John Buschman

PurposeThe broader analytical framing of systematically distorted communication (SDC) helps extract value out of the enormous amount of scholarship on fake news.Design/methodology/approachThe massive literature on fake news has been the subject of handbook overviews, systematic literature reviews, summaries, taxonomies, citation studies and so on. Deploying these tools, the approaches that the literature takes can be characterized, Habermas' concept of systematically distorted communication (SDC) will then be presented in its context, reviewed and put to work to frame fake news research to tell us new things that individual pieces of specific analysis and research do not. Conclusions will be offered from this analysis.FindingsFake news research has become repetitive, revolving around themes such as the fate of journalism, the role of technology, remediating its effects and deep dives into definitional components (disinformation, misinformation, lies and so on). A broader framing of systematically distorted communication allows us to arrive at some conclusions about contemporary fake news: that it is a power strategy with a particular right-wing slant and it creates a sociology – that is, its own interpretive environment – hostile to democratic functioning. It answers the question: what is fake news for?Originality/valueA perspective on fake news research is much needed and Habermas' concept is a useful framing mechanism for the large corpus of research. Systematically distorted communication asks – and answers – different questions of the research. Meanwhile, SDC itself is modified by its application to fake news research and contemporary conditions.

IntroductionTwo interesting strands of cultural and intellectual controversy have come together in an unexpected corner of the American professional/academic world, and they pose an interesting practical question for the ethics and the technology of communication as a professional. First, librarians have participated in and fully acted out-in slower fashion-the right-left political and culture wars in a number of related blog free-for-alls over the course of several years. These blog debates were wide-ranging affairs-from debate over the latest Middle East war to alleged massive (Democrat) voter fraud to the poor preparation of recent graduates of library schools and the poor job market. But the pattern was a familiar one: generally there would be an objection to an action by the American Library Association (ALA) Council (its democratically elected governing body), another part of ALA (such as a committee or Round Table), or a loosely-affiliated organization such as the Progressive Librarians Guild. Often, those "actions" would simply consist of a sentiment expressed, or a debate held within or around the Council context. The "action" and/or the positions advocated in the debate would be deemed liberal or even radical, and concern "political issues having nothing to do with librarianship."1 The blog discussion would then quickly devolve down to some very mean-spirited name-calling, the vast part of it from those on the rightward end of the political spectrum: from "liberal echo chamber" to "unrepentant, left-wing, Stalinist moronicity," "chief bootlickers of Fidel and Che," "goose-stepping" "thought police," or an "apologist for murderers like Stalin and Mao." The comments also became quite personal too: saying their opponents "really, really do deserve to be B*tch-slapped, verbally, if not literally (and I know I'd love to see the latter one day)," or calling one a "puffed-up narcissistic Moonbat," and most directly, someone's mixed ethnic heritage children were called "mutts." In turn, these unpleasantries closely mimicked the media exchanges between the American right and the "left" that we have become so familiar with in recent decades (though it is highly debatable whether or not a media outlet such as MSNBC represents the left in the same manner that Fox News represents a coherent right perspective). In the second strand of the librarian exchanges, political orientations, opinions, and goals were not the hot-button issue in the end. The majority of these attacks publicly identified their targets (and sometimes their employing institution), but were made anonymously/pseudonymously or semi-anonymously (behind a few layers to hide identity). As it was put by way of explanation and justification, "It makes no sense to accuse a blogger who posts under a nom de plume of any form of anonymity. I am not anonymous; I spelled my name backwards to shield it from searches on the web." The arguments from their opponents (clearly identified and named by the conservative writers as left/liberal/radical) were identifiably authored; those persons owned their words. When that professional stance (anonymous communication as a professional which included attacks on named and identifiable persons) was questioned, the defense of anonymity (and its variants noted above-so as not to burden the reader anonymity will be used) in supposedly professional communications became the sensitive and volatile issue in these blog debates. The pattern consisted of the initial naming of a left-generated "controversy" as noted, anonymous attacks from the right, followed by a response, and that response was then characterized by the right as "silencing"-and from there, acrimonious debate inevitably ensued. The purpose of this paper is to unpack the arguments as they have been "articulated within pragmatic and contentious political contexts" (Mara 2008, 20-21) to justify the ethics of the stance of anonymity in speaking as an information professional. …

Cet article presente une etude de cas ou les systemes de gestion de la bibliotheque universitaire de la Rider University sont tombes en panne, il n'y a donc pas eu de catalogue a consulter durant un semestre. Les difficultes dues a cette situation sont donc decrites ainsi que la facon dont le bibliothecaire a pratique pendant un semestre. Le bilan et l'analyse de cette experience est expose

Very few issues in librarianship have risen to the level of notoriety and controversy as the Beall’s List affair (as I call it). It has generated national publicity, controversy, recriminations, and a retirement. After so much has been written, it would seem little more could be said. One overlooked aspect of the affair is an examination of its political sociology: What are the groups/groupings that were prominent? What were their arguments supporting, opposing, modifying, influencing, envisioning, or deciding on the issues raised in the Beall’s List affair? And what were the relative power relationships among them? This article seeks to map those relationships and the arguments deployed to better situate library and information science within a broader environment and identify the forces at work within and on the field.

