Recently, in response to a tweet by Elon Musk, the writer Oliver Traldi tweeted “just my view, but belief in "mind viruses" leads to the worst, most anti-democratic, and most illiberal thinking from the woke and anti-woke alike,” leading to a healthy debate in the replies.
The “mind virus,” in my opinion, is a real phenomenon; there is a significant body of literature on memetics exploring this very phenomenon. The last several years in particular have felt like such an extreme assault by mind viruses that I became sympathetic to the idea of the “tin foil hat,” which, as described by Wikipedia, is “often worn in the belief or hope that it shields the brain from threats such as electromagnetic fields, mind control, and mind reading.” I have begun approaching the news with a metaphorical tin foil hat on to protect my brain from the incessant propaganda (and with increasing surveillance by tech gadgets, paranoia about mind reading is likely to become more common as well).
Are we, in fact, currently experiencing Fifth Generation Warfare, or a war of perceptions and information? Jenny Holland believes the current battlefield is the mind, writing:
Over and over again, people ask: ‘what is going on?’ Nothing is as it once was. Everything feels off… to name just a few big ones: how has the mainstream culture has (sic) persuaded us we don’t know what biological reality is? How is it possible that the arguments of the “left” are an exact mirror image of arguments on the “right”, leaving zero space for substantive dialogue and causing us to live in two separate but parallel realities? How is it that suddenly governments across the world started using the same phrases over and over, like “Build Back Better” and “flatten the curve” and “safe and effective,” and regular people started repeating the same phrases over and over again — like ‘I believe in science’ or more recently ‘stochastic terrorism’? How is that at some point in the last few years, suddenly everything that came out of formerly trusted institutions just felt like a massive lie?
Here again, the library plays a critical role for the public, through defending privacy and intellectual freedom, supporting viewpoint diversity, hosting debates and discussions, and teaching information literacy.
I was firmly agreeing until the last paragraph. My library system, right now, is crushing privacy and intellectual freedom through “DEI”initiatives. Like a mother drowning her children in the bathtub.
I think libraries are, for the most part, still carrying on in their historical vein, although I realize that behind the scenes things are beginning to falter. I hope the profession starts to grasp that their historical mission is more relevant than ever and reconsiders jumping on the same (unpopular) bandwagon as every other organization/ profession. Public libraries are government entities so it's tricky.
I'm with Traldi on this one. See an excellent recent book on this: "Not born yesterday : the science of who we trust and what we believe" (https://www.worldcat.org/title/1099689542) The author, Hugo Mercier, makes a strong case against social contagion, mass delusion, or mind viruses. He argues that "the narrative of widespread gullibility, in which a credulous public is easily misled by demagogues and charlatans, is simply wrong." Per Mercier, people are pretty good at critical thinking about the evidence they encounter, especially when it directly affects their lives.
For librarians, the danger of believing in mind viruses is that it encourages us to take a therapeutic approach to our patrons. If our patrons have sick minds, we can't trust them to think for themselves. Instead of providing them with the resources that they need for intellectual autonomy, we have to control what they see and read until they are cured. My concern about the "woke," "never-neutral" radicals who increasingly dominate the discourse of librarianship is that they believe that most of their patrons suffer from mind viruses like "white supremacy," "patriarchy," etc., etc.
If those us who resist those tendencies start to think of "wokeness" as a different kind of mind virus, we're doomed. It leads to counterproductive strategies against wokeness. If the woke try to disinfect the library by purging anything that might possibly infect patrons with racism, and the anti-woke respond by purging anything that might possibly infect them with wokeness, we'll be in more trouble than we are now.
I think the best protection against "mind viruses" (real or imagined) is a broad collection representing a wide range of viewpoints, rather than purging a collection.
I was firmly agreeing until the last paragraph. My library system, right now, is crushing privacy and intellectual freedom through “DEI”initiatives. Like a mother drowning her children in the bathtub.
I think libraries are, for the most part, still carrying on in their historical vein, although I realize that behind the scenes things are beginning to falter. I hope the profession starts to grasp that their historical mission is more relevant than ever and reconsiders jumping on the same (unpopular) bandwagon as every other organization/ profession. Public libraries are government entities so it's tricky.
I'm with Traldi on this one. See an excellent recent book on this: "Not born yesterday : the science of who we trust and what we believe" (https://www.worldcat.org/title/1099689542) The author, Hugo Mercier, makes a strong case against social contagion, mass delusion, or mind viruses. He argues that "the narrative of widespread gullibility, in which a credulous public is easily misled by demagogues and charlatans, is simply wrong." Per Mercier, people are pretty good at critical thinking about the evidence they encounter, especially when it directly affects their lives.
For librarians, the danger of believing in mind viruses is that it encourages us to take a therapeutic approach to our patrons. If our patrons have sick minds, we can't trust them to think for themselves. Instead of providing them with the resources that they need for intellectual autonomy, we have to control what they see and read until they are cured. My concern about the "woke," "never-neutral" radicals who increasingly dominate the discourse of librarianship is that they believe that most of their patrons suffer from mind viruses like "white supremacy," "patriarchy," etc., etc.
If those us who resist those tendencies start to think of "wokeness" as a different kind of mind virus, we're doomed. It leads to counterproductive strategies against wokeness. If the woke try to disinfect the library by purging anything that might possibly infect patrons with racism, and the anti-woke respond by purging anything that might possibly infect them with wokeness, we'll be in more trouble than we are now.
I think the best protection against "mind viruses" (real or imagined) is a broad collection representing a wide range of viewpoints, rather than purging a collection.