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| <nettime> Phil Agre: Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society (2001) |
< http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/intellectual.html >
Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society
Philip E. Agre
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA
[email protected]
[1]http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
[2]Ethics and Information Technology 3(4), 2001, pages 289-298.
Please do not quote from this version, which may differ slightly from
the version that appears in print.
6500 words.
"Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is
found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions
and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the
all-around growth of every member of society" (Dewey 1920: 186).
1 Introduction
What is a digital library for? Here is one way to look at it: the
purpose of a digital library is to support the intellectual life of a
society. Now, this is a familiar role for a library. We are already
accustomed to thinking of libraries as repositories of cultural memory,
resources of information, and promoters of literacy. But as information
technology becomes radically cheaper and more ubiquitous, and as
information services become knitted into the fabric of daily life, we
are in a position to ask more deeply what an intellectual life is and
how to support it. Existing scholarly and library practices reflect the
wisdom of centuries, and we should think twice before throwing them
out. Instead, I propose that we recover the underlying logic of these
practices, abstract the aspects of them that have lasting value, and
then generalize, extend, and democratize them -- that is, make them
available to, and adapt them to the purposes of, the citizenry in
general and not just to elites. This requires a sustained analysis of
intellectual life. Intellectual life is both deeply individual and
deeply collective at the same time, and analysis will be required
particularly to understand the relation between these two levels.
The paper proceeds largely through an informal phenomenology of
intellectual life. By way of preparation, section 2 confronts
prevailing stereotypes about intellectual life and section 3 emphasizes
the diversity of activities and purposes within which an individual's
intellectual life can be embedded. Section 4 then describes some senses
in which an intellectual life is a space largely apart from the rest of
life. Section 5 describes the role of personal questions in an
individual's engagement with books, and with intellectual tradition
generally. Section 6 sketches the phenomenology of intellectual life at
a more detailed level by describing the fragmentary groundwork on which
intellectual life is built; this analysis suggests the potential value
of technological support for an individual's ongoing engagement with a
personal library. Section 7 concerns the place of intellectual life in
the overall life of the individual, and suggests that new technologies
might permit the institutions that support the intellectual lives of
academics to be democratized. Section 8 turns to the intellectual life
of a democratic society as a whole, and suggests that the institutional
supports for the intellectual lives of professional political advocates
might be democratized as well. Section 9 generalizes the point by
suggesting the role that new technology might play in the creation of
lightweight institutions to support intellectual life. Section 10
concludes by considering the potential role of a particular set of
institutions, those derived from the collective cognitive processes of
the professions.
A comment is perhaps necessary on my use of the phrase "digital
library". My purpose in this paper is not to provide detailed technical
proposals, nor to engage with the specifics of digital library research
as it is currently developing (e.g., Arms 2000, Borgman 2000). Rather,
I want to gather some conceptual raw materials for long-term
strategizing about the directions that digital libraries might take.
"Digital libraries" in the narrowest sense refer to networked computer
systems for the storage and retrieval of large collections of digital
texts and image. The engineering of digital libraries thus draws
equally upon computer science conceptions of system architecture and
library science conceptions of information organization and management.
As basic problems are solved and traditional functionalities become
available in a fully digital medium in a scalable way, it will become
possible to rethink more ambitiously how digital libraries might
support the intellectual life of a society. A networked digital
library, after all, is not localized geographically or confined by
physical architecture, and so it can become deeply intertwined with the
collective cognitive processes of the many social groups whose
activities it is meant to support.
By "digital library", then, I mean to suggest the full breadth of these
potential tools of intellectual life, and I am not especially concerned
with the boundaries between the concept of a digital library and
related concepts such as digital archives, knowledge management tools,
online discussion forums, distance education, personal Web sites, and
so on. In particular, I am not concerned with the traditional
distinction between library materials, whose permanent value makes them
worth cataloguing, and other materials whose temporary or otherwise
limited value has historically excluded them from library collections.
The proper definitional boundaries of the concept of a digital library
is a question to be explored, that exploration begins with a general
sense of the requirements for the digital libraries of the future, and
those requirements presuppose in turn a three-dimensional understanding
of the nature of intellectual life. Of course, a library can support
other social functions besides intellectual life -- entrepreneurship,
for example, or entertainment. But I will focus on intellectual life
because of its deep connection to personal and social well-being.
