ILI Blog - Week 2 - Technology and Information Literacy

Question(s)
How is technology changing our view of information literacy? What challenges does this bring to library services? Describe an "aha" moment you had this week, if any.

Answer(s)
What did information literacy look like before technology (writing tools, printing presses, the internets), before it was formalized as a concept? What sociocultural practices shaped how people sought, consumed, and shared information? Is there an oral literacy different from reading/writing/etc. literacy, or is it just a difference of mode of transmission?

Technology deepens, expands, and makes more complex my view of information literacy. Information is able to spread further faster and more fragmented, and be available in a slew of new formats from various new access points, created and shared widely by more people with fewer barriers to publishing and dissemination. We are no longer limited to engaging mostly with physical copies of books and other texts that make their way into our neighborhood, or local news reports on events of the world, or even our own sociocultural/familial paradigms. We are able to access overwhelming amounts of information from experts to total ignorant novices from all over the world, and need to remain reflective and critical of what we seek, find, manipulate, and share.

In other ways, technology merely changes some of the details of delivery but not the overall ideas and needs of information literacy. We still need to pay attention to who is saying what and why, and why they're not saying other things, and how they came by their information and opinions, and who they're associated with, and so on. There are always people with agendas, for good or ill, behind information, from data sets to philosophical rumination, and we need to understand that context.

Especially on the internet, we have to be vigilant, as anyone can say they are anybody and tout anything as truth. And with the speed at which information travels and proliferates and cascades and multiplies, we need to be aware that the first thought that pops into mind isn't necessarily the most refined, or the one that needs to be shared, without further reflection and examination.

Library services have to rise to the challenges that technology brings (speed, convenience, unchecked and uncritical proliferation), in order to fulfill library missions and also to retain relevancy, against so many other sources of query answering as well as misinformation and opinion about libraries' value to society.