. This challenge the boundaries between the mental bridge has not grown wider, al­ corporeal and the mechanical.”47 though this author has used it frequently Outer space and inner space, psycho­ to revisit the images of cyberspace he once logical space and physical space, and experienced. The chasm between his im­ other space sets still interest us, along ages of the future and the visions of the with the more recent phenomenon of future as depicted in library literature is cyberspace. enormous. And this is worrisome. The In his article “Smooth Spaces and hope is that some of the information dis­ Rough-edged Places: The Hidden History cussed in this article will assist others in of Place,” Edward S. Casey states that in building their own mental constructs of the 1600s, “the idea of place was begin­ a different world. ning to disappear from philosophical and The culture emerging around the con­ scientific discourse.”48 It was replaced by cept of cyberspace recognizes that soci­ the idea of space. Some went even fur­ ety has, in Bukatman’s words, “passed ther and suffered the consequence. beyond the spatio-temporal experience of Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake its citizens.”44 Bukatman also has sug­ in 1600 for suggesting that there was “not gested that “in the context of cybernetic just infinite space but an infinite number disembodiment, rooted in nanoseconds of of worlds in such space.”49 According to time and imploded infinities of space, Casey, “it is difficult to deny some sig­ cyberspace addresses the overwhelming nificant connection between the demise need to reconstitute a phenomenal be­ of place as a viable philosophical category ing.”45 The dual themes of passing be­ and the rise of the alienated modern sub­ yond our everyday spatio-temporal ex­ ject. The alienation first articulated by periences and attempting to reconstitute Pascal and then codified and rationalized ourselves through the agency of by Kant is, I would suggest, an alienation cyberspace fascinate literary critics and from place at least as much as it is an alien­ others who believe that literature often ation from abiding metaphysical and re­ provides the narratives by which we dis­ ligious ideas and ideals.”50 Kant’s view cover ourselves. A recent book by Tho­ was that the “phenomenal self, the only mas Disch described the ways that science self we know, is radically unemplaced.”51 fiction has contributed to this process of For different reasons, Freud came to a discovery.46 similar conclusion: man is not a master Some of the characters inhabiting in his own house. He believed that the Gibson’s textual space and cyberspace traditional view of self as whole and un­ appear to be striving, almost paradoxi­ divided was undermined by the presence cally, perhaps subconsciously, to recon­ of an unconscious. nect themselves to a primitive self by sur­ So, humans are not supposed to be in mounting the demands made on them by place but, rather, in space. Displaced by The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 17

Kant. The public ignores Kant. Disembod­ ment as represented by Descartes’s cogito ied by Freud. The public uses what it was insufficient to ground human expe­ wants of Freud and discards the rest. The rience.53 If we do not have a unitary truth intellectual discoveries of Kant, Darwin, upon which to ground human experience, Freud, and Einstein, among others, made what do we have? This question becomes centuries-old metaphysical and religious critical to Merleau-Ponty in a postmodern beliefs obsolete. They destroyed the foun­ era when the reality of self is arrayed dations of the old, but the only reasonable against multiple selves and multiple re­ substitute seemed to be science itself, sci­ alities.54 In From Text to Hypertext, Silvio ence as de facto religion. This was unac­ Gaggi depicted the cogito as “both dis­ ceptable. So the public largely maintained persed and enlarged, not by a challenge its old beliefs, isolating them from objec­ of philosophy or theory, but by the tive fact and the clear view of reason, subject’s experience in a decentered net­ while simultaneously accepting science work that threatens to eclipse the ‘indi­ not as a substitute for religion but, rather, vidual’ subject that understands itself as in addition to the public’s other pre­ physically embodied and clearly localized science beliefs. Life became more compli­ in space and time.”55 cated, and alienation became a fact of life. Bukatman stated: “The duality be­ The aggregate impact of these tween mind and body is superseded in a discontinuities is unclear, but they have new formation that presents the mind as affected many people. Daily, millions of itself embodied. The body, here, exists only Americans stream into the offices of thera­ in phenomenological terms: it perceives pists. The reasons sometimes relate to the and it moves (a reductive and utopian very kinds of unresolved issues men­ version of Merleau-Ponty’s model of sub­ tioned above. Librarians are not exempt. ject-construction, which eliminates the Writers in the twentieth century have mortal limitations of a physical body). been very attentive. Many have com­ Through the construction of the computer mented on the absence of place as a con­ itself, there arises the possibility of a mind cept in scientific discourse, the absence independent of the biology of bodies, a of self, and the uncertainties surround­ mind released from the mortal limitations ing truth in mediated societies. of the flesh. Unlike the robot forms of the modernist era, wherein a mechanical Mind and Body body substituted for the organic, the in­ Major figures of the Enlightenment rec­ visible processes of cybernetic informa­ ognized that humans were displaced by tion circulation and electronic technology the empowerment of the mind. “Accord­ construct a body at once material and im­ ing to Saint-Simon, men now lived in a material—a fundamental oxymoron, per­ critical epoch because scientific progress, haps, of postmodernity.”56 by destroying theological and metaphysi­ Frederic Jameson was equally provoca­ cal doctrines, had