2 Class stereotypes
One cannot begin to discuss intellectual life without confronting some
destructive stereotypes. Intellectual life, first of all, is not
confined to intellectuals. Intellectuals as a class do exist, though
they are defined and organized in different ways in different cultures
[1]. They can play a valuable role. But a democracy cannot depend on
intellectuals alone. A democracy requires the intellectual effort of
all its citizens, and it must value intellectual practices other than
those associated with high culture.
Everyone has an intellectual life; everyone has questions and thinks
about them. But many unfortunate dynamics have conspired to prevent the
intellectual life of democratic society from reaching its full
potential. Intellectual talent and achievement are often treated as the
status markers of an elite, and the formally meritocratic procedures of
democratic education can be used to increase the stigma associated with
modest educational success. Intellectual snobbery can be used to
control people, and it provokes intellectual insecurities and defensive
reactions. The very attempt to discuss intellectual life can be
perceived as an attempt to lay a burden of judgement on people whose
lives are too demanding to enable them to live up to it, and
intellectual aspirations may be culturally marked as a betrayal of
one's group, for example as "acting white". The norms of intellectual
life may be interpreted as attempts to bias political rules or to
pacify dissent, and indeed such interpretations have often had much
basis in truth.
Intellectual life has often been caught in political conflicts. Burkean
conservatives long questioned the wisdom of attributing rationality to
the lower orders, much less educating them, lest they take it upon
themselves to devise a new social order (Herzog 1998). The founder of
modern public relations, Edward Bernays, was a nephew of Sigmund Freud,
and was quite open in his project of using Freud's ideas to keep social
decision-making power in the hands of an elite few (Ewen 1996). This is
not a democratic vision of intellectual life. Marxism, for its part,
has often celebrated the worker-intellectual, and particularly the
collective intellectual efforts of working people. Such Marxist texts
as E. P. Thompson's (1963) "The Making of the English Working Class"
are the foremost depictions of popular intellectual life. But in
practice the Leninist vanguardism of most organized Marxism has
promoted the opposite approach, in which the workers are molded and
judged in terms of the degree of conformance between their views and
the world-encompassing theories of the intellectual-activist elite.
What's missing in each case is a democratic spirit of trust in the
intellectual judgement of ordinary people. Modern scholarship has gone
a long way toward valuing popular culture, often applying the
interpretive methods of literary criticism and anthropology to recover
its intellectual and political content (Grossberg, Nelson, and
Treichler 1992). Poetry slams, for example, are a novel intellectual
practice whose participants, largely young African-Americans, are often
simply unacquainted with the effete stereotypes that afflict poetry
elsewhere (Clines 1997). Skepticism about a broad-based intellectual
life, then, is partly a result of narrow definitions, partly a lack of
imagination, and partly a real cultural problem that a new generation
of social innovators, armed with appropriate new technologies, can hope
to overcome.
3 Diversity of intellectual life
Talking in a loose way about ordinary people, however, inevitably leads
to a stereotype along the lines of "Joe Sixpack" that is no more
helpful. To get beyond the stereotypes of intellectual life, therefore,
we must appreciate and analyze its diversity. Too narrow a conception
of intellectual life, after all, will surely bias the design of digital
libraries in favor of some culturally prominent model. Consider, first
of all, the wide range of purposes that have been ascribed to
intellectual life at various places and times: understanding of
oneself, collective consciousness, cosmopolitan rationality, overcoming
prejudice, deepening oneself, cultivating an inner life, as a component
of social or political practice, investment in human capital, therapy,
casting off tradition, reproducing tradition, and so on. And as a
concrete matter in people's lives, an intellectual life can be embedded
in a great variety of activities: religion, amateur science, travel,
political participation, psychological self-help, collecting, fandom,
social climbing, conspiracy theorizing, entrepreneurship, professional
development, trivia gathering, family genealogy, aspiring to write and
publish, involvement in the art world, an intellectual hobby relating
to one's profession, and so on.
