intellectual freedom
EFA’s Five Substantive Principles – Endorsement!
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/launching-efa , 23 April 2019)
As part of grassroots efforts to stand for digital rights and related intellectual freedoms, I want to promote EFA’s five substantive principles:
- free expression: people should be able to speak their minds to whomever will listen.
- security: technology should be trustworthy and answer to its users.
- privacy: technology should allow private and anonymous speech, and allow users to set their own parameters about what to share with whom.
- creativity: technology should promote progress by allowing people to build on the ideas, creations, and inventions of others.
- access to knowledge: curiosity should be rewarded, not stifled
I endorse these principles with the support of a few of my collaborators. In particular, Brandon Smith, independent journalist, and George Walker, technologist and consultant.
#Privacy Chat, May 2019
Jesse Lambertson … will discuss his top five recommendations for digital freedom!
6 May 2019 / 7-8:30 PM
Kate Waller Branch of Alexandria Public Library / 717 Queen St. Alexandria, VA 22314
Information here.
Freedom and #Diversity in #Libraries
I read Marshall Breeding’s May 2017 “Library Systems Report 2017” way back when it was published in American Libraries magazine – but something struck me this morning while reading a completely unrelated article on politics/culture in the US…
(accessed from American Libraries magazine, 27 July 2017)
That if, as Breeding states, in the internet age, libraries are moving toward increasingly centralized, for-profit “solutions” for their tools and services – from technical services, authority syncing, reference chat tools and vendors for research materials of all formats (and I think he is correct), then libraries are moving away from their democratic ideals towards arrangements with a more fascist bent.
This trend in libraries of course simply reflects the state of culture at large that works by default with the internet.
But the end result, as I see it, is at least twofold:
- That the number of librarians and interested connected professionals are able to engage less and less in the design and implementation of those technologies across almost every front- This not only affects those people’s ability to engage in deep-dive lifelong learning, but it also means that “design local” as a guiding metaphor is being thrown out the window. Even as libraries’ staff talk about how much they like to serve their patrons/community/users (whatever each library wants to call its local constituents, it is actually less able over time to to design solutions built specifically for those very people.
- That one major result of the above trend as partially commented upon in bullet # 1 is a significant decline in diversity – this even as diversity & inclusion committees and working groups are being formed across libraryland in the United States. We talk about diversity and intellectual freedom in libraries. But we define those ideas in increasingly narrow terms if we do not take into consideration the elaborate tools that might be built if local libraries maintained their own servers, ILSs, and well defined privacy policies that could be much better managed if local libraries (of all types) maintained a higher level of control over their own systems.
The result of this trend migrates thinking & tinkering away from local decision making, policies, technological innovation towards a totalitarian model wherein diversity is discouraged and intellectual freedom is hindered across several important fronts – especially meaningful fronts in the information age.
A few thoughts…
Thank you for reading.
