Commons - Lauren

I never go to libraries. The only time I’ve ever gone to a library is when I was forced to go with somebody else. Despite this fact, every time I go to a library, I love it. I think libraries are crucial to democracy. Libraries are almost tangible internets. It’s reading, learning, and sharing materials that are archived for the purpose of dispersing information and entertainment. To take away a library would be to essentially take away the right to share that information and therefore taking away the right to democracy. In libraries sit the history of our freedom and the opportunities of documenting the present to circulate our knowledge throughout the future. Anyone could argue that we don’t need them anymore because we have the internet, but I say no. To me, gold is to the paper dollar as libraries are to the internet. Money would be nothing without gold to back it up and the internet is nothing without the tangible representations that are held within a library.

Vaidhyanathan uses the term “anarchy in the library” to express how information is become uncontrollable. There’s much of it and it’s getting harder to control who has the ability to see something and what exactly they have the ability to see. He talks about how some freedoms are now being looked at as “threatening” because of how powerful they are becoming. The distribution of information is huge. On the internet we can access almost any information that we want whenever we want. Especially when we have search engines, such as Google, that make it easy as typing in a keyword and discovering information you wouldn’t otherwise have easy access to.

In Erin’s post, I also loved the quote that she used from Vaidhyanathan. Some people are seeking ways to diminish the amount of access to information. He says their trying to “force information back into its toothpaste tube”. I think this is such a brilliant quote because as easy as it is to squeeze toothpaste out of the tube, it’s going to be just as hard as trying to put toothpaste back into it’s tube as it is trying to take information out of the public’s hands. There are people today fighting for the very opposite of this because they have a complete opposite view to the “danger” that Vaidhyanathan believes in growing so rapidly. There are people battling on both sides of the circulation and access to information fight. In my opinion, Vaidhyanathan’s hopes are pretty much a lost cause. The world today has taken a drastic turn toward technology and if the internet has anything to say, it’s that information of any kind is going to be shared 24/7 until the internet itself becomes completely obsolete.