It is thus clear that an intellectual life need not look "intellectual"
in any stereotyped sense. In particular, an intellectual life is not
just for introspective people; it can be equally relevant to someone
who stays immersed in practical action and mixing with others. Fiction,
music, and television can certainly be part of intellectual life, even
if much of the output in those media is not intended that way [2].
Intellectual life includes the many cultural projects, such as the
growing movement in the United States to reunite the black and white
descendents of slave-owners (Fulwood 1999, Henry 2001, Richardson
2000), that make a personal journey into the raw material for social
reflection. Different kinds of intellectual life can have very
different architectures, from the armchair to the cafe table to the
teenage bedroom or monastic cell, or indeed the laptop and airplane
seat, and digital librarians can aspire to deliver information services
that are fitted to the form and customs of each of these locales. The
study of religious texts makes an outstanding site for the application
of digital libraries. Bible study, after all, is the origin of most of
the West's ideas about reading, and numerous religions have large,
global study-communities that would benefit from technological support.
4 Intellectual life as a space apart
Looking at these diverse embeddings of intellectual life, it is clear
that prevailing images of intellectual life tend to abstract it from
relationships, conversations, feelings, and histories. Yet intellectual
life really is to some extent a space apart, and it is worth
considering just how. To speak of an intellectual life does not
disparage other parts of life. In fact, colloquial usage usefully
treats one's intellectual life as one "life" among many -- social,
professional, emotional, personal, and so on. These "lives" can have
various qualities: compartmentalized, integrated, in conflict, and so
on. A given individual might devote disproportionate effort to some of
them while the others atrophy, and the atrophy of any "life" is
regarded as unhealthy. A healthy life, accordingly, is said to be
"full" or "balanced". An intellectual life can become stale just as a
love life or professional life, yet the pain of a stale intellectual
life seems harder to identify. I will return to the nature of this pain
later on.
Intellectual life can be distinguished from more instrumental concepts
such as training in that one follows questions wherever they go.
Perhaps one does not follow a question "for its own sake", a
meaningless idea. But questions do often arise that lead one beyond the
bounds of a particular task, or even of a profession. One's
intellectual life is the place where such questions are pursued without
any clear idea of how the effort will pay off. An intellectual life is
a space apart, then, from any clearly defined purposes or payoffs. It
is a cauldron on the fire, a refuge or ballast or source of
perspective. It prevents one from being too caught up in the ups and
downs of daily life. The ideas that emerge through intellectual
reflection may be a step more abstract than the immediate problems of
life, and the effort of understanding them must be amortized over an
unclear stretch into the future.
Intellectual life can be pathological, either because the ideas
themselves are disturbed or because one is trying to live in one's
head, without paying attention to the inconvenient complexities of real
life. Bordo (1987) accuses Descartes of just this, and traces a
philosophical tradition of unhealthy detachment (a "flight to
objectivity") from the messiness of involvements with real people and
things.
An intellectual life requires a safe space, which can be solitary or
among the like-minded. Intellectual life can provide a respite from the
real world or a resource for engaging with it; either is legitimate.
One's intellectual life might evolve its own language to express the
things one has seen or conceived, and much translation can be required
to make these observations useful again in the world.
We are a finite species, however, and we constantly need fresh
intellectual fuel. In this sense and others the intellectual life is a
place only halfways apart -- not a distant planet but a separate room,
walled to be sure but trafficking in a controlled way with the larger
world.
Intellectual institutions have also been understood as places apart,
the university for example, and the structure of an intellectual
institution becomes internalized as a cognitive structure [3].
Intellectuals are to some extent a separate society, and when they live
by one another's judgements their separateness grows. This separateness
is inevitable and harmless up to a point. After all, abstraction has
its uses, not least the making of distant connections that would not
otherwise be made in the thick of real life. But the intellectual life
can be a space apart in other ways. Intellectual life is not just for
people with leisure, and new forms can surely be invented that fit into
busier ways of life. Or perhaps life itself needs to be adjusted. If
the road to social advancement lies through education, then the real
haves and have-nots are the ones who have or do not have quiet to
study, already a scarcer commodity than computing power.
