Keywords In and Out of Context

I have been contemplating the fact that I only cited Ronald Day once (his analysis of the “conduit metaphor” in Chapter 4) in my book, even though I have always admired his thinking, especially his continued work in critical theory.

Anyway, I realized today, rereading his The Modern Invention of Information (one of the suggested readings for the critical information studies doctoral seminar that I taught this past semester), that I probably should have asked him to write a foreword for Keywords In and Out of Context, since my book is an excellent example of what he describes on page 117-118 of his book as a deeply troubling and problematic trend in LIS:

“The world of information that we are given by foundational texts and traditions of information in the twentieth century is a deeply troubling and problematic one. It is troubling because of its seeming naturalness and common sensibility and because of the ease of its predications for an information age of the present and the future. It is problematic because its claims are far too simplistic and reductionistic of the complexities of sense, knowledge, and agency in the world and because a careful examination of its own claims and foundational models reveals vast and and deep exclusions and contradictions. These qualities do not mean that certain dominant rhetorics about information are ‘wrong’ but that rather a tradition of values for information has been established and has been, rather uncritically and ahistorically, promulgated as a ‘good’ not only for Western culture but, more troubling, for, and as, ‘the global.’.. [T]he lack of critical analysis is a function of power and ideology rather than any more neutral cause, and this can be shown by examining the rhetoric and history of information. That such an analysis is rare, however, perhaps reveals that language, as well as history, is not very much an issue for the ‘information age’ in any manner other than as a problem of transmission to be solved. The ‘problem’ of language, however, cannot be ‘solved’ because it is not simply an object of study; rather it constitutes the primary conditions through which study occurs. The same is true of ‘history.’… I have suggested in this book that an informational approach to information has produced a cultural history and philosophy of information that is far too simplistic and politically convenient.”

Since Keywords In and Out of Context deals precisely with language and history in this way, it does serve as a textbook example of how power and ideology can be embedded in a particular perspective on information, especially one, like my book, supported by numerous academically respectable sources. Interestingly, this has only become clear to me a year after having published it.

Lacking a critical foreword by Day, what comes to mind now are the possibilities offered by alternative histories, hidden histories, and counterfactual histories in particular. I did some work related to counterfactual LIS history in 2012 for the Pre-Conference Seminar on the History of ASIST and Information Science and Technology Worldwide in Baltimore, although no one was at all interested back then, so perhaps I could re-visit that idea, with Day’s general critique of information history in mind. As always, thank you, Professor Day!