Abstract:Public libraries have been rhetorically cast as being in crisis for decades as an outmoded, unaffordable institution in high-profile venues. However, when challenged as such, public libraries are vigorously defended, and an abundance of data on their actual popularity, usage, and value is deployed. We come to the question of why this mode of questioning persists despite the manifest value that the public places on public libraries. This article proposes a two-track answer by exploring (1) the long running context of neoliberalism and corrective to our understanding of it and (2) the status of publicness within neoliberalism. The article unpacks the concept of "public" and how it has changed and come under specific threat—informed by our more robust understanding of neoliberalism—over the last several decades. Data and arguments about public libraries and improved quality of life, community, cultural heritage, economic assistance during hard times, or their role as...

Very few issues in librarianship have risen to the level of notoriety and controversy as the Beall’s List affair (as I call it). It has generated national publicity, controversy, recriminations, and a retirement. After so much has been written, it would seem little more could be said. One overlooked aspect of the affair is an examination of its political sociology: What are the groups/groupings that were prominent? What were their arguments supporting, opposing, modifying, influencing, envisioning, or deciding on the issues raised in the Beall’s List affair? And what were the relative power relationships among them? This article seeks to map those relationships and the arguments deployed to better situate library and information science within a broader environment and identify the forces at work within and on the field.

Libraries and their relationship to print culture are commonly thought of in warm, familiar terms or conversely with invidious overtones of old-fashioned-ness. Neither of these tells the story of the internal discourse and struggles within them, however. Libraries have been the sites of a working-through of neoliberal ideas down to a very basic level in communal and educational institutions. Throughout this process, the institutions have been guided by a management culture that continually declares a crisis to shape and guide them, and that crisis culture itself has largely responded to an unexamined arc of development that has lead to neoliberalism. This feedback loop—broader economic and social agendas that go unnamed, yet shape and form library institutional leadership and practice—has meaning for print culture. This paper reviews the sources and ideas of my work primarily in two books over the last decade.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to flesh out a truncated line of analysis in library and information science (LIS) of language analyses of power in the field.Design/methodology/approachLiterature-based conceptual analysis of the problems engendered by neoliberalism in LIS and the productive approach of language analysis of Austin, Habermas, and Smith that allows us to account for neoliberalism’s effects in language and practices – doing things with words.FindingsLIS has engaged a productive postmodern analysis of power relations that reflects social and economic progress, but Austin, Habermas, and Smith offer a sensible, practical explanation for the operation of neoliberal hegemony on the practices of librarianship.Originality/valuePostmodern analyses are now being deployed in portions of LIS, but they fail to account for the full implications of the dominant public language (and policy and practices) of neoliberalism for librarianship. This is productive exploration of those i...

David Harvey's right to the city is a productive point to discuss the role of urban libraries and democracy.  Harvey's ideas, however, can be further deepened by engaging them with democratic theory.  Within Harvey's broader challenge to neoliberalism, democratic theory helps to tie the work of librarianship to a meaningful instantiation of a right to the city through a review of:  the concepts (and brief history) of rights the founding theories of rights themselves, the public sphere (a LACUNY Institute framing concept), community, and democratic voice.

- Academic libraries have frequently led the way in automation and electronic publishing investments. In addition to OCLC, the RUN bibliographic utility was founded by academic libraries, nearly all of which had online catalogs by the early-to-middle 1980s. Those ...

The case for anonymity in various libraryland blogs — in which (mostly) conservative librarians justify varying degrees of anonymity to mask their identity — is as follows, a distillation of various posting from over the past year or two: • Anonymous writing has a long and proud history. It is a key component of the rights of free speech and intellectual freedom, and if people donʼt choose to identify themselves, that is their right too. Anonymous speech is done to focus attention on the debate rather than the speaker. • There is no reason to stand by someone elseʼs opinions or be responsible for what they say. However, it is possible to have

Introduction It is salient to begin this article with some examples of fertile and groundbreaking study emanating from the history of the book, reading, and publishing: * Robert Darnton brilliantly re-constructed the world-view of 18th century French society from the ground up in his book The Great Cat Massacre. He did so by reinterpreting odd and rare documents such as a printing society's wage book, a semi-fictional autobiography of a printshop worker, and an odd, obsessively complete "inventory" of the city of Montpellier. [1] * Justin Kaplan's notes in his Library of America edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass list eight different editions Whitman produced and edited, the first consisting of twelve poems and a preface, others expanding to four times the length, and then contracting again. Like all of Whitman's later compilers and editors, Kaplan faced the author's injunctions declared at various times on the variety of editions, in order to come up...