5 Questions
One of the great recurring traumas of school is being compelled to read
(what students call) "dry" texts. Reading works best with a question in
mind, and teachers have generally forgotten what it's like to lack
questions for the texts they teach. The notion of reading with a
question is central to the hermeneutic method, itself derived from
Biblical study, for which repeated readings lead to successively deeper
interpretations. Everyone has questions, and in the ideal world
everyone would be matched with whatever book speaks most squarely to
the questions that they have at a given moment. Some questions are
simply factual, and reference services are well-equipped to deal with
these; others are framed as topics that can be translated to a subject
catalog. But most questions are deeper, and little is known about them.
The questions that children bring to fairy tales, for example, are very
basic and mostly unconscious. Many questions are existential, or
diffuse, or else they consist precisely in the search for a name for
something that is only halfway grasped. They may arise from personal
circumstances sufficiently complex and private that they can't be
communicated. They may be intuitive or abstract.
The problem is much harder for fiction than for nonfiction. But in each
case, society does a poor job of matching people to books. Librarians,
book store owners, critics, interview hosts, and others all play their
parts, and technologies such as recommender systems (Resnick and Varian
1997) are part of the answer as well. Yet much more can be done to
provide people's intellectual lives with the steady streams of
individualized stimulus that they need. And so it is worth inquiring
more deeply into the questions that people bring to reading. One
approach locates questions in standpoints: the structural epistemic
situations that the practical world creates for the people who are
assigned to various positions within it. That approach is too narrow,
but one aspect of it is more broadly valid: questions, like other
aspects of self-understanding, are grounded in identity, that is, in
the continuing narration of self that makes both the self and the world
intelligible. The identity at stake can be conceptual, professional or
political, or it can employ some other person as a hero or role model.
Many authors and texts are meaningful in relation to national
identities.
Just as identities are public phenomena, questions likewise tend to
have a public character: even when they are unconscious, secret, or
half-formed, they arise through a project of self-fashioning that
engages with and draws upon the symbolic resources of a culture. Yet
the questions can be hard to capture: most people will have no practice
in the public performance of their questions, and will be unaccustomed
to articulating them. The questions can best be found in established
genres of public testimonial, such as testimonies of religious
conversion, literary memoirs, political consciousness-raising stories,
and the self-narratives of psychoanalysis and support groups. These
stories will include much else besides the questions that brought a
person to a text, or that took form in engagement with that text. But
that is much of the point: questions arise in the fullness of life. To
the extent that people can recognize themselves in the testimonies of
others, perhaps we can understand how to recommend books.
It would also help to have tools for exploring the space of books much
faster. One can often tell at a glance whether a book promises to be
hopelessly dry, and it is easy to imagine trawling thousands of
superficially relevant books each year looking for the few that hit
home, provided that the trawling can be done in stray moments on the
subway. The ultimate goal is to fuel intellectual life by creating a
culture in which everyone has the ongoing expectation of easily being
able to find just the book that speaks to their current question -- a
hermeneutics not just of a single text but of intellectual history as a
whole. This kind of semi-directive exploration is not just for
professional scholars and the leisured rich. Made efficient with
technical support, its practices can multiply to meet diverse needs.
6 Dynamics
Intellectual life is a process. It is not wholly goal-driven nor wholly
methodic, yet it must be actively pursued if it is to keep moving. A
theory of the intellectual life implies a theory of cognition -- a
theory of the interaction between innate mental capacities, cultural
forms of intellectual activity, and the practical and intellectual
environment.
Intellectual life tends to unfold as a set of independent strands, each
of which is liable to be called to mind by a text, a thought, or a
life-situation that it happens to speak to. Intellectual life is thus,
in the short term, inherently fragmentary. Fragments of thought emerge,
and they are often lost unless they are captured in writing or shared
in conversation. Notebooks and dictation machines are artefacts for
capturing those fragments, and much better artefacts are easy to
imagine [4]. The practice of capturing these fragments gives the
fragments, over time, a discrete, packaged quality, yet practice and
effort can be required to notice one's own fragmentary thoughts, as
opposed to losing oneself in the object of the thoughts. The objects of
thought can obviously be diverse, and yet any object, if engaged with
in a sustained way, can serve as a sort of oracle, leading thought in
directions that are just as telling about the thinker.