eliminated the founda­ tive: “This latest mutation in space— tion of social organization of the Middle postmodern hyperspace—has finally suc­ Ages.”52 Saint-Simon was wrong. Science ceeded in transcending the capacities of destroyed the agrarian way of life, not the individual human body to locate it­ theology. Theology merely jettisoned its self, to organize its immediate surround­ previous claims to reason. Doctrines of ings perceptually, and cognitively to map faith were dusted off and re-crafted as its position in a mappable external world theology recreated itself. A simpler inter­ … this alarming disjunction point be­ pretation is that religion as a way of life, tween the body and its built environment not as dogma, always had the greatest … can itself stand as the symbol and ana­ appeal among the people. logue of that even sharper dilemma Maurice Merleau-Ponty maintained which is the incapacity of our minds, at that the unitary truth of the Enlighten­ least at present, to map the great global 18 College & Research Libraries January 2000 multinational and decentered communi­ ago] were modernist in spirit: Nearly all cational network in which we find our­ tried to describe the mind in terms of cen­ selves caught as individual subjects.”57 tralized structures and programmed The inner space of the human psychol­ rules. In contrast, today’s models often ogy no longer offers the same place of embrace a postmodern aesthetic of com­ refuge. Jacques Lacan and his followers plexity and decentering. Mainstream view the ego as an illusion. If there is no computer researchers no longer aspire to core self, what do we experience? The program intelligence into computers but answer is probably whatever we want “as expect intelligence to emerge from the the ‘I’ can be likened to something we interactions of small subprograms.”61 The create with smoke and mirrors.”58 A cen­ implication is that computers will create tral belief uniting many diverse thinkers their own intelligence. is that we construct our own reality. Each of us shifts the mirrors around for myriad The psychological consequences of reasons to deal with the environment sur­ being disembodied are likely to rounding us. become more severe as technological The dissolution of who we are has not innovations cause increased cultural happened abruptly. Television and other and societal fragmentation. media have been undermining us for years. “Television, video cassettes, video Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson tape record/players, video games and imagined further steps in the process of personal computers all form an encom­ evolution: “Humanity looks to me like a passing electronic system whose various magnificent beginning but not the last forms ‘interface’ to constitute an alterna­ word.”62 Would computer intelligence tive and absolute world that uniquely in­ qualify as the next word? In Blood Music, corporates the spectator/user in a spatially science fiction writer Greg Bear presented decentered, weakly temporalized and “the passage beyond the flesh—beyond quasi-disembodied state.”59 the human—as a significant and legiti­ The impact of television on society and mate evolutionary step. The human is not culture has been well documented. Its reified as an unchanging and finished negative features are odious, but the product; instead, the work is concerned smoke and mirrors wielded with the most exclusively with metamorphosis, subtlety and the power of a theology, a transformation, development, and evolu­ commercial theology, minimize the dis­ tion.”63 tractions and serve to protect the self from An example of this type of thinking in a dangerous realization. We authenticate the real world made its appearance at Paul ourselves via television. A recent publi­ Evan Peter’s 1992 LITA President’s Pro­ cation entitled Glued to the Set has a pro­ gram. One of the speakers was Hans vocative subtitle, The 60 Television Shows Moravec, a leading mobile roboticist from and Events That Made Us Who We Are To­ Carnegie-Mellon. A pioneer in artificial day. The dust jacket drives the point home intelligence, Moravec believed “an indi­ with the skill of a Rocky Horror Show: vidual brain could be entirely imported “Television is so much a part of us that into a computer program and supercopied. we breathe it like air. We also take it for The human body would become superflu­ granted. Yet its sitcoms, technie-thrillers ous. When the body died, the program and laugh tracks are the life blood of the could be housed in a robotic body, and the baby boom generation and the ongoing individual’s consciousness could live for­ cultural mindset of our nation.”60 Truth ever.”64 He also believed that “over time, is irrelevant in front of the tube. more compact and faster ways of using According to Sherry Turkle, “the com­ space and matter will be invented and putational models of mind that domi­ used to restructure the cyberspace, effec­ nated academic psychology [fifteen years tively increasing the amount of computa­ The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 19 tional spacetime per unit of physical ing of phenomenon in our experience of spacetime.”65 the world. Experts can explain anything Some take the idea of disembodiment in the objective world to us, yet we un­ rather lightly. Morris Berman does not. derstand our lives less and less. In short, He believed that we are alienated from we live in the postmodern world, where our bodies as a result of developments everything is possible and almost noth­ reaching back thousands of years. More­ ing is certain.”69 over, he was highly critical of the “West­ Sherry Turkle explored one of the con­ ern academic understanding, including sequences of a world in disorder: “When philosophy and anthropology as well as the individual loses confidence in his abil­ history … that the body has nothing to ity to understand the world around him, tell us, has no knowledge or ‘informa­ when he feels split between private and tion’; that for all practical purposes, it isn’t public identities, and when social ‘reci­ even there.”66 The prospects for a unifi­ pes’ no longer offer him a sense of mean­ cation of mind and body (reembodied or ing, he is apt to become an anxious con­ reconstituted) are not favorable at the sumer of reassurances about his ‘authen­ present time. The psychological conse­ tic’ subjectivity, his hidden ‘inner life,’ and quences of being disembodied are likely his deepest interpersonal experiences. to become more severe as technological People seem to respond to what Max innovations cause increased cultural and Weber described as the ‘world’s disen­ societal fragmentation. chantment’ by becoming fascinated with the mysteries of their interior alchemy.”70 Real and Virtual The phenomenon Turkle described In an article entitled “Back to Chaos,” may be observed most often when the sig­ Wilson wrote: “In his 1941 classic Man on nificance of social and cultural institutions His Nature, the British neurobiologist is questioned. More and more people Charles Sherrington spoke of the brain as seem to believe that our institutions lack an ‘enchanted loom,’ perpetually weav­ “any particular, transcendent validity.” ing a picture of the external world, tear­ This belief, one of the greatest of all her­ ing down and reweaving, inventing other esies according to Berman, may cause oth­ worlds, creating a miniature universe.”67 ers to deny, ignore, or remove the source Most people have a relatively fixed view of the criticism.71 Some people will seek of reality and their place within it. Chang­ new solutions. The postmodernists have ing cosmetics is one thing; changing our been successful in pointing out what is understanding of reality represents dan­ wrong. Problem identification is a crucial ger and threat. Historically, we have for­ first step in creating a new consciousness. tified ourselves against such intrusions. The postmodernists do not provide an­ Will we use the loom as we have in the swers, and they have been faulted for this. past, or will we use it differently? Will we The meaning of postmodernism itself has fortify ourselves? The brain may take a become nebulous and may merely mean second look at its body, a body irrelevant “fairly recent.”72 “Fairly recent” sounds in cyberspace. Jack G. Voller called this good. Nevertheless, comment on the slipping “the shackles of body and meaning of postmodernism is warranted time.”68 because many of the themes in this article Epic shifts are occurring. Vaclav Havel, reflect a postmodern perspective. president of the Czech Republic, ad­ Mohamed Zayani described post­ dressed this theme in a speech at Inde­ modernism’s core features as follows: pendence Hall on July 4, 1994. He said: “Broadly speaking, postmodernism sig­ “The world of our experiences seems cha­ nals a reaction against the very founda­ otic, disconnected, confusing. There ap­ tions of modernism. It entails, among pear to be no integrating forces, no uni­ other things, an undermining of positiv­ fied meaning, no true inner understand­ istic science, a challenge to objective 20 College & Research Libraries January 2000 knowledge and to rationality, an incredu­ happens to the information delivered lity towards meta-narratives as totalizing through television. Baudrillard said that discourses, a critique of absolute truths, “information devours its own content.”78 and a questioning of the possibility of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. seemed to agree: envisaging a unified history.”73 However, “The rise of the electronic media has modernism remains dominant as a politi­ drain[ed] content out of [political] cam­ cal and economic force. paigns.”79 Alvin Toffler broadened the Early Greek philosophers posed the impact: “The result of this image bom­ question, What is reality? And this ques­ bardment is the accelerated decay of old tion continues to intrigue us. In the twen­ images, a faster intellectual through-put, tieth century, television is most frequently and a new, profound sense of the imper­ cited as the major technological influence manence of knowledge itself.”80 distorting reality and replacing it with The simulation of reality as distinct something different. Every day, millions from its representation is becoming a of people are transported to a different major growth industry. Prospects for the reality in their own living rooms. The talk future are extraordinary. “In the story of shows and daily soap operas provide a constructing identity in the culture of life as meaningful to many people as their simulation, experiences on the Internet own. Jean Baudrillard described this type figure prominently, but these experiences of reality shift as a four-stage process. can only be understood as part of a larger First, the image is “the reflection of basic cultural context. That context is the story reality.” At this stage, we believe the im­ of the eroding boundaries between the age is a sign of the truth. Second, the im­ real and the virtual, the animate and the age “masks and perverts a basic reality.” inanimate, the unitary and the multiple Third, the image “masks the absence of a self, which is occurring both in advanced basic reality.” And fourth, the image scientific fields of research and in the pat­ “bears no relation to any reality whatever; terns of everyday life.”81 it is its own pure simulacrum.”74 The Internet, medicine, and military In his 1967 manifesto entitled Society offer examples of simulation and its im­ of the Spectacle, Guy Debord examined the pact. “immense accumulation of spectacles” in postindustrial societies.75 Particularly Internet noteworthy attributes of the spectacle are The Internet examples are taken from the loss of representational truth and “the Turkle’s Life on the Screen. Internet users implosion of the medium and the real in in multi-user domains (MUDs) frequently a sort of nebulous hyperreality.”76 If we think of their experiences in cyberspace hope to hold on to reality, what do we (or electronic space) as real. grasp? The media cannot be relied on. In An eleven-year-old girl who uses com­ Glued to the Set, Steven D. Spark observed puters regularly and belongs to a chat that one of the major ideologies emanat­ group in an