Libraries and Learning
Gorilla Theatre
January 17, 2018
I enjoyed reading John Warner’s recent confessional – he was very nearly fooled for a moment by the “gorilla television” prank. Many people were fooled, because we’ve become accustomed to believing six impossible tweets before breakfast.* There are at least a couple of things going on – confirmation bias (it fits a pattern of shock and outrage many of us have been feeling about this president and confirms our sense that this is not normal and not right). The other is decontextualization. If you don’t know the person who tweeted is joking, and it comes to you in a stream of weary horror about the state of the world (“let that sink in” is a the new OMG in Twitterland), it’s just further proof that we’re in the handbasket and it’s getting much warmer. John suggests, and I heartily endorse this idea, that we should be starting our discussions of information literacy in the first year right here, not with how to find peer reviewed research for college writing. I’ve thought this for years.
Because I am as old as dirt, I remember when faculty who never really bought into information literacy as a valuable use of class time suddenly wanted library sessions. They noticed students were using websites in their research and were choosing them unwisely. Suddenly it was important that we have a discussion of how to tell good information from bad. (Somehow picking books off the shelf unwisely was an entirely different problem – to faculty, but not to students.) Some of these sudden converts were perfectly upfront about why this was a job for librarians. They weren’t familiar enough with the web to guide that discussion. I sense a similar dread right now, thanks concern about “fake news.” Students need to know how to think about this torrent of misinformation, propaganda, tilted news, disinformation, and clickbait. But someone who is confident about guiding students to good scholarly information may feel just as unprepared as students when it comes to knowing how to recognize these things as our information landscape undergoes rapid and unpredictable tectonic shifts. Our usual scholarly methods don’t work very well.
The thing is, this is the world our students will graduate into. Learning how to find peer-reviewed articles won’t help students figure out if a gorilla-television claim is true. Isolating part of our information landscape and labeling it “high quality” is not only misleading, it fails to make a case for why that sort of information matters in a world where most of the information we encounter every day is published and shared under different rules. Academic scholarship can help us understand our world. As a method of inquiry it’s valuable and findings are often significant beyond a small circle of experts. If students graduate thinking of peer-reviewed research as a thing that only matters in academic circles, that it’s good “because I say so,” we’ve done them an injustice. We’re also not even