To be useful in the long run, thought must be externalized, as for
example in a notebook or in letters. Externalizing an idea compels one
to give it form and structure using language or diagrams or some other
representational practice. Having been externalized, the thought now
becomes available for inspection. In its new form, slightly
defamiliarized, it will suggest further thoughts. Articulating a
thought using the grammatical structures of language, for example, will
cause it to be analyzed it into parts that can be varied separately,
thus providing the basis for unanticipated connections. The very fact
of externalizing a thought somehow clears it out of the mind -- if not
from memory then at least from the fear of forgetting it -- and makes
room for more. This kind of iterative externalizing of ideas is also
central to design work (Schon 1983). The gathering of fragments in a
permanent medium such as paper also makes it easier to notice patterns
among them (Goody 1977).
Many new thoughts involve analogies between distant ideas, or else they
apply an existing idea to an unexpected object. The mind will not
spontaneously draw abstract structural analogies between ideas that are
expressed in different terms, but it is extremely efficient at making
connections between ideas that are expressed in similar or overlapping
terms. "Transfer", to put the point in psychological language, will not
automatically map complex formal structures to one another (Lave 1988),
and so the production of new ideas depends heavily on the terms in
which an individual expresses the old ideas. A simple conceptual
framework can thus have immense heuristic value when it is used to
analyze a variety of problems in different fields; even if the concepts
themselves do not dictate any answers, they can mediate analogies that
suggest answers by framing the issues in an unexpected light. This
method is widely used in business, for example, whose concepts can
often be expressed in simple two-by-two matrices.
The connections that emerge in intellectual work often draw one back to
previous reading. A text read for one purpose, or even casually, often
becomes significant through a new connection -- a new question that it
can address. Read with a new question in mind, the text will offer up
new answers. That is why it is said that an educated person lives with
books, as well as simply owning them. Over time a personal library
acquires its own structures and meanings, whether through highlighting
or through the mental traces of the questions and answers that have
threaded through it. But much of one's reading, for example a daily
newspaper, does not become part of a personal library unless one has
the foresight and discipline to copy or clip it. A digital personal
library would be an important aid to intellectual life. This is
different from Bush's (1945) original vision of the Memex, a personal
device that stores all of the world's documents. The personal library,
by contrast, contains only those documents that one has actually read,
with perhaps an annex for those documents that one wishes to read.
Intellectual life would be amplified if anyone could easily return to
anything they have ever read, using whatever sketchy summary of it --
even a distorted memory of a single striking point -- happens to come
back to mind. A personal citation file can help with this recall, but
one cannot produce citations for every newspaper article. The space of
personal reading will always be small enough that massive content-based
indexing and loosely constrained search will be computationally
feasible. Design of the necessary algorithms would be facilitated by
empirical study of naturally occurring desires to recover an article
(or passage in a longer text) that one has once read. These
recollections of previous reading are often sketchy, and they are no
doubt often transformed in memory in the ways described by Bartlett
(1932). A search engine could obviously employ potentially false
queries if it computes similarity measures, but perhaps it could also
employ a model of memory.
7 Alignment
Like any part of life, an intellectual life requires effort. But it
also has rewards. It brings a wider range of ideas to bear on practical
questions, and it makes alternatives visible that may have lacked names
before. It alleviates boredom; indeed, boredom may almost be defined as
the lack of an intellectual life. Many people engage in activities that
even they regard as worthless in an attempt to medicate their boredom,
and it seems reasonable to hope that a developed intellectual life
would lead to a better use of time.
I have described how intellectual life evolves through an interaction
between a very personal process and regular inputs from intellectual
history. But where does it evolve to? Given that it emerges in
fragments and finds its own direction, one might imagine that an
intellectual life becomes ever more fragmentary until it dissolves into
white noise. And this might be a problem for people who suffer from
schizophrenia. For most people, though, the fragments resolve into a
picture. Intellectual life is a matter of discovery. It is a way of
discovering what one finds interesting -- many people don't know -- and
what one cares about. Something is there to be discovered simply
because of the coherence of any person's own personality. It is an
intellectual calling -- a research topic, a life purpose, a cultural
project, an institutional role, a business to found -- the exact form
of which will depend on the individual and the environment.
