BackTalk: When Personality Vanishes
Aug 15, 2010Every Monday for the past three years I have turned the front of the community college library where I work into a coffee shop. Popular vindication for my efforts has been slow, but it’s been peaking ever since I started putting up humorous posters about the founder of Coffee Monday (me), “companion to the stars.” I have also been having lots of great conversations with students of all ages who have no idea what to think of me or my intentions. They love the strong, free coffee I brew. On a good day we’ll serve 150 cups by 5 p.m. Coffee Mondays is a place where caffeine, fun, ideas, and people all collide.
I like to think libraries should be places of conversation like this, physical locations where books and ideas are debated, environments where students can encounter professors, librarians, and their friends and, on occasion, indirectly glimpse some timeless truth.
This facet of education is about to be lost as libraries vanish into “space”—literally, “cyberspace”—and into a bath of digitization. This baleful epochal moment is apparently inexorable. Books were the last holdout, but, as we all know, they will soon be gone. Place will have become space, and personality will vanish.
Succumbing to cyberspace
There is nothing theoretical about this. My student friend Jeremy, who was once a regular at Coffee Mondays, came by the other day to see me at the reference desk, where our numbers have been declining as fast as head counts in a Protestant church. I told him I had not seen him in a while and had even wondered whether he was okay. He said he had been really busy with school and work and that since they installed Wi-Fi in the dorms he had no more to need to come to the library, even on Mondays.
He said he missed our conversations, which had encompassed philosophy, economics, and course selection. I told him I missed his friends Leila, Mars, and Paul. For a while we had all hung out at Coffee Mondays, but technology had stymied our friendships.
The placebound circuit of the library, once again, had succumbed to cyberspace, a world of infinite pixels but no people.
The loss of teaching moments
I can’t help but think Jeremy has lost something by not having an advocate in me, someone older who is willing to listen, offer counterviews, and sympathize with his confusion and uncertainties. A kind of tangible teaching occurred between us—he obtained, perhaps, a greater purchase on a sense of human potential; I obtained what the mathematician Jacob Bronowski called a “sense of the future,” a feeling of continuance at a time of my life when such a thing is most welcome.
We accomplished this feat at the reference desk during slower times, when we could speak freely. We did not text our words across six continents, nor speak by phone. Our jokes and our stories were told directly, and we could hear the other laugh and read each other’s face. There were no printouts, no records of anything we ever said.
Everything between us will be held in the stillness of the place we were in—the library, where the knowledge in books sleeps by the hundreds of thousands. Such a place is sacred; when it vanishes, just that much more meaning will disappear from our lives.
Information, but no personality
My friend Cindy, an English instructor, used to visit frequently and always brought her classes in to learn about the library. She recently shocked me by saying that she hadn’t been in the place for three years because she can do “everything” from her desk—she presumably conducts her own offsite bibliographic instruction.
We are poised to witness the loss of libraries from civilization’s millennia-long program, yet few seem to have noticed. The masses are hooked up to YouTube, and the librarians are in denial.
The great libraries built since the Middle Ages were shaped around the book, the most familiar symbol of knowledge to this day. If predictions run true, books in their current form will begin a gradual process of disappearance, analogous to handmade books after the invention of the printing press. Personal libraries will continue to exist, but slowly they will become rare. Libraries will disappear except as archives of precious original papers.
An increasingly decentered society is not likely to take up the cause of books, reading, or libraries. Like all humans, we’ll do what’s expedient unless forced to do otherwise. An evolved Kindle is our future.
With each passing year I will reach fewer young minds. True, students can, and often do, find something useful on their own. True, the computer is an amazing tool that can do amazing things. Everything will be exactly the same, and better, in education, except that it won’t. We’ll have information, but no personalities. No quirks to laugh over, no Coffee Mondays, no volumes of Romeo and Juliet to underline or define young love.
William H. Wisner is a Reference Librarian at Laredo Community College, TX. He has written about libraries for various publications, including Sewanee Review, and is the author of Whither the Postmodern Library? (McFarland, 2000). We welcome opinion pieces for BackTalk. Please send them to ffialkoff@mediasourceinc.com
