Babel Fish Bouillabaisse II Babel Fish Bouillabaisse II BARBARA FISTER GAZORNUM ST. PETER, MN Babel Fish Bouillabaisse II by Barbara Fister is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Contents Introduction 1 Libraries and Learning How I Became a Librarian 5 Thursday in the Park With Students 8 My Take on the Amazon Workplace Exposé 11 Doing Our Copyright Homework 14 Open Access Without Tears 17 The Library of Forking Paths 21 Checking Our Library Privilege 24 The Fix Isn't In 26 The Skeuomorphic Library 28 Reframing Libraries 31 Platforms and Profits 34 When is the Library Open? 36 When is the Library Open: PS 39 Must Digital Divide? 42 On the Latest Docudrama 46 Playing, Learning, and the Teaching Problem 49 The Woes of Wikipedia 52 This Rant is for Social Scientists 55 A Library for All 57 Curation, Evaluation, and Open Access for Teaching 60 Burning Issues for Operation 451 64 Books (Still) in Print 67 Objectivity, Professionalism, Citizenship 69 How Libraries Became Public I 72 How Libraries Became Public II 75 Peering Into Peer Review 78 The Boundaries of 'Information' in Information Literacy 81 Belonging Online and In the Library 83 Tell Me If You've Heard This One Before 85 Information Literacy and the Great Divide 88 Getting Sand in My Beach Reads 91 Take a Chair 94 Inevitably Open 97 Just Business 99 A Necessary Footnote 102 The Black Box Problem 104 The Term Paper Perplex 107 Gorilla Theatre 109 Are We There Yet? 112 From Schooled Skepticism to Informed Trust 114 Lessons from the Facebook Fiasco 118 Access Means More than Abundance 122 It's the Attention Economy, and It's Stupid 126 Who’s Welcome Here? 129 Academic Freedom and Librarians: A Natural Fit 132 Are You Kidding Me? 134 Information Literacy’s Third Wave 136 Beyond the Battle for Open Access 139 No Big Deal 142 Dona Nobis Pacem 144 Yes, Books Are Banned 146 Retrenched 148 Learning Why, Not How 151 What's the Big Idea? 154 Sharing and Attention in the Academic Gig Economy 156 Bloopers and Expertise 158 Not So Fast! 160 Papers, Please 163 Change and Agency 165 Evidence and Authority in the Age of Algorithms 167 This Is Why We Can Have Nice Things 178 Practicing Freedom for the Post-Truth Era 197 System Restore: Bringing Library Values to Today's Information 218 Networks Technology and Society Negotiating a New Social Contract for Digital Data 237 The Bigot in the Machine 240 What's Love Got to Do With It? 242 No News Would Be Bad News 244 Data Breaches, Betrayals, and Broken Promises 247 All the "News" That's Fit to Click 250 The Ghost in the Machines of Loving Grace 252 Putting the Person Back in Personalization 254 What Kind of Free Is Speech Online? 256 Post-Post Truth 259 Terms and Conditions 263 Code and Ethics 266 Human Subjects, Third Parties, and the Law 269 Twitter and the Bernays Bookcase 272 Responsible Freedoms 275 Alexa: Tell Me How to Succeed in College 277 Innocence and Experience 280 Not-So-Funhouse Mirrors 282 Three Paradoxes 284 Plagiarism Policing and Profit 287 Adulting for the Web 289 Skinner at the Googleplex 291 Promises, Promises 294 Leaving Las Vegas 296 On Not Being Able to Tell Fakes From Good Reporting 299 Subject to Change 301 Trivial Pursuits 304 That’s Sorted 306 Move Fast and Forget Things 308 Rigged Markets 310 Another Tech is Possible 312 These Trying Times Take Courage 317 We Can Handle the Truth 319 What Next? 322 Make America [Fill In the Blank] 323 The Media Has Always Been the Opposition Party 325 Matter of Facts 327 Info Wars 329 How Not To Fight Terrorism 331 Beyond Ignorance 335 The Things We Forget 337 Outrage and Circuses 339 At Year's End 344 Winner Take All (But the Blame) 346 Can’t Argue With That 349 Reductio ad It’s All a Conspiracy 352 Taking Him at His Word 355 Stopping By the Library on a Snowy Evening 357 Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? 359 Thinking About Online Hate 361 A Babel Fish Bookshelf Understanding Social Facts 365 Remember What's Never Forgotten 368 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A Mixed Review 372 Why the Right Is Better at the Internet 375 Labor and Digital Tracking 379 Living in the Uncanny Valley 383 Living Inside the Internet 386 Snoopers in the Valley 389 Anti-Social Media: A Review 391 Naming What We Know About Writing 395 Catching Up with Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression 398 When the Internet is Angry 400 Lulz and Dissent 403 Weapons of Math Destruction: The Dark Side of Big Data 406 Afterword 409 Introduction In 2015 while on sabbatical, I assembled some of my blog post and articles into Babel