And as intellectual life leads to places outside the bounds of one's
existing life, the time may come to get a new life. Some people are
satisfied to have an intellectual hobby that provides a diversion from
the other parts of life. But just as often, a fully pursued
intellectual life leads to a new conception of oneself: the
realization, for example, that one is actually a political activist, or
a caregiver, or a religious convert. A fully pursued intellectual life
may also require social support, such as a network of intellectual
friends.
Little is understood about the life changes by which people bring their
various "lives" (intellectual, social, professional) into alignment.
The process can be intimidating and dispiriting, and it can be done in
a way that hurts other people. But embedding in a new intellectual
network is central. For intellectuals this reembedding is supported
naturally by the institutions and rituals of research: one cites the
relevant authors' work and then meets them at conferences.
Intellectuals have powerful incentives to build networks, given the
system of peer review, and they can draw on existing networks that have
been rigorously reproduced for centuries.
Similar mechanisms ought to be available to anybody. Non-intellectuals
may not have the same incentives to build intellectual networks, but
they have incentives nonetheless. A network of like-minded individuals,
knitted together by relations of mutual respect, is a source of
intelligent conversation. In particular, it is a source of the most
important kind of intellectual conversation, the talking-through of
halfways-formed ideas. Just as ideas can develop by being iteratively
externalized into a notebook or iteratively posed as questions to the
existing literature, soliciting the responses of others is an efficient
way to defamiliarize one's ideas and propel their development.
Intellectuals have plane tickets and research libraries to use in
searching for interlocutors, and Internet technologies now provide
similar tools for everyone else. Although the cultural language of
intellectual community among non-intellectuals is not yet
well-developed, Internet discussion forums have obviously provided a
generation of experiments in that direction. Ideally this should lead
to a new kind of social mobility: the continual building and rebuilding
of intellectual community that aligns with individuals' unfolding
intellectual lives.
These generalized intellectual institutions will obviously require some
new cultural beliefs. The necessary beliefs are part and parcel of the
existential situation that generations of democratic organizers have
called empowerment. They start with the belief that one can have a
whole life, including a developed intellectual calling and an
intellectual network to support it. They require individuals to find
their own thoughts valuable -- indeed to know what their thoughts even
are -- and to trust that their thoughts will lead somewhere. They
require developing and trusting a gut sense of what one finds
important.
8 The embedded public sphere
The analysis of individuals' intellectual lives, then, leads to
collective phenomena. What is the intellectual life of a society? It is
not a "group mind". That kind of metaphor begs many questions and makes
social phenomena sound more coherent and harmonious than they are.
Rather than rely on such loose talk, one must analyze the array of
institutions through which collective cognition is organized, including
the conditions of access to those institutions.
The modern history of ideas about the intellectual life of a society
begins with Vico and Herder, who originated the romantic idea of
discrete and organic civilizations, each with its own immanent phases
of intellectual development (Berlin 1976). This sort of theory made
sense in the context of political unification projects in Italy and
Germany, and in this tradition there arose a sophisticated vocabulary
for talking about a society's collective intellectual legacy, the
unconscious contents of its culture, the state of its language as
expressed in works of literature, and so on. In such a context, a
digital library could be understood as a representation of a collective
inheritance.
But geographic mobility and cultural diversity challenge the picture of
discrete civilizations, and the emergence of a global movement for
human rights based on liberal premises challenges the radical
communitarianism of the romantic theory. Real commonalities do knit
modern societies -- mass media, political events, economic conditions,
a shared legal system, ecological problems, market-driven dealings
across community lines, and so on. But these produce overlaps and
interactions among subdivisions, not an organic whole. The romantic
theory of a society's intellectual life was powerful but misleading.
Every society has many intellectual subtraditions, both among
intellectuals and among other sectors, and many intellectual social
histories have yet to be written [5]. But intellectual life is always
embedded in an institutional order, and in a democratic society it
would seem particularly important to investigate the intellectual
workings of the sphere of public debate. There is much to investigate.
