Farewell to 2020, Let's Move On

Hindsight is 2020 and that’s what this year will go down in history, one that is transformative in not only the way we live but conduct work. While the information profession will be reshaped in the post-Covid world, changes were underway well before 2020.

One of these changes to stay is videoconferencing. It’s critical to see the rise of Zoom as it has become almost ubiquitous in our daily, particularly working, lives. Information and “white-collar” professionals will likely continue to concentrate on digital engagement with not only their users and customers but also colleagues in lieu of the physical office and meeting spaces. Whether Zoom will last beyond the next few years is irrelevant, however, but what will endure is the way we approach communicating with one another across using digital services, and especially learning which will be reshaped forever. I’ve often thought that it made no sense for ten minutes meetings to require everyone to be in the same space; it’s inefficient and unsafe.

As such Zoomification has now become a term that highlights the radical shift in the way we now communicate with colleagues. Instant messaging and video conferencing aren’t particularly novel or groundbreaking, but how we communicated using technologies this year is ineed transformative. It’s amazing to see how quickly information industries have adapted.

Many organizations vanished due to Covid, but many more reinvented themselves to not only survive but thrive in the chaos.  I find Disney as a uniquely successful example: by restructuring and focusing on streaming its shows and films, digital technology shifted to became the most important facet of the company’s business and moving away from the bricks and mortar company that it’s so used from the past century (although Disneyland will continue to become an important part nevertheless).

Libraries, in the same vein, will likely forever change as well - and I hope for the better. We’ll be meeting our patrons online, our reference services will happen in a hybrid of digital and physical spaces, and our collections will increasingly be streamed and available online, born-digital ebooks and journals, and analog materials increasingly digitized for on-demand access. 

But change is nothing new for libraries.  I recently came across a paper that traces the use of technology in health care settings as far back as the American Civil War era and librarians have been instrumental in transitioning to the information age.   

It is known that the telegraph was used during the Civil War to transmit casualty lists and order medical supplies. By 1900, the telephone was in use, and physicians were among the first to adopt it. The telephone was the mainstay of medical communications for fifty years and remains a major force. About the time of World War I, radio communication was established, and, by 1930, it was used in remote areas such as Alaska and Australia to transfer medical information. By the time of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, radio communication was used regularly to dispatch medical teams and helicopters.

So while I don't look necessarily look forward to Zoom fatigue, I'm heartened that as an information professional, that I get to support our faculty and students, and be a part of history.  So we move forward, and hindsight will be 2020. See you on the other side and Happy New Year.

Master of Switching In An Age of Information

In an age of surveillance, propaganda, and fake news, I'm currently re-reading a 2010 title, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.  A decade ago, the Web 2.0-era appeared as if it were paving a way to a better humanity of collaboration, free expression and economic innovation.  Tim Wu's argument that information occurs in long "cycles" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time seemed like a vague theory at the time.  A mere warning.   In 2010, I couldn't quite fathom how the internet belonged to a chronological continuum that included the rise of the Bell AT&T telephone monopoly, the founding of the Hollywood entertainment industry, broadcast, and cable television industries.   Many (including myself) were swept up in rewriteable and perpetual beta, and even conducted research, publishing, and all that of the glory of participatory and democratization of information.  Indeed, the optimism for the future of the web seemed infinite.  

While Wu warned us that it's companies like Apple that would eventually become a more closed system, and that the internet industry would follow the historical cycle of the rise of information empires, it didn't seem possible at the time.  The iPhone brought so many possibilities, and coupled with social media, enabled social movements across the world.   The future of the longtail was based on disruptive technologies meant to bring equality.   In 2006, You was Time's Person of the Year.  

But how times have changed.  The current dispute over TikTok reminds us that it's a microcosm of just how complicated the internet has become.  The vision of “open web” as a means to build a just and thriving society not only looks like a hazy reality, but the information empires formed from the geopolitical web of business has far from ensured us technological neutrality for human rights, privacy or even free expression.   How times have changed.     

Anti-Racism Titles for a Better, More Informed World

Photo by Cyrus Gomez

I compiled a shortlist of titles after being asked by a colleague for some recommendations.  There are far too many compelling titles out there to list.  These are just personal recommendations that I can recall on the whim.   Deeply disturbing hate crimes against Asian Americans and Asian Canadians across North America, both physical and verbal assaults, have risen sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic.   The world is rising up to the occasion place these past few months to injustice and intensified with the Black Lives Matter protests.  Anti-Asian hate crimes are currently being investigated in the police everywhere. Incidents have included hate-filled rants, racial slurs, threats, and intimidation, as well as spitting and coughing on victims and violent physical assaults in public settings.  What can we do as a society to do our part in countering intolerance?   The first thing we can do is being informed, of tracing the history of racism.  

Yellow Peril!: An archive of anti-Asian fear
The Yellow Peril is a catalogue of more than 150-year anti-Asian writings, illustrations, propaganda, and pop culture. The recent spate of anti-Asian hate crimes stemming from COVID-19 would sadly fit right in at the end of this book, but offers a stark reminder that xenophobia is still deeply ingrained and much work remains to be done to combat it.

Asian American Librarians and Library Services Activism, Collaborations, and Strategies
What are the library services and resources that Asian Canadian and Asian Americans need? In a profession that is predominantly white and steeped in Western colonial traditions, what does it mean to be an Asian librarian in the 21st century? Library professionals and scholars share reflections, best practices, and strategies, and convey the critical need for diversity in the LIS field, library programming, and resources.

Days of Distraction
As the heroine narrates her romantic life, she finds herself in the process of facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. It is a story of her family’s immigration, the history of interracial relationships in America, and stereotypes of Asian American women in the Western world

Double Melancholy: art, beauty, and the making of a brown queer man
C. E. Gatchalian's Double Melancholy charts the memoirs of queer Canadian man of Filipinx descent who attempts to tease out the complexities of his identification with white and Western ‘high culture.’

Obasan 
Set in Canada, Obasan focuses on the memories and experiences of Naomi Nakane, whose brief stay with her aunt ‘Obasan’ helps Naomi revisit and reconstruct in memory her painful experiences as a child during and after World War II, and the lives of Japanese-Canadians who were uprooted and sent to internment camps during the war.