Fish Bouillabaisse, an open access anthology, using PressBooks. At the time I was experimenting with public scholarship by blogging about my research into online book discussion communities while exploring the potential for using new platforms for open access scholarship. A few years later, Minitex, which supports libraries in Minnesota and the Dakotas, made PressBooks available to the public through libraries. By then, I had added digital humanities to my librarian portfolio, so I used the platform to help a retired faculty member bring some of his writings to the public. I also was developing a new course, so adapted Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers into an open access textbook – Clickbait, Bias, and Propaganda in Information Networks – along with my co-instructor, Rachel Flynn, and our students, who contributed chapters. I began to think it was time throw together another anthology of my own, which turned out to be good advanced planning when my 10-year blogging gig with Inside Higher Ed came to an end after 492 posts – something over 350,000 words about libraries, learning, technology and society. My blogging goes back further. I remember the day (though I’m not certain of the year) when a student, who is now a seasoned librarian himself, introduced me to this new thing he was excited about. I was chatting with him at the reference desk, and he politely asked to borrow my keyboard and brought up Blogger to demonstrate how easy it was – much easier than my kludgy attempts to put library news on our site using raw html. I was hooked. I began to assign blog posts as writing assignments in courses starting in 2005. That year, I also began a blog for my library and become one the inaugural contributors to the Association of College and Research Libraries blog, which is still going strong (though I stepped away from it in 2011). Between 2009 –2015 I wrote a weekly column for Library Journal (in disappearing e-ink, as the links have all broken) and began blogging weekly for Inside Higher Ed in 2010. In future, I’ll return to blogging at my own site, though on a more relaxed and ad hoc schedule because having no deadlines will do that to a person. A lot happened in libraries, technology, and society in my decade of blogging for IHE. Open access to scholarly publishing went from something Introduction | 1 only activists knew much about to a significant part of the scholarly publishing environment. Lever Press, which I helped to brainstorm into existence, has an entire catalog of open access books published, with more in development. The Google Books lawsuits were resolved, the GSU e-reserves lawsuits were not. Wall Street was occupied and had its own library until the police tossed it into dumpsters. We lost Aaron Swartz. Edward Snowden blew the whistle. Net neutrality was rescued, but then deregulated out of existence, though the fight isn’t over. Social media became increasingly anti- social. The news industry continued to struggle, with half of newspaper journalists pink-slipped over the decade. Librarians retired a set of standards for information literacy in favor of a more complex framework after much debate. Students struggled with research papers. Librarians struggled to help. Project Information Literacy released one fascinating report after another, and after fan-girling for a decade I was tickled to be invited to serve as their first Scholar-in- Residence, to help with a project that is close to my heart. And I had the chance to work out my thoughts in writing, every week. I’ve assembled some of those blog posts here, along with articles and the text of talks I’ve given since 2015, into a second helping of Babel Fish Bouillabaisse. Bon appétit. 2 | Introduction LIBRARIES AND LEARNING Libraries and Learning | 3 How I Became a Librarian May 30, 2019 As the year finishes and the library becomes quiet, I find myself thinking about how I became a librarian. It wasn’t a well-planned career move. When I was in college I fell in love with a major that let me read big fat novels for credit. As I neared graduation, I bristled when my mother suggested, “why don’t you go to library school?” As a child of the Great Depression she had a practical bent, and she knew my chosen major wouldn’t be able to support me in a long-term relationship. “Something to fall back on,” she added, which only made it worse. I loved being in libraries, I even worked in one, but it was the life of the mind that swept me off my feet. The kind of work I imagined librarians did – safe, boring, routine – nope, not for me.