"LJ: The Internet has certainly attached itself to libraries—and so, not surprisingly, your work is popular with librarians…
JB: Well, then it's a mutual admiration society. Libraries are one of my most favorite things....
LJ: How did the Deadheads inspire the world's first Internet guru?
JB: Well, Deadheads had a lot of characteristics of, say, a medium-size town. They were a tight community. But what I couldn't understand was how they had achieved that aspect of random interaction that is so essential to community. You know, meeting at the public library or the village square. Until someone suggested to me that the continuous space Deadheads inhabited was called the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the forerunner of the Internet. The ARPAnet was a government network mostly for defense contractors. It just so happened there were a lot of Deadheads among defense contractors, and they had set up newsgroups on the ARPAnet. A lot of the random interaction in that community was taking place there. When I first got on the ARPAnet and a community bulletin board called the Well, I immediately felt like I was dealing in a social space....
LJ: As cyberspace develops, do you think libraries will maintain a physical role in their communities?
JB: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I think physical libraries will be even more important in the future. Communities need that physical element. But libraries will have to be places where people do more than go to get books, because a lot of what people want they will be able get online. Libraries will be places where people will go to exchange ideas, and librarians will be even more essential than they are now, guiding people to information, knowing where to find it. I look at the potential for librarians and for libraries as being venues for all manner of salons, where the objective is not silence but conversation....
LJ: One line you wrote that has always stuck with me is, "information is experienced not possessed." What is the Internet teaching us about the nature of information?
JB: I think cyberspace is gradually teaching us that information is a verb, not a noun. This is a very important thing. Information is a relationship. It is something that exists in the space between two minds or many minds. It is not something that is merely encapsulated and collected into some physical object. But we have a lot of habits that were developed out of an industrial economy that make it very difficult for us to imagine things any other way.
LJ: So what does the idea of viewing information as a verb mean for libraries?
JB: Even with their physical books in their traditional libraries, librarians have always had a holy mission to see that information was available. Now they have the opportunity to see that information is everywhere. That is enormously exciting. The problem is, for some, especially administrators, that they have to think a lot about legal issues—which is their job, in fairness. They have to be concerned about copyright violations, keeping pornography from minors, and all the other kinds of proscribed materials that are, as many librarians would argue, still part of the overall ecology of ideas. So, unfortunately, right now there is also a great deal of tension....
LJ: You cofounded the EFF, which has fought on the front lines in a number of battles important to the library community. What's your message to librarians on behalf of the EFF?
JB: I hope more librarians will join us. Librarians' entire raison d'être is up for grabs. The American Library Association has been extremely helpful, especially with the [Child Online Protection Act] case and other legislative issues. But librarians still have a culture that is kind of polite, circumspect, maybe a little reticent. If librarians really care about what they do, they need to become more politically involved. These issues in cyberspace are not going to go away, and they could turn out very badly. I would love to see more librarians ready to charge the battlements, because you can't be confident that this is all going to work out and virtue will prevail. Not now."
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
