In this scenario, the liberated end-user is presented as having been
freed from regulation and subordination to information specialists
and bureaucracy, whilst at the same time freed to pursue their own
“ideas”, without having to negotiate or mediate these ideas
with or through institutional gatekeepers. Such an ideal model of
individuated activity fits neatly with an atomised picture of educational
and academic activities. However the communicative exchange involved
in the negotiation process through which questions are formulated
and knowledge in produced, maintained and modified, cannot be reduced
to the interaction characteristic of human computer interaction. To
attempt to do so reduces an essential feature of knowledge production
to information retrieval. For this to be possible, learning would
have to be reduced to a form of individualised problem solving that
set about generating answers for questions that have already been
established and for which the methods had already been prescribed.
As such education would become a system of learning procedures and
command following. The previous state of affairs made librarians bureaucratic
gatekeepers (allocating and preserving limited resources). For all
its potential benefits, new technology does not substitute for librarians,
nor for the series of others that make up the field of communicative
exchange within an academic cultural network. The free market/instrumentalist
conception of learning is doubly misleading in that it hides the non-market
based conditions upon which the so called liberated end user has been
given supposedly “unmediated” access, and secondly it ignores
the crucial cultural networks (of mediation) through which individuals
acquire criteria of relevance that enabled translation of information
into knowledge.
a. Academic Communism?
While far from the idealised image of free exchange in the academy,
Robert Merton’s (1973) academic communism, intellectual production
and the distribution of ideas within the academic community should
not be modelled on the commodified exchange of the marketplace. The
academic library perhaps best exemplifies, at least in principle,
the non-market ideal of free access to the means of intellectual production.
The virtual library, or library without walls, based on a variety
of new media systems and services, is, at present, enmeshed in a series
of struggles over the distribution of costs and benefits of such facilities
as on-line journals, World Wide Web access and on-line bibliographic
services such as BIDS in the U.K.. Conflicts between communication
and commodification are manifest here.
i. On-Line Journals: As mentioned above academic journal prices have risen radically in recent years. Technically, full text on-line journals are vastly cheaper to for the publisher produce than the production and distribution of paper copies. This is because fixed costs shift from publishers to readers in terms of the increased hardware and software required by the reader to access the materials. The collective provision of such reader resources is something that the library is eminently well suited to carry out. However, beyond technical questions of production, distribution and reception, the question of copyright has inhibited the development of services. While services are emerging slowly they are small scale and often eclectic at present, and questions of ownership predominate. In Britain the first serious attempt to produce electronic journal services are being heavily state subsidised through the Joint Information Service Committee E-Lib (Electronic Library Programme). Librarians interviewed as part of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing BLERBS research expressed concern over the dependency relations that could emerge from electronic journal services. Unlike paper copies that the library would take possession of and which would not be returnable if a subscription was subsequently cancelled, electronic access to past materials would potentially only continue as long as present subscription payments were maintained. The centrality of copyright questions to the development of electronic services (as if people are not presently photocopying paper sources) reflects the increasing penetration of academic journal production, and even editing, by the priorities of more commercial publishers.
ii. The World Wide Web: Again the Web manifests the conflict between communication and commodification. With more and more of the telecommunications infrastructure being relocated into private hands, and with universities increasingly unable to subsidise services, the commodification of cyberspace moves on apace. The Web was originally designed as a medium for the transmission of scientific data (visual, numerical and textual) by a Swiss physicist at the European Centre for Particle Research. However at the present time the Web is being increasingly commercialised both through the attempts by Microsoft and rivals to control the software used to access the web, and by the increased penetration of advertising revenues in the organisation of search engines, right down to the priority placement of commercial sites in the listings gained by users when conducting searches.
iii. On-Line Bibliographic Services: The example of BIDS (Bath
Information Data Services) shows some signs indicative of the on-going
commercialization of academic communication. However its birth, development
and success have other causes. Originally a service set up by the
British higher education communities’ Joint Information Services
Committee, and based at Bath University, BIDS sought to provide a
generalised bibliographic data service to the university sector that
would avoid both the high variable cost of “pay as you go”
on-line services, and the high fixed initial cost of CD Rom services.
Its mission statement is: 'To stimulate and enable the cost effective
exploitation of information systems and to provide a high quality
national network infrastructure for the UK higher education and research
councils communities'. The freedom for the user at the point of use
lies in the service’s non-market based approach. Through a nationally
negotiated arrangement the user is given the freedom not to pay each
time they use the system. The liberation of the end user could simply
end up as the liberation of the market and the freedom of corporations
to commodify academic communication in the name of the free and isolated
net-surfing consumer. BIDS is an important counter example of non-market
based principles in practice. Submission to pressure on the service
to become more commercial would be unfortunate. This brings us to
the next theme, academic communities and the enabled (rather than
simply the liberated) end-user.
b. Academic Communities.