MUD has “built a room she ing from the television set relates to free- calls a condo. It is beautifully furnished. dom—the freedom to acquire. Consum­ She has created magical jewelry and erism is the preeminent value; all else is makeup for her dressing table. When she secondary. “Shows which implicitly visits the condo, she invites her dampen the spirit of consumerism—say cyberfriends to join her there, she chats, tragedies—have less of a chance of mak­ orders a virtual pizza, and flirts.”82 ing it to television.”77 Corporate sponsors “When people can play at having dif­ want a happy viewer in order to increase ferent genders and different lives, it isn’t the likelihood of a positive response to surprising that for some this play has be­ their advertisements. come as real as what we conventionally As professionals who deal with infor­ think of as their lives, although for them mation daily, librarians might ask what this is no longer a valid distinction.”83 The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 21

A fifty-year-old Caltech graduate likens use of simulation in the training of pilots the Internet to “a brain, self-organizing, is well documented. Simulated training nobody controlling it, just growing up out has been extended to tanks. “The play­ of the connections that an infant makes, ers, who are tank commanders, operate sights to sounds, … people to experiences inside a mockup of the interior of a tank. … Sometimes I’ll be away from the Web Their view of the battlefield is a computer- for a week and a bunch of places that I generated display. But in a devilish mix know very well will have ‘found’ each of reality and virtuality, some command­ other. This is not an engineering problem. ers on Simnet are actually riding in real It’s a new kind of organism. Or a parallel tanks out on the desert, miles away. The world. No point to analyze it. No way you commanders on the tank simulators do could have built it by planning it.”84 not know if the tanks they see on their monitors are real or virtual.”89 Medicine The military asked the science fiction Rick Satava, a laparoscopic surgeon and writer Bruce Sterling to observe the De­ project manager with the Advanced Re­ fense Advanced Research Projects search Project Agency, said that “what we Agency’s Battle of 73 Easting. Using mid­ used to think of as blood and guts are just 1980s technology, a virtual war was con­ bits and bytes.”85 ducted via network links. “What one re­ In his article “Surgery in Cyberspace,” ally sees in ‘73 Easting’ is something new Gary Taubes reported that “researchers and very strange: a complete and utter across the country are pursuing a new tech­ triumph of chilling, analytic cybernetic nology in which a human surgeon ma­ rationality over chaotic, real-life, human nipulates surgical instruments that appear desperation.”90 Sterling believes the mili­ to extend into a three dimensional image tary wants to extend itself into the virtual of a patient’s body while computers per­ world. He expects requests for huge in­ fectly translate the surgeon’s movements creases in military expenditures—a round into the parallel actions of a machine [a of “cyberpork.”91 microrobot] wielding real surgical tools In an article entitled “Cyber-Deter­ inside a flesh-and-blood patient.”86 The rence,” James Der Derian described the surgeon is in virtual space and the digital battlefield of Desert Hammer VI microrobot is in real space operating on the and the Advanced Warfighting Experi­ patient. Seemingly, we are becoming just ment.92 In a slick brochure entitled The as connected to our machines as we are to Vision, he found a section called Exploit our own eyes and ears. This aspect of the Modeling and Simulation. One particu­ human–machine connection is discussed larly lively paragraph captures the spirit in the following section. of military simulation: “Ten thousand In What Will Be: How the New World of linked simulators! Entire literal armies Information Will Change Our Lives, Michael online, global real-time, broadband, fiber- Dertouzos, director, MIT Laboratory for optic, satellite-assisted, military simula­ Computer Science, alleged that the second tion networking. And not just connected, major explosion in the Information Mar­ not just simulated. Seamless.”93 Der ketplace will be health care.87 The entertain­ Derian was not surprised that the word­ ment transformation has already begun. ing had been appropriated by the mili­ The soaring cost of medical care is a major tary from Bruce Sterling”s Wired article incentive for these efforts. Robotic and aug­ “War Is Virtual Hell.” mented-reality surgery are reviewed.88 Der Derian found scientists helping the protected species on the military base he Military visited. One of these species was the tor­ War is a serious endeavor with critical toise. The lengths to which the scientists consequences. The military has used vir­ went to protect the tortoise were analo­ tual tools for well over a decade, and the gous to the lengths to which the military 22 College & Research Libraries January 2000 will go to protect us. “The scientists minimum. In the March issue of C&RL, claimed to be matching the warfighters the second part of this article will discuss chip for chip in the information war. Tor­ some possibilities for creating the value- toises were tagged with transmitters, added services and products that are es­ tracked by radio telemetry, and graphed sential for growth, success, and survival in grid locations by computers. Landsat in the twenty-first century. satellites were used to identify good habi­ tat areas, aerial mine detection technol­ Humans and Technology ogy to find tortoises moving on the ground, and electronic sensors to warn My spring is past, my summer is off vehicles that might endanger the crea­ over tures.”94 Pushkin Many people are wondering what is happening. They are worried, but they are On the streets, it is assumed that hu­ hopeful. Michael Heim believes we will mans are meaningfully free from the tech­ experience an ontological shift, a shift in nologies surrounding them. Elsewhere, it being: “An ontological