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 informa...

The American Library Association (ALA) is undertaking a revision of its code of ethics. The author propo ses and discusses three reasons not to revise the code. The reasons are that there is already a set of interlocking policies on ethics and related issues; that ALA leadership has taken the most conservative possible approach to ethics policy - and especially the connection between librarians' professional responsibilities and rights; and that when policies are amended, they are not always improved, and those on the books are often ignored. The author considers and discusses likely objections to his proposal

This paper examines the political nature of library leadership and acknowledges consistent problems within the management and leadership literature. The political nature of leadership is offered as an insight versus the usual imitation of business management discourse. A critical theory of library leadership is offered. The paper proceeds by examining what we mean by “leadership” and “political” and how those concepts relate before analyzing what has changed to call forth a critical interpretation and framework for library leadership. It moves on to examine insights from political theory that are instructive within contemporary contexts.

Research attention has been focused on the public sphere and librarianship recently, generating disagreement, even controversy. This reflects long-running debates in LIS and related fields. This is not a stale rehash: how we think about the public sphere and libraries is an indicator of libraries in democratic societies and how we position them. A compact account of affinity groupings around this research in LIS will precede an account of the controversy suggesting the question, are there still actually existing public spheres as Habermas deployed the term? The answer clarifies the controversy, and the paper will explore and draw conclusions from it.

AbstractThis article situates the ethics of information professionals within its contemporary public and political settings. An information ethics so contextualized can help promote the kinds of democratic and global citizenships that are the basis of this special issue of the Journal of Information Ethics. While this paper cannot fully canvas the issues raised, it can take us some way in balancing our perspective on the political issues packed inside the goals of an informed, global citizenry. It proposes a coherent network of concepts about the political context of the contemporary world by mapping its challenges. The article reviews the political and public content of the concepts of global and globalization, citizen and citizenship, and discusses the implied agency of the informed global citizen. It concludes with a discussion that draws out some of the broad responses to these contexts.The call for papers for the Information Ethics Roundtable 20i4 conference describes global ci...

Author's Preface Part I: Setting the Stage Chapter 1: Should We Be Bothered By Library Marketing and Advertising in the Classroom, and If So, Why?-An Introduction Chapter 2: An Historical View I: A Precis on the Entanglements of Democracy, Education, and Libraries in America Chapter 3: An Historical View II: A Precis on Advertising in Schools, Marketing in Libraries, and the Appeal of Neoliberalism Chapter 4: From Theoretical to Empirical Critiques of Advertising: Have They Deepened Understanding of Democracy and Our Educative Institutions? Part II: The Insights of Democratic Theory Chapter 5: Tocqueville and the Centrifugal/Centripetal Forces Within America: Why (and How Much) Our Practices in Libraries and Classrooms Matter Chapter 6: A Practical Communitarianism: Educative Institutions, Social Bonds, and Neoliberalism's Incursions Chapter 7: Deliberative Democratic Theory's Deeper Critique: The Profound Effects of Neoliberalism's Grammar in Educative Institutions ...

The period covered by the publication of Library Quarterly (LQ) has been one characterized by the arc of three defining contexts. First, libraries have been inextricably tied to educational institutions in the modern era. Second, libraries developed within democratic societies and took on aspects of the public sphere (as did classrooms), even while public spheres were being transformed in the macro sense. Third, these two contextual conditions predominated for half of our period but led to a fundamental conservative rethinking of civil society institutions like schools and libraries: neoliberalism as a loose set of economic and market principles projected into schools, universities, and libraries, resulting in economic and political inequalities and an undermining of democratic and civil society institutions. These three contexts do not explain everything about libraries during LQ’s run of publication, but they situate a great deal of that history.

T his editorial was hard to write. An editorial about the political climate of libraries is not a simple task in ordinary times (whatever those were or will ever be again), but it is much more difficult to tackle since the 2016 US election. There is far more complexity now, for the country and for libraries too. Now that the 2020 US election is over, it does not look any simpler. As AbrahamLincoln’s Secretary of StateWilliam Seward said, “Therewas always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare” (quoted in Brooks 2020). The library issues that have arisen aremyriad and fundamental: disinformation, fake news and “fake” news, the values and actions of the profession and its primary association, a reckoning with injustice via systemic racism in society and the profession, identity politics, our relationship to democracy itself, COVID-19, and library budgets and personnel (Buschman 2017, 2018, 2019; Mehra andGray 2020; Peet 2020;Wiegand 2020). Those issues were only themost notable, and only one (COVID-19) shows promise of receding as an issue. Whatever happens in the next decade, good or bad, this era will be a watershed that affects the future of libraries. In addition to its geographic and meteorological contexts, “climate”means the “prevailing influence or environmental conditions characterizing a group or period” or the “prevailing trend of public opinion or of another aspect of public life.” Both of these definitions are useful