Despite simple views of the public sphere as a floor that any
individual citizen might take, in fact the opinion columns of
newspapers are dominated by accredited producers of opinion in
universities, government, industry, and think tanks. Ordinary citizens
are nearly invisible, except as props, in letters to the editor, and in
sound bites chosen by journalists, in most of the institutions of
public debate. This division of labor makes some sense. Because
individual human beings are inherently limited in their cognitive
capacities, political movements must distribute arguments to their
followers. Otherwise no individual, full-time intellectual or not,
would be able to formulate winning arguments on a full range of complex
modern issues.
It is not a scandal, then, that the average citizen is primarily a
consumer choosing among arguments on offer; political cognition is a
collective phenomenon. Of more concern is the institutional order by
which arguments are produced. In the world of professional issue
advocacy, issues are identified with individuals and groups. Careers
are made by pioneering an issue, building a network of other
professionals whose own issues abut it in some way, developing a base
of financial support, and cultivating the media. Conference organizers
and journalists will accordingly develop a mental look-up table that
associates every issue with the advocates who have identified
themselves with it. These professional networks are knitted tightly
enough to frustrate access to the media and other necessary gatekeepers
for any ordinary citizen who is not part of the system. The Internet
can help to circumvent the system to a degree, but even the largest
Internet audiences do not approach the scale of the mass media. Once an
advocate becomes associated with an issue, therefore, that position is
self-reinforcing. Publicity makes that advocate the natural choice for
further publicity, so long as the issue remains live.
More subtly, the constant flow of demands to argue a position provides
the professional advocate with an encyclopedia of rebuttals. Neither
intelligence nor will-power can substitute for these opportunities to
rehearse a progressively more bullet-proof repertoire of arguments [6].
The advocate has an intellectual life, of course, and the day's
news-events provide points of departure -- "hooks" in news jargon -- to
publicize one or another of the strands of thought that constitute the
advocate's evolving position. Ordinary citizens often feel fear at the
prospect of exercising a public voice (Mansbridge 1980, Schudson 1997:
301-302), and justifiably so, given their lack of access to the
professional's opportunities to refine their arguments. No matter how
clear their thinking might be, ordinary citizens under the present
system cannot be confident that their arguments will hold up in the
public arena.
Full democracy therefore requires institutions by which ordinary
citizens, as an extension of their intellectual lives, can rehearse and
refine arguments about the matters that concern them. A voice that has
internalized potential replies is more rational, other things being
equal, and it is more effective. Independent scholarship and political
analysis is often brittle for lack of this kind of testing, and new
intellectual institutions can hope to change this.
9 New models
How, then, can a new generation of digital library technologies support
the intellectual life of a democratic society? Any answer will depend
on the institutions in which intellectual life is embedded. The
technology and the institutions will evolve together. Both of them
will, in turn, require new cultural forms and practices. To see the
connection, imagine a hypothetical system for matching individuals with
potential intellectual friends. If everyone maintains a digital
notebook and other electronic aids to intellectual life, then advanced
content-based comparison mechanisms should be able to match individuals
who are thinking along similar lines. Introductions might be made
automatically, leaving the individuals to take it from there. Such
schemes have been used for many years, in fact, within some highly
regimented environments such as the French electric utility [7]. They
are not completely implausible. The question is whether the individuals
follow up. This will only happen on a large scale if following up has
become a culturally accepted commonplace. Otherwise the prospect of
conversing with an utter stranger will be too abstract and unfamiliar.
Lacking conventional rituals it will require trial and error. And the
participants will have little sense of the probability that the match
will succeed.
What is required, therefore, is an institutional and cultural framework
to provide the necessary sense of adhesion. This framework need not be
complex, and the culture of self-published 'zines (Duncombe 1997) may
provide a model of the kind of lightweight institution that is
required. Along with new technology, then, we need new cultural forms.