shift is a change is commonly accepted that humans are in the world under our feet, in the whole inseparable from these technologies. context in which our knowledge and Bruce Mazlish believes the unwillingness awareness are rooted. Things change even of humans to recognize their underlying before we become aware of what has been relationship to technology creates a dis­ happening to us.”95 continuity of significant proportions.97 In Some people believe humans will his view, traditional attitudes about the change their opinions toward being and humans and technology relationship reality by adopting radical new attitudes; must end. others are less hopeful. The physicist Max Planck did not think it possible for people The discontinuity between humans to adapt to earthshaking changes of this and technology is of overwhelming magnitude. His specific point of reference interest because the nature of being was paradigm shifts in the sciences. Tho­ (ontology) is at issue. mas Kuhn makes use of Planck’s views in his classic The Structure of Scientific In his article entitled “The Fourth Dis­ Revolutions: “A new scientific truth does continuity,” Mazlish reviewed Freud’s not triumph by convincing its opponents observation that there have been three and making them see the light, but rather “ego-smashing” moments in the recent because its opponents eventually die, and history of humanity: the Copernican revo­ a new generation grows up that is famil­ lution, in which the sun replaced the earth iar with it.”96 If this cannot be avoided, as the center of the universe; Darwin’s we may miss an historic opportunity to theories of evolution, which “robbed man contribute in a major way to an awe-in­ of his peculiar privilege of having been spiring shift in our humanity and our pur­ specially created, and relegated him to a pose. If we miss this opportunity and only descent from the animal world”; and grab onto the bytes and digits before us, Freud’s own conclusion that the ego “is we will not create a higher value-added not even master in his own house.”98 Ac­ philosophy of professional and institu­ cording to Mazlish, a fourth discontinu­ tional service. Instead, we will be in dan­ ity still exists in our time. “It is the dis­ ger of placing ourselves on the margins continuity between man and machine. In of history. This does not mean that the fact, my thesis is that this fourth discon­ functions librarians now perform will be tinuity must now be eliminated—indeed, discontinued but, rather, that machines we have started on the task—and that in will handle many of these functions and the process man’s ego will have to un­ human intervention will be reduced to a dergo another rude shock.”99 The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 23

Eliminating this discontinuity is desir­ actions of the character Targa, indepen­ able, but the obstacles are tremendous. dent of Elizabeth’s desire as a player.104 Rifkin believes the new computime Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation “bears no relationship to the rhythms of of an Online Town is a more recent account nature.”100 Robert Markley believes sci­ of an online community. Author Stacy ence will be the big winner in a return to Horn created East Coast Hangout (Echo) the fixed structure theory of nature. “to meet guys.”105 Bukatman summarized “Cyberspace is the return of the Cartesian the significance of these innovations by repressed in the age of semiotics,” because depicting technologies “as extrusions of what lies at the heart of cyberspace is the our organs and neural passages” 106 and belief in “the mathematical structure of terminal identity “as an essential cyborg nature, in the computability of the uni­ formation, and a potentially subversive re­ verse.”101 Others disagree. The structures conception of the subject that situates the and metaphors of biology, not mathemat­ human and the technological as coexten­ ics, appear to best represent the underly­ sive, codependent, and mutually defin­ ing nature of cyberspace. For example, ing.”107 Freeman Dyson has found “the computer metaphor … enormously fruitful as an aid Cyborg to the understanding of living pro­ The union of cyberspace and the human cesses.”102 organism has been most dramatically ar­ The discontinuity between humans ticulated in Donna Haraway’s Cyborg and technology is of overwhelming inter­ Manifesto.108 Her language is uncompro­ est because the nature of being (ontology) mising. “By the late twentieth century, our is at issue. One senses that ignoring the time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, problem will not be as easy as our re­ theorized and fabricated hybrids of ma­ sponse to earlier discontinuities. Millions chine and organism; in short, we are cy­ walked away from the land into the city. borgs. The cyborg is our ontology … The Nature was left behind. Several hundred cyborg is a condensed image both imagi­ years ago, almost everyone was engaged nation and material reality.”109 Think of in farming; today, almost no one is. To­ individuals as nodes on networks.110 day, the economic base of the city contin­ Think mutated worlds. Do not think just ues to erode as the industrial sector ideas, think new flesh.111 “We’re inside of shrinks and the service and information what we make, and it’s inside of us.”112 sectors grow. Brain over brawn. Mind Hari Kunzru described Haraway’s world over matter. The next step will be just as as “one of tangled networks—part hu­ consequential—perhaps even more so. man, part machine; complex hybrids of Turkle sees people and machines in a meat and metal that relegates old-fash­ new relationship in which one can be ioned concepts like natural and artificial mistaken for the other.103 In chat rooms to the archives.”113 and other online communities, people of Haraway was excited about the future, all ages assume roles quite different than optimistic. She foresaw a more equitable their RL (real life): differences in gender, world as male-dominated institutions are age, and species are not uncommon. Some replaced by those with universal, diverse cyber-events are