More recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IMLS and the Information School at the University of Washington have taken steps to further investigate the substantive impacts of ICT use in US public libraries. In their report, Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits
from Internet Access at U.S. Libraries (Becker et al. 2010), they identify worthy and meaningful
impacts for patrons, and by extension their communities. They are, in effect, organized into categories that are eminent examples of social connection, education, employment, health and wellness, e-government, personal finance, and community and civic engagement. The report was multi-method and depended principally on telephone and internet surveys with tens of thousands of patrons as well as 400 libraries. It extended into interviews and case studies, which makes it similar to the two-phase approach used in this dissertation.
While the Opportunity for All report provides a good overview of the kinds of ways internet use in public libraries help individuals and local communities, it takes a definitively promotional position. It highlights strengths more than challenges and uses qualitative data mostly to decorate quantitative findings, instead of as the ingredients for individually told stories. The report does have the kind of focus that I would argue is akin to the angle of my project, as it pays some attention to people in specific disadvantaged demographics, such as those in poverty and those from racial/ethnic minorities, but it ultimately breaks users into a relatively vague typology based on their frequency of use of the computers. It would be more interesting to understand more about the identities of these users and the ways they actively shape and produce information as they take part in computing activities related to health, education and more—and, perhaps more importantly, 34
what these activities mean to them and how stakeholders judge their effect on the community. Fortunately, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released a second portion of the impact study that more robustly contextualizes their case study sites in connection to their global findings (Becker et al. 2011). This material provides more insight into the relationships within the network of influences on public computing and social outcomes and provides recommendations based on these findings, such as supporting staff in technical training or collaborating with community organizations. The locations featured in this report are all larger, in comparison with the Illinois sample set of this dissertation, and the study employed a broader, deeper and more structured set of variables for study—in general appearing more deductive in design.
The Opportunity for All report is only one of many studies on the impact of public access to ICT and multimedia production technologies. I bring it up here because of its particular concern for libraries and disadvantaged people and because it is an empirical study that tries to illustrate discernable downstream effects. As of yet, research indicates that we don’t fully understand the implications of the public access model in terms of sustainability, users, usage patterns and prolonged social outcomes, despite being in place for many years in varied form across the globe (Sey and Fellows 2009). Critics contend that commercial, market-based solutions, intensified mobile and personal computing, and the increased possibility for ubiquitous learning (Cope and Kalantzis 2009) may supplant the need for traditional forms of public computing. Consequently, one of the main reasons I frame the public library as a network of relationships and resources that foster digital literacy is because it transfers the emphasis to arrangements that lead to learning and empowerment, which depend on an array of factors, as previously stated, people, activities, and policies in addition to infrastructure. In other words, if we want to appropriately gauge social impacts, we have to paint a picture that goes beyond decontextualized or general numbers about access, as well as separate, concentrated glimpses of case studies, and work to connect the two. It is important to pause to take stock of the discourse in operation behind much of this literature. It may not be fair to say that the politics of government, universities, libraries, and library patrons are all in alignment when it comes to the context of ICT. In fact, words like empowerment are sometimes used as tools to advance hidden agendas and mask what may or may not be contestable social transformations. Who or what the government conceptualizes as an empowered (or informed) citizen may just as well serve as a vessel for continuation of extant power rifts and
dominating social norms. Shifting the library from its traditional roles—archival, pedagogy, legitimization and gatekeeping—to what might be characterized as a postmodern orientation— interactivity, empowerment, cultural pluralism, and communitarianism—is inherently political (Hand 2005), and something that I believe will continually run up against resistance and infiltration. The internet cannot be summed up by any central discourse, but the tools used to access and make meaning of it are very often the products of commercial enterprise and thereby subject to the influences of capitalism and the regulations of the market. We see this very much in action as libraries struggle to make public goods out of commoditized information in our current phase of increased marketization (Burawoy 2005b). Battles are waiting to be fought over intellectual property produced or remixed with library assets, or systems of eBook distribution and ‘borrowing.’ Companies like Facebook and Google walk a dangerous line between privacy, transparency and encouragement of open access and sharing; their practices, policies and ethical dilemmas will work their way into the social impacts yielded by the public library. In one sense I like the idea of making sure everyone has the ability to share their identity and establish social connection on the internet, but in another sense I’m less excited if the only—or institutionalized— way to do this is through Facebook. As it stands right now, some of the main uses for public computers, as well as new ICT mediums like cell phones, are commercially driven interactions and entertainment. If public libraries are to be seen as institutional intermediaries between citizens and their government, and connectivity, content and competencies are a requirement for meaningful citizenship and input into globalized cultural flows (Hand 2005, Castells 1997), then I see it as our duty as researchers to move forward from descriptive analysis, as it is commonly seen in the literature above. We need to grant recognition of power, both when we establish what we mean by digital literacy and when we measure literacy-related outcomes.