The Treachery of Technology
Between the years 1928 and 1929 Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte created “The Treachery of Images” in which a lone pipe is shown on a yellow field. Under the pipe Magritte wrote “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” French for “This is not a pipe.” At the time, the painting stirred much controversy, as the image above the words is very clearly a pipe. But then, that was the point. In response to the image Magritte said only, “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!”1 (Torczyner 72) And it is the nut of Magritte’s statement — ‘it’s just a representation’ — that carries forth to the technological world of 2015.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the Internet doesn’t really do anything new, it simply does things in a new fashion that is currently cheaper than the old school way of doing the very same thing. And, in many cases, this “newness” is, like Magritte’s pipe, only a representation of the original, real thing. In his book, You Are Not A Gadget, author and technologist Jaron Lanier speaks on this very same topic. He explains the limitations of digital objects (of which the Internet is one) saying, “Digital representations can be good, but you can never foresee all the ways a representation might need to be used. […] The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions about what aspects of it will turn out to be important. It will be a flat, mute, nothing if you ask something of it that exceeds those expectations.”2 (Lanier 133) This is basically what Magritte was articulating when he asked if the pipe in his painting could be stuffed [with tobacco]. Of course, it could not, and thus something was asked of the painting that exceeded what it could physically do. Lanier mirrors Magritte’s statement on the pipe when he says, “a physical object, on the other hand, will be fully rich and fully real whatever you do to it. […] What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion. A digital image, or any kind of digital fragment, […] captures a certain limited measurement of reality within a standardized system that removes any of the original source’s unique qualities.” (Lanier 134) This now brings us to the topic of the library.
The obsoleting of the library has been predicted each time a new technological revolution has taken hold of humanity, from our agrarian beginnings to the Industrial Revolution through the current Knowledge Worker revolution, each milestone has prompted cries of the death of the library. And yet, the library remains. While it is arguable that the actual “brick-and-mortar” library will forever be around (though if you read any writings on the idea of the “third place” in society you will see that there is a strong argument that it will be) it is almost assured that the librarian will always be around. And the reason is because, as both Magritte and Lanier have said, we are real and thus cannot ever be represented to completion. In addition to this, as author Neil Gaiman pointed out in an interview in 2010, “in a world where Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.”3 (Gaiman 2010) Anyone who has ever conducted a reference interview knows this to be true. The first thing you learn about the reference interview is that what is being asked for is seldom what is actually needed. In other words, when people are looking for information they do so in a way that makes sense to them, not necessarily in a way that makes sense to how that information is actually organized. The job of the librarian then is to get to the actual question being asked or information being sought by asking questions and offering examples. Internet search engines really can’t do this (the most Google will ask is “did you mean…” if you’ve misspelled a word). As PHP Presenter Andy Fischoff says in his “Coding For Kids” program, “computers are stupid. They can only do what you tell them.”4 A librarian, on the other hand, can react, empathize, question and assess in real time.
The most important message I am trying to convey in these opening essays is not that technology is bad — I believe it is quite the opposite — but that technology is just another tool for people to use. It is not, and should never be, a replacement for actual human interaction. The library is a beacon of human interaction and community and this is one of its greatest strengths. This, in conjunction with the people inside is why the library as an institution can never be created to completion by any other source.
1. Magritte Quote: Magritte, R., & Torczyner, H. (1977). Magritte, ideas and images. New York: H.N. Abrams
2. Lanier, Jaron. (2010). You are not a gadget. New York: Vintage
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH-sR1uCQ6g
4. Fischoff, Andrew. (2015). Personal conversation with author. September 2015.
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