1st LIS blog: what is LIS and why is it important for me to write a blog about it?

My name is Nathan Finley and I am just beginning an MA course in Library and Information Sciences (LIS), in which I hope to develop a number of Web 2.0 skills (and Library 2.0 skills) as well as advance my understanding of a number of philosophical/theoretical issues dealing with the technological age. This can be pretty heavy duty stuff, and I decided to use the blogger platform as a method of organizing/trying out some thoughts and discoveries both as a practice in public discourse and as a private meditational tool.
Of course I've read a number of other blogs, mostly political in nature, over the course of the last several years, but I never really thought about starting my own. Until now. I just began Nancy Courtney's Library 2.0 and Beyond and my brain is buzzing with what to me are good ideas. Since I'm just beginning my MA program I thought this would be a perfect time to start a blog and keep a record of my thoughts as I progress through the next year and a half. I'm hoping that this will clear away some of my cobwebs and refine my thinking/writing for class. In order to help facilitate this endeavor I have written the following introductory blog as a sort of manifesto for myself and any potential readers. Comments of all and any sort are welcome--don't think you have to follow my creed if you talk to me!

My guiding thoughts are probably along the lines of this: what does the technological revolution really mean to us as citizens, as participants in government and community networks, as artists and lovers and thinkers and dreamers? In order to contextualize this question I'll review something that I learned while studying at the University of Florida.

Dr. Greg Ulmer, who I had the chance to take a graduate course with at UF, coined the term "electracy" to indicate how radical of a transformation he thinks we as humans are undergoing at this time. The new media communication tools that are revolutionizing our lives are as tangibly transformational, according to Dr. Ulmer, as the advent of literacy was 3000 years ago. Thus he is calling the new skill sets associated with the new media "electracy" (wikipedia has a good article on electracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electracy). Mark that he's not saying the the new media platforms are akin to the advent of the printing press. No, he's thesis is far more radical. What Dr. Ulmer argues is that we are living in a time of transformation as radical as the dawn of human writing itself.

Wew. That's pretty radical. I mean, if I sit down and think about it a number of realizations come to mind. I think about how the ancient Druids of the Celtic world were notorious for distrusting the new medium of writing--and they're pretty much extinct for all practical political purposes. I think about how the pre-historic peoples of so many societies--from ancient Greece to the Scandanavian countries to Africa and the Middle East--all finally broke down and made written records of their oral traditions, thus creating the first historical documents of their peoples.

Also, however, I think about how much oral traditions still persist even today. The spoken word is still very much a vital part of our culture: poetry jams and hip-hop communities, stand-up comedy and presidential addresses are all part of our oral traditions in the West. So the new medium doesn't do away with the older medium, the one just displaces the other as a primary signification tool in our lives. That's a relief as a book lover!

But how does such a radical transformation effect the way we think about ourselves? How does it make radical and far-sweeping changes in the way we narrate our own stories--as individuals, as cultures, as political bodies--on a fundamental level? How do we gauge that foundation and anticipate or even observe its swings and transformations? Finally, and very important: how does it effect the way we perceive--the actual physical activity of sensing--the world around us.

While these might seem like somewhat common sense questions where the answers are right before our eyes I am starting this blog with the hypothesis that we have not even begun to understand how radically transformed an "electrate" culture is relative to a "literate" culture. As much as we today have difficulty imagining what a purely oral culture would have looked like, how it would have operated, and that it could have constructed such elaborate and well thought out cosmologies as the Vedas or Homer's Iliad (yes, some argue that this was an oral poem before Homer wrote it down), so it is nearly inconceivable to think about what kinds of changes the new technologies will entail. My firm belief is that all things are cyclical in nature--some argue spiralic. What goes around comes around. Are we beginning a new loop, are we witnessing the end of one, is there any way to rationally see where we are heading without getting into some really wild new age mumbo-jumbo?


One of the chief reasons I am starting this blog is to make a record of my thoughts and reactions to the material that I will be learning, with a particularly close attention being placed on the "evolutionary" changes wrought on society by technology. In order to stay away from the really wild and out-there theories like I see on New Age blogs (end of the Mayan calender type of stuff), I'll try to stay as grounded as I can in the texts and philosophies that I have used or am using in the course of my studies. I do warn any readers from the outset that I am not going to hold back on looking into what might be some really weird spaces. I want to get ABSTRACT with this. But I also want to have a solid center to come back to.

There is one note that I should make and that is that I am heavily informed by Christian texts and will come back to the Judeo-Christian traditions time and again in my discussions. I do have an interest in working through some theoretical notions that I have in regards to technology and the Biblical texts but I warn you up front that the Bible rubs me the wrong way. I am so heavily informed by it because I have a strong familial background in the Bible. But what rubs me in an even worse way is the political agenda of Bible students and so-called Christians. So if your stomach is turned by religio-political agendas, be aware that I am aware of my own agenda and one thing that I want to do in this blog is to look more closely at my own agenda (and those of others) in this time of upheaval which many find themselves going through.

Now I'm tired of talking about what I want to do with this site, and I want to get down to doing it. Since the introductions are over, I'll close this first blog and get prepared to write my first real entry. thanks to anyone out there who finds this and wants to keep reading!