disturbing, and the psy­ values. Viviane Casimir also saw a new chological impact on the individuals in­ identity, “that of the borg,” arising “in a volved may approximate the intensity of postmodern culture, a world of reframing real life. In March 1992, Ronald’s MUD dichotomies … a world of discontinuity character Backlash found a way to con­ and of contextualized truth and meaning, trol the actions of Elizabeth’s character, a new metaphysics, and a new hierar­ Targa. Backlash ‘forced’ Targa to have sex chy.”114 with him. In this example of “virtual Cyberspace is frequently framed in a rape,” Ronald directed the action and re­ context similar to the one used to depict 24 College & Research Libraries January 2000 ventures into space—moon shots and tion: the use of self-replicators that roam planetary explorations. Adventure, ex­ the Net. Free-ranging, self-replicating citement, and the limitless are powerful programs, autonomous Net agents, digi­ inducements to support or to join. The tal organisms—whatever they are called, power of the Saturn V has been replaced there’s an old-fashioned word for them: by the personal computer as the signifier computer viruses.”119 of technological progress.115 David Tomas At first, this prospect might be fright­ has suggested that cyberspace and the ening. However, the biologist Lynn technologies surrounding it “constitute Margulis discovered that “most of the big the central phase in a post-industrial ‘rite steps in cellular evolution were caused by of passage’ between organically human parasites.”120 These parasites developed and cyber-psychically digital life-forms as a symbiotic relationship with their hosts reconfigured through computer software stronger and more adaptable than the cel­ systems.”116 lular structure without this intervention. The computer virus is attractive because Beyond Artificial Intelligence of its “irrepressible mobility,” “self-cen­ The possibility of intelligence emerging tered autonomy,” and “surprising agil­ directly from computers rather than be­ ity.” ing programmed by humans is startling. Interest in the computer virus comes The concept is simple. Humans will cre­ from three areas: (1) developers who want ate artificial intelligence. Artificial to harness “the power of self-replicating intelligence(s) will create a new form of programs,” (2) scientists who want to intelligence. This development might study “the abstract behavior of self-repli­ qualify as a new stage of evolution in the cating codes,” and (3) virus writers. sense envisioned by Dyson.117 Below is a Mark Ludwig is a developer with a diagram of the flow created by this au­ Ph.D. in physics from the University of thor to help visualize the sequence: Arizona. His first self-published book was The Little Black Book of Codes (1991). The I � A (I) � A (i) �� detailed annotated source codes in his I = Human intelligence book led to the issuance of a legal injunc­ i = Machine intelligence tion against its publication in France, �= Cyber-intelligence which since has been lifted. In 1993, A = Artificial Ludwig published Computer Viruses, Ar­ tificial Life, and Evolution, which contains Julian Dibbell believes that “someday his Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine. the Net will be the summation of the The programming utility “turns any nor­ world’s total computing resources. All mal DOS virus into a souped-up geneti­ computers will link up into a chaotic digi­ cally evolving polymorph, complete with tal soup in which everything is con­ an option for sexual gene-swapping.”121 nected—indirectly or directly—to every­ It is described as a “finely tuned interac­ thing else. This coming net of distributed tion of variety and natural selection that resources will be tremendously powerful, allows the environment itself to shape the and tremendously hard to harness be­ internal code of the organisms dwelling cause of its decentralized nature. It will in it.”122 be an ecology of computing machines, Tom Ray is an ecologist from the Uni­ and managing it will require an ecologi­ versity of Delaware. He breeds viruses or cal approach.”118 worms, “software that is both self-repro­ He has suggested that “many of the ducing and able to execute its code inde­ most promising visions of how to coor­ pendent of any host program.”123 He wants dinate the far-flung communication and to turn the Net into a jungle “infusing the computing cycles of this emerging plat­ vast unused spaces of the global computer form converge on a controversial solu­ networks with a roiling digital ecology as The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 25 complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as brain.”126 Intelligent agents with learning beneficial to humankind as the rain for­ capabilities, self-replicating autonomous ests that he has long sought to protect and agents, free-flowing parasitic viruses bor­ understand.”124 Ray discovered that his so- rowing and optimizing the reproductive called worms were bona fide parasitic vi­ codes of larger programs are spearhead­ ruses with surprising capabilities. The ing efforts to create a new form of intelli­ “tight-wound optimization” attained by gence, a cyber-intelligence. these parasites would have confounded As mentioned earlier, this discussion the “most wizardly” of software engineers. will be continued in the March issue. Yoked, these parasites might develop prac­ Specifically, how will the four tical applications. Ray’s plan to colonize the discontinuities impact our lives in the Net appears in “A Proposal to Create a Net- years ahead? What new developments work-Wide Biodiversity Reserve for Digital might we expect? What can we do about Organisms,” at ftp://tierra.slhs.udel.edu/ them? How will these discontinuities tierra/doc/reserves.tex.125 impact the future of the library and the Dibbell is thrilled by the potential op­ profession of librarianship? Naturally, portunity to transform the Net “into the this discussion will be speculative, al­ single most complex information entity though outlines and subtle patterns are since the emergence of the human visible on the horizon.

