Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: I know the Golden Rule of speaking and writing, so I’ll start off with my catchiest question right off: why is it that Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” caused such a furor with the public and with Congress? Why is it that the last Presidential campaign ended up focused in part on the violence and coarseness of the typical product coming out of Hollywood? What is it about Jerry Springer and his imitators that makes us draw uncomfortable conclusions about our culture? The answer is the same for all three, and deceptively simple: in our putative information-driven society, when we debate the sources and nature of the information we produce and consume, we’re debating the basis and nature of our economy, and as the media scholar John Durham Peters notes, “we’re [also] debating democracy by other means.” That is why exchanges about such trivial matters take on sharp political inflections, and why as Peters states, the “spectacle of a stupefied TV audience worries us” so. If information and its related sets of critical skills are as important to economic and political participation as we keep insisting, then what information we produce, how we keep it, what we keep, and how it is absorbed or not are crucial questions in our culture and libraries are important (if undervalued) institutions in this.
Source: Lincoln (University of Nebraska)
Author: John Buschman
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2151445367