The two are indissociable. New lightweight publishing models could make
intellectual communities easier to build and sustain. Open Internet
forums might provide a bad model because they cannot guarantee any
level of discourse. The necessary cultural form may be more like a
club. Technologies and institutions are also required to help authors,
musicians, and others to build audiences. The existing functionality of
publishers may be unbundled, with distribution occurring electronically
and publicity services purchased as needed. Ubiquitous digital library
services should make it easier to organize reading groups around a
single text, as a million people can gain access to the same text with
almost no overhead. Some communities are organized around
paraliteratures, such as fan publications. Improved self-publishing
tools will make such communities easier to organize.
Schools and universities can provide distributed frameworks, both
technological and institutional, for the ongoing intellectual lives of
their alumni -- a permanent seminar. Schools can also facilitate the
most basic cultural change that a democratic intellectual life will
require. Education is often rightly concerned with the content of
various subject matters, but students should also learn process skills.
"Learning how to learn" includes study skills, of course, but it also
includes the broader set of skills for building an intellectual life.
This includes the skills of building an intellectual community for
oneself. Those who are unacquainted with these networks of intellectual
relationships may find them constraining. With personal experience of a
democratic intellectual culture, however, it will become clear that
they are actually a means to freedom -- the freedom of a way of life
that is aligned with one's own intellectual calling.
10 The professionalization of everything
Those who labor under the traditional stereotypes about intellectual
life will find these scenarios implausible. Yet society is clearly
moving in the direction that I described at the outset: the spread of
formerly elite intellectual institutional forms to broader populations.
In the area of work and occupations, this trend might be called the
professionalization of everything, and it is a major potential area for
digital library work. A dynamic and knowledge-intensive economy
obviously requires workers to keep their skills up to date, and that is
a significant role for digital libraries all by itself. But
professionalization is much deeper.
Workers who expect to change jobs several times in a career must
maintain professional networks, starting for example with former
coworkers. As work itself becomes more knowledge-intensive, and
especially as all jobs become learning jobs that require the production
of new knowledge, every occupation becomes professionalized to some
degree. Professions are not simply monopolies on knowledge but
institutions for recognizing and transferring innovations.
Organizations are increasingly formalizing similar institutional forms
within themselves, such as the consulting firms that collect digital
reports on each client project, or the World Bank initiative to
reconstitute itself as a global technology-enabled knowledge bank in
the area of economic development (Wenger and Snyder 2000).
Ubiquitous digital library services can provide the technical substrate
to generalize these institutional forms more widely. There is no
reason, for example, why school children cannot participate in global
communities of peer-reviewed publication. At the high school and
college level, an adapted online scholarly journal model should
certainly replace the dysfunctional institution of the term paper that
only the teacher will ever read (Downing and Brown 1997). Peer review
requires effort from one's peers, of course, but the current model
places impossible burdens for evaluation and feedback on teachers --
burdens that teachers routinely drop. Putting such models into practice
in the early years of school could have an immediate and tremendous
impact on culture. Citizens would grow up accustomed to having a public
voice, to receiving intellectual responses from others, and to
participating in a global intellectual culture. The cultural conditions
of democratic intellectual life will have been achieved.
Endnotes
[1] On the role of intellectuals in society see Barber (1998); Barzun
(1959); Bauman (1987); Bender (1993); Bozoki (1998); Eyerman (1994);
Eyerman, Svensson, and Soderqvist (1987); Fink, Leonard, and Reid
(1996); Goldfarb (1998); Gouldner (1979); Gramsci (1992); Lears (1993);
Le Goff (1993); Michael (2000); Morison (1956); Perry (1984); Rabinbach
(1997); Sadri (1992); Shils (1972); Staloff (1998); and Watts (1994).
[2] See, for example, Liebes and Katz (1990, especially Chapter 8),
Lindlof (1987), Walkerdine (1990), Willis (1990).
[3] I allude here to Vygotsky's (1978 [1934]) idea that cognitive
processes arise through the internalization of organized processes of
social interaction. See also Wertsch (1985).
[4] Journalists refer to the practice of capturing fragments of thought
relevant to a prospective article as "gathering string".
[5] Those that have been written include Feierman (1990), Ginzburg
(1980), Munck (2000), Steele (1997), and Vandergrift (1996).
[6] Collins (1998) makes a similiar point about the history of
philosophy.
[7] Saadi Lahlou, Electricite de France (EDF), personal communication,
November 1995.
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1. http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
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