Notes

1. This is the judgment of Edward O. Wilson. “In contrast to widespread opinion, I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right. The assumptions they made about a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential for indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily to heart, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding as we learn more and more about the circumstances of our lives. Edward O. Wilson, “Back from Chaos,” Atlantic Monthly 281, no. 3 (Mar. 1998): 41. 2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. “philosophy, the history of the west.” 3. Ibid. 4. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1972: reprint, s.v. “positivism.” 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Gary P. Radford, “Positivism, Foucault, and the Fantasia of the Library: Conceptions of Knowledge and the Modern Library Experience,” Library Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Oct. 1992): 408–24; John M. Budd, “An Epistemological Foundation for Library and Information Science,” Library Quarterly 65, no. 3 (July 1995): 296–318; Archie Dick, “Library and Information Science as a Social Science: Neutral and Normative Conceptions,” Library Quarterly 65, no. 2 (Apr. 1995): 216–35. 8. Gary P. Radford and John M. Budd, “We Do Not Need a Philosophy of Library and Information Science—We’re Not Confused Enough: A Response to Zwaldo,” Library Quarterly 67, no. 3 (July 1997): 315. Online. Expanded Academic ASAP. 9. Budd, “An Epistemological Foundation for Library and Information Science,” 315. 10. One exception is Jim Zwaldo’s “We Don’t Need a Philosophy of Library and Informa­ tion Science—We’re Confused Enough Already,” Library Quarterly 67, no. 2 (Apr. 1997): 103–21. 11. The author assumes that the observations of Radford, Budd, and Dick address services and products, but not the ALA’s Code of Professional Ethics in the areas of censorship, privacy, due process, and equality of opportunity. 12. Wilson, “Back from Chaos,” 62. 13. Ibid. 14. Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness (New York: Viking, 1980), 14–15. 15. Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, trans. Tiina Nunnally (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1993), 189. 16. Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Bantam, 1990), 179. 17. Andrew Odlyzko, “Silicon Dreams and Silicon Bricks: The Continuing Evolution of Li­ 26 College & Research Libraries January 2000 braries,” Library Trends 46, no. 1 (summer 1997): 154. 18 Marguerite Holloway, “A New Classic,” University Business (May/June 1998): 36. Holloway writes about James J. O’Donnell and his most recent book, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1998). 19. Odlyzko, ‘“Silicon Dreams and Silicon Bricks,” 153. 20. Tom McArthur states that “the structuring of books …took all of 4,000 years to bring about.” Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning, and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Com­ puter (New York: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1986), 69. 21. Richard Bode, First You Have to Row a Little Boat: Reflections on Life and Living (New York: Warner, 1993), 191. 22. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 14. 23. Zwaldo, “We Don’t Need a Philosophy of Library and Information Science.” 24. Michael K. Buckland, Library Services in Theory and Context, 2nd ed. (New York: Pergamon Pr., 1988), 16. 25. Two major journals have published special issues in the past four years with titles link­ ing books, buildings, and bytes: “Books, Bricks, & Bytes,” Daedalus 125, no. 4 (fall 1996); and “Buildings, Books, and Bytes: Perspectives on the Benton Foundation Report on Libraries in the Digital Age,” Library Trends 46, no. 1 (summer 1997). 26. Excerpt from the poem “Beneath Winter’s Roof,” by Ekaterina Iosifova, in Clay and Star: Contemporary Bulgarian Poets, trans. and ed. Lisa Sapinkopf and Georgi Belev (Minne­ apolis, Minn.: Milkweed, 1992), 133. 27. Excerpt from the poem “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” by T. S. Eliot, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 147. 28. Excerpt from the poem “The Mirror’s Hide and Seek,” by Liliana Ursu, in The Sky Behind the Forest: Selected Poems, trans. Liliana Ursu with Adam J. Sorkin and Tess Gallagher (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Bks., 1997), 46. 29. Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (New York: Henry Holt, 1987). 30. Ibid., 69–70. 31. Robert Doisneau, Three Seconds of Eternity (New York: te Neues Pub., 1997). 32. Tracy Kidder, The Soul of the New Machine (Boston: Little Brown, 1981), 137. 33. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke Univ. Pr., 1993), 109. 34. Rifkin, Time Wars, 155. 35. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 108. 36. Lance Olsen, “Virtual Termites: A Hypotextual Technomutant Explo(it)ration of William Gibson and the Electronic Beyond(s),” Style 29, no. 2 (summer 1995): 300. 37. James S. Russell, “The Way We Work,” Architectural Record 186, no. 6 (June 1998): 139. 38. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Berkeley, 1984), 51. 39. Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Pr., 1991), 272. 40. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Introduction: From Possible Worlds to Virtual Reality,” Style 29, no. 2 (summer 1995): 178. 41. Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communication Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1998). 42. Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Arts and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1989), 247–48. Thomas M. Disch extends Lovejoy’s observations in his analy­ sis of the impact of science fiction on society. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: Free Pr., 1998). 43. William Gibson, Virtual Light (New York: Bantam Bks., 1993); —–, Idoru (New York: Putnam, 1996). 44. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 108. 45. Ibid., 156. 46. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. 47. Ronald Schmitt, “Mythology and Technology: The Novels of William Gibson,” Extrapo­ lation 34, no. 1 (spring 1993): 75–76. 48. Edward S. Casey, “Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place,” Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 2 (Dec. 1997): 287. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 293. 51. Ibid., 292. 52. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “positivism.” 53. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 250. The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age 27

