#libraryfutures

we need other ways for humans to learn about the world and interact with each other, healthier ways, less commercial and addictive ways. We should explicitly build out public forums, we should subsidize journalism, we should enhance our public support for universities, museums & libraries.

Libraries are lifelines in the modern world. They provide access to knowledge and technology; they are places where people apply for jobs, file taxes, get warm during the winter, cool off in the summer, and escape the apprehension and frenzy of daily life.  Few institutions have had as profound an impact on American society.  Now, perhaps as a result of the Bard-Brooklyn Public Library partnership, these iconic institutions will become places where men and women who have been marginalized and left behind--immigrants, the homeless, veterans, the formerly incarcerated, and the family members of incarcerated people--can start their journeys toward a more secure future and a better life.

“In relation to the Internet and the changes it has already brought in our society, my feeling is that although we don’t know really where it’s heading because it’s too early in the change, we’ve had one stroke of luck. The stroke of luck was that, as a species, we’ve conducted this experiment once before. We’re living through a transformation of our information environment. This happened once before, and we know quite a lot about it. It was kicked off in 1455 by Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of printing by movable type.”

there is widespread recognition in the academy and beyond that getting at the truth is difficult, that the construction of what counts as truthful is indeed contestable and contested and that debunking falsehood requires critical skills and moral commitment to truth-seeking.

I came away from these conversations thinking that one big challenge for this generation is determining how to take good things that are happening on the local level and translate them to the national level, where the problems are. I was also struck by pervasive but subtle hunger for a change in the emotional tenor of life. “We’re more connected but we’re more apart,” one student lamented. Again and again, students expressed a hunger for social and emotional bonding, for a shift from guilt and accusation toward empathy. “How do you create relationship?” one student asked. That may be the longing that undergirds all others.

we make the five following recommendations for the future of media literacy work: ■ Develop a coherent understanding of the media environment. With new technologies and new rhetorical techniques, existing programs should be updated. ■ Improve cross-disciplinary collaboration. Media literacy is often seen as a narrow, pedagogical  eld. But work from other disciplines – social psychology, political science, sociology – is producing new research and  ndings that could greatly bene t media literacy. ■ Leverage the current media crisis to consolidate stakeholders. The new attention on “fake news” could allow for new cross-disciplinary collaboration and therefore greater coherence within the  eld. ■ Prioritize the creation of a national media literacy evidence base. A centralized and stable base of evaluation data would make more accurate assessment possible. Though there are many potential political challenges to such an evidence base. ■ Develop curricula for addressing action in addition to interpretation. With the increased use of social media, literacy efforts need to be able to address user behavior in addition to interpretation.

ethics in general and digital ethics in particular, cannot be a mere add-on, an afterthought, a late-comer, an owl of Minerva that takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering—once digital innovation has taken place, and possibly bad solutions have been implemented, less good alternatives have been chosen, or mistakes have been made. Nor can it be a mere exercise of questioning. The building of critical awareness is important but it is also only one of the four tasks of a proper ethical approach to the design and governance of the digital. The other three are signalling that ethical problems matter, engaging with stakeholders affected by such ethical problems, and, above all, providing sharable solutions. Any ethical exercise that in the end fails to provide some acceptable recommendations is only a preamble. So digital ethics must inform strategies for the development and use of digital technologies from the very beginning, when changing the course of action is easier and less costly, in terms of resources and impact. It must sit at the table of policy-making and decision-taking procedures from day one. For we must not only think twice but, most importantly, we must think before taking important steps.