Reflection: Hyperlinked Communities

Like a true addict, I woke up this morning and checked my email. This is part of my routine. Generally I delete a lot of them and somehow this makes me feel instantly productive. This morning I received an email from Molly M. She is an artist who has a studio in Berkeley. She used to be an architect, and now uses her knowledge of laser cutting to influence her artwork. I find them so pleasing, both abstract and geometric, a delicate balance of chaos and pattern. This design in particular came to mind as I was exploring the resources on hyperlinked communities. The linked pattern balanced in front of an array of color, fixed in space.  The links hold it all together, representing our libraries, the color representing our communities. The layers bound together, fixed in space. I like to think that where the links end, is where we begin to find new connections.

Maybe that’s a little too cheesy. Idk.

When I initially signed up for this course I read the course name literally. Hyperlinks… I hyperlink all the time! As a teacher I try to hyperlink every bit of information I source. My unit slide decks serve as an outline of my class, so I hyperlink all assignments and resources into them. All of my course documents, handouts, projects are hyperlinked with research, citations, other tools and information. In my mind this was the easiest way to share and cite information, and for students, educators and administrators to follow my pedagogy. However, despite this inclination (slash obsessive compulsive behavior) I inevitably have someone (student, educator, administrator) ask where they can find something. Reminding me that providing information is not the end goal of education, communication, connection, interaction, and engagement is.

This course has taught me that “Hyperlinks are people too” and that library programs and services must take care of the whole person. We have to consider the populations we serve, how we can best serve them, how we want to help them understand and interact with the world, and how we can meet their information needs. This discussion reminded me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which I recently learned was inspired by (or appropriated from, depending on your research) the Siksika (Blackfoot) people. The basic concept being that people need their most basic survival needs met first, such as food, water, shelter and safety, before they can work toward “self-actualization”. In Maslow’s view, self-actualization is the manifestation of personal growth and fulfillment. The Blackfoot believed in something greater, “community actualization” in which life is bound to those around you. They believe in creating a culture of “generosity, trust, and cooperation, rather than one of inequity and individualism.”

The examples provided in Module 5 represent this spectrum of needs. The “Community Closet” helping people meet their more basic survival needs – providing resources for the taking. The “Soup Nights” offering food and community needs. Or the studio spaces, “Stop Motion for Kids” and 3D printing for patrons to engage in creative pursuits can meet their inclination toward self-actualization. Libraries should and are engaging in “community actualization” constantly.

Despite this positive emphasis, I was particularly stuck on danah boyd’s reflections on Medium: What World Are We Building? She explores the challenges of social networking sites, as they became a tool for social discontent rather than for social justice. She writes that as she saw the rise of social media she also “watched teens struggle to make sense of everyday life and their place in it. And I watched as privileged parents projected their anxieties onto the tools that were making visible the lives of less privileged youth.” She talked with kids who said that “black people use MySpace and white people use Facebook”, teenagers were reproducing discriminatory and racist behavior they saw elsewhere and projecting it onto the networking tools they were using. She also reflects on the cultural biases that are deeply embedded in “big data” and it is these datasets that our systems are trained to learn on, “we didn’t architect for prejudice, but we didn’t design systems to combat it either”. She writes this in 2016, before the widespread use of AI. 

Our data is information. Information that is bought and sold to keep capitalism going, not to keep people in community. Discontent means clicks, comments and purchases for profiteers. Alex Jones for example thrives on discontent and made $165 million selling supplements on his website. I’m sure he’s not shy to sell his subscribers data either.

As danah puts it, “Data is power. Increasingly we’re seeing data being used to assert power over people. It doesn’t have to be this way, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that, unchecked, new tools are almost always empowering to the privileged at the expense of those who are not.” If we don’t understand how tech works against us, and we don’t give opportunities for our most vulnerable populations to engage in these issues, than we perpetuate unequal, unsafe systems. 

danah’s conclusion: “We need those who are thinking about social justice to understand technology and those who understand technology to commit to social justice.” There needs to be more oversight and accountability of what tech companies are doing with our data, and more education and programming on digital literacy so that young people grow up to challenge these systems. This can’t only be the responsibility of libraries, but the responsibility of communities at large. However, seeing the work of libraries across the world, and knowing the work my colleagues and I participate in related to civic online reasoning, I have hope that this knowledge will become power. I’m just perpetually nervous about the pernicious power of capitalism to work against social justice.

Libraries and communities, knowledge and power, linked together, fixed in space. 

Hope you enjoyed all the hyperlinks related to hyperlinked communities.