54. Ibid. 55. Silvio Gaggi, From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1997), 115. See also the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (fall 1997) on the subject of “Technocriticism and Hypernarrative.” 56. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 208. 57. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Pr., 1991), 44. 58. Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Basic Bks., 1977), 139. 59. Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene on the Screen: Towards a Phenomenology of Cinematic and Electronic Presence,” Post-Script 10 (1990): 56. 60. Steven D. Spark, Glued to the Set : The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 61. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 20. 62. Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 9. Gifford Lectures given at Aberdeen, Scotland, Apr.–Nov. 1985. 63. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 270. 64. Lisa Mason, Arachne (New York: Morrow, 1990), 70–71. 65. Hans Moravec, “Pigs in Cyberspace,” Thinking Robots, an Aware Internet, and Cyberpunk Librarians, ed. R. Bruce Miller and Milton T. Wolf (Chicago: ALA, 1992), 15. 66. Berman, Coming to Our Senses, 109. 67. Wilson, “Back from Chaos,” 62. 68. Jack G. Voller, “Neuromanticism: Cyberspace and the Sublime,” Extrapolation 34, no. 1 (spring 1993): 22. 69. Vaclav Havel, “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World” (speech given at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, 4 July 1994). 70. Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics, 41. 71. Berman, Coming to Our Senses, 79–80. 72. Thomas M. Disch, “Double Talk, Double Dutch, Dutch Chocolate,” Hudson Review 51, no. 1 (spring 1998): 233. 73. Mohamed Zayani, “Review Essay: The Deterritorialization of Capitalism in an Age of Punctuated Equilibrium: Globalism, Tribalism, and Other Related Matters,” Studies in the Humanities 24, nos. 1–2 (June–Dec. 1997): 101. 74. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, For­ eign Agents Series, ed. Jim Fleming and Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 11–12. 75. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983). 76. .Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Payton, and John Johnston, Foreign Agents Series, ed. Jim Fleming and Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 101. 77. Spark, Glued to the Set, 4. 78. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, 21. 79. Michael Oreskes, “America’s Politics Loses Way as Its Vision Changes World,” New York Times, 18 Mar. 1990, 22. 80. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Bks., 1971), 161. 81. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 10. 82. Ibid., 11. 83. Ibid., 14. 84. Ibid., 45. 85. Gary Taubes, “Surgery in Cyberspace,” Discover 15, no. 12 (Dec. 1994): 86. 86. Ibid., 85. 87. Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1998), 165. 88. Ibid., 172–74. 89. Ibid., 94. 90. Bruce Sterling, “War Is Virtual Hell,” Wired 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1994): 46. 91. Ibid. 92. James Der Derian, “Cyber-Deterrence,” Wired 2, no. 9 (Sept. 1994). 6 pp. Online. Internet. 7 July 1998. Available: http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~bruegg/ cyber.deter.html. 93. Ibid., 5. 94. Ibid., 5. 95. Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1993), xiii. 28 College & Research Libraries January 2000

96. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. rev. (Chicago: Univ. of Chi­ cago Pr., 1972), 151. 97. Bruce Mazlish, “The Fourth Discontinuity,” in Technology and Culture, ed. Melvin Kranzberg and William Davenport (New York: Schocken Bks., 1972), 217–18. 98. Ibid. Quote by Sigmund Freud is from his eighteenth lecture in The Complete Introduc­ tory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 284–85. 99. Ibid. 100. Rifkin, Time Wars, 119. 101. Robert Markley, “Boundaries: Mathematics, Alienation, and the Metaphysics of Cyberspace,” Configurations 2 (fall 1994): 488. 102. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 56. 103. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 17. 104. Julian Dibbell, “Rape in Cyberspace,” Village Voice, 21Dec. 1993, 38. 105. Harold Goldberg, review of Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town, by Stacy Horn, New York Times Book Review, 15 Feb. 1998, 13. 106. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 71. 107. Ibid., 22. 108. Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 109. Ibid., 150. 110. Hari Kunzru, “You Are Borg,” Wired 5, no. 2 (Feb. 1997): 156. 111. Ibid., 157. 112. Ibid., 209. 113. Ibid., 157. 114. Viviane Casimir, “Data and Dick’s Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier,” Extrapo­ lation 38, no. 4 (winter 1997): 278. 115. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 6–7. 116. David Tomas, “Old Rituals for New Space: ‘Rites of Passage’ and William Gibson’s Cul­ tural Model of Cyberspace,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Pr., 1991), 33. 117. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 9. 118. Julian Dibbell, “Viruses Are Good for You,” Wired 3, no. 2 (Feb. 1995). 15 pp. Online. Internet. 7 July 1998. Available: http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~bruegg/ viruses.html, 1. 119. Ibid. 120. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 69; citing Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. 121. Dibbell, “Viruses Are Good for You,” 7. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., 8. 124. Ibid., 8. 125. Ibid., 10. 126. Ibid., 13.