The idea of the unmediated medium, or the liberated end-user is easy
dove-tailed into misconceptions over the nature of academic freedom
and production in the particular, as well as over the relationship
between information and knowledge in general. In our ethnographic
interviews and focus group discussions with academics, researchers,
students and librarians at a number of U.K. universities and across
a number of faculties the centrality of cultural networks emerged,
both in relation to the acquisition of skills to use new electronic
media, and in the ability to translate systems of information management
into tools for knowledge production. This process hinges around the
negotiation of “criteria of relevance” by which searches
(using new electronic media or not) move through the organisation
of information within databases to the selection of materials based
on their meaning within a knowledge based frame of reference.
Such frames of reference do not provide fixed and objective horizons within which members of an academic community are contained. They are the on-going shared understandings that the participants bring to, and modify through, their interactions. These frameworks guide the formulation of creative new understandings that form the basis for new working hypotheses for both empirical and bibliographic research. The negotiated nature of interpretation, along with the normative orientation towards understanding is manifested most clearly in the attempts to formulate problems and search criteria. Discussions of what actually constitutes the problem at hand, discussions between researchers and librarians, between academics, between academics and students, constitutes the heart of the creativity within an academic discipline.
The relationship between creativity and discipline centred around communicative action within a cultural network must be radically distinguished from the relations of command and execution enabled by a technical network. While the principle of chance coincidence may lead a machine, in the exercise of a command, to generate results that trigger a connection in the mind of a user (between Foucault and goldfish for example), a machine is only capable of following a command in the manner it has been programmed to do so. It cannot understand a question, or, more importantly, know if what it has been commanded to execute is in fact what the person imputing that command wanted. Technical networks cannot replace the cultural networks through which the question to be asked is formulated, discussed and negotiated, even if the technical network can be very useful in generating answers to certain types of questions once they have been formulated. To assume that technical networks can replace cultural networks is to assume that the questions that need to be asked already exist and it is only necessary for those engaged in academic production to enact the procedures required for their calculation as isolated technicians of information manipulation.
The equation of knowledge and information, the reduction of intersubjective communication to command, the failure to differentiate the enabled end-user from the liberated end-user, and the assumption that technical networks can substitute for cultural networks, are all characteristic of the current trend within higher educations, at least in the U.K., with regard to the introduction of new electronic media. The enabled end-user, in the light of the BLERBS research, is someone who has access not only to the technical networks of information management and transmission, but is also a part of cultural networks through which they can negotiate questions, learn from others and generate the criteria of relevance by which information can be selected and integrated within knowledge production and application.
The U.K now has possibly the largest per capita number of people entering
higher education in Europe, with a staffing level that has remained
constant, or in some institutions diminished during the 1990’s,
the very years in which U.K. student numbers grew most radically.
As student:staff ratios in the U.K. increase and contact time, for
discussion and asking questions, diminishes, new electronic media
are being used within the framework of the “liberated end-user”
as described above, rather than as part of the enabled end-user model
to which we counterpose it. Unless the misconceptions entailed in
the “liberated end-user” model are brought out and alternatives
suggested, the economic arguments made for replacing expensive human
communication with new electronic search services, will carry on,
along with the commercialisation of education that is being carried
through as its sub-text and driving force.
v. An Endnote - Via Theodore Rozek.
While this paper has only begun to touch on some of the crucial areas
of investigation in the study of the democratic possibilities of new
electronic media, and the tendencies to subvert and distort these
opportunities, we suggest that the themes raised do make a start at
what needs to be an on-going research agenda. The BLERBS research,
which is currently (February 1997) being conducted and which has only
just begun the task of integrating the empirical materials generated
through its multiple track application of ethnographic and conversation
analytic modes of micro-analysis can only begin to offer suggestions.
We would like to finish by quoting from Theodore Rozek’s (1996,
pp. 12-14) critique of faith in computers as substitutes for human
interaction in learning: “Out of curiosity, I recently asked
a librarian if she had ever considered renting out space for advertisements
in the card catalogue or its on-line version. She was first bewildered,
then shocked. “We would never do anything like that,” she
said. That is the voice of public service... Some Web enthusiasts
consider such structures a kind of elitist censorship. They might
even regard the Dewey library catalogue system an infringement on
the free flow of information. On the other hand I have heard no serious
complaint that keywords on the Web are now rented out... People who
think that education equals information have no idea what either information
or education is... the quality of the question is more important that
the quantity of data that appears as an answer. And how do we teach
kids to ask good questions?”
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