From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Fri Feb 24 2006 - 12:27:49 EST
Jerry wrote: But, please do not forget that urban areas internationally are often under fiscal distress and attempting to cut city budgets. In that context, I think they will increasingly target libraries for closure. Yes, well it's a funny thing how they talk about the "knowledge economy" and the "information age" and then shut down libraries which are needed by people who don't have all the gizmo's of the sophisticated classes. But my experience is that librarians are generally quite skilled at the politics of information, and demonstrating the need for libraries. There have been attempts by neoliberal more market fanatics to promote profit-making and profit-driven libraries, but really they haven't been all that successful - one reason is that marketisation of information generates a lot of "nonsensical hot air" that is easily demolished by people practically "in the know" about the realities of information management. Often people think trading in access rights to information is great, until they have to fork out big themselves, to get it. Then they start yelling that information ought to be freely or cheaply available, or that there should be more competition to drive down prices. The final problem is really that human knowledge is lodged in human minds, and as long as people are legally free to dispense it as they will, you can only get at it through socially relating (which involves acknowledging that a person has rights), or through robbery (in which case anything goes, this would increase uncertainty, rather than reduce it). But really Jerry, I'm sorry but I have to take a break from OPE-L, however intellectually stimulating, as I have too many things to do, and people get pissed off because you make them wait. The interesting question about the TP is, why do people persist for so long in an error? Pedagogically, I think what we need is a "layman's guide to the transformation problem". I'm usually inclined to think that people (including myself) persist very long in an error, because what appears as an error does contain a real truth somewhere, which is not acknowledged. It's maybe a bit analogous to the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, where you know the answer, but you just cannot seem to get it out of the memory banks. It could of course be a hoax or a ruse, but it could be for real. And so people somehow sense this, and so they can cling to something, an idea, even when they know themselves there's something wrong with it, or that it's officially discredited and so on. Like, "you can try to bamboozle me all you like, but I stick with it anyway." So I feel a bit the same way as Ian Wright, you have this perfectly valid content, but you have to creatively reframe the puzzle, the Rubik's cube if you like, so it gets solved. The main fault I personally have is typically that I try to tackle too many things at once, maybe over-enthusiastically like a kid in a toy store - which maybe yields interesting rapping artistry, but doesn't truly crack the problem, and ends up being dis-orienting. I hope to return to the subject in future, when I have a few pressing tasks out of the way... Regards Jurriaan
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