If after reading Pauline's account of ASIS anyone decides they would like
to hear John Perry Barlow speak, he is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at
the Wyoming Library Association annual meeting. He will be speaking the
afternoon of October 6, 1994 in Gillette, Wyoming. We have also scheduled
a room for an hour or so after the keynote for a more "intimate"
discussion atmosphere. If you would like information or a registration
form you can contact me directly.
Kathy Carlson
Wyoming State Law Library
(307) 777-7509
<kcarlson@csn.org>
On Wed, 1 Jun 1994, Pauline Afuso wrote:
>
> Fellow Librarians,
>
> I attended the ASIS Midyear Meeting in Portland, Oregon May 21-25, and
> submitted the following summary to the librarians at USC. One suggested
> that I forward this to law-lib as well, as it may be of general interest
> to you all. Please feel free to delete, as this is a couple pages long.
>
> psa
>
> Pauline S. Afuso
> Reference Librarian
> Law Library, University of Southern California
> pafuso@law.usc.edu
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
> I would like to take a brief moment to tell you about the first
> plenary session at the ASIS Midyear conference I attended last week.
>
> The session was entitled "Themes for the 21st Century: Where
> are we going?" Pat Mulholt, Chair for the technical program
> committee made an unusual announcement: The conference was not
> going to emphasize the hard, technical, details one might have
> expected from this association. Rather, issues the speakers were
> going to address would reflect the "softer" issues, the humanistic
> side of technology.
>
> This was a surprising announcement because the three speakers for
> the morning session were John Gage, Director of the Science
> Division for Sun Computers, John Seely Brown, Director of the
> Science Division of Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Campus
> (PARC), John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier
> Foundation (and lyricist for the Grateful Dead), and James
> Duderstadt, President, University of Michigan. In spite of
> their impeccable technical background, the four speakers really did
> focus on the social and legal issues of our society becoming so
> immersed in technology.
>
> It is difficult to say that one person was responsible for
> presenting one particular idea, because their topics and their
> ideas were very intertwined. Some of the main points are:
>
> Technology is going to force us to think about information in
> new ways. The most vivid analogy is that information is like
> wine in bottles. Now we have to start thinking about wine in
> different types of bottles, or perhaps, of even wine in no
> bottles at all.
>
> That we are building technological tools to foster
> communication and support relationships, and this leads us to
> challenge the cartesian view of "I think therefore, I am" and
> replace it with, "We participate, therefore we are."
>
> Information is not static; it is a relation, (the wine changes
> as we move the bottle around it); it is an environment, (eg
> people developing communities through listservs or bulletin
> boards); it is a living being (in that someone puts out some
> information on a list serv, and other people react to it, it
> grows and produces new bits).
>
> This panel discussion was fascinating to me in several ways. From
> an academic viewpoint, it seems to me that the speakers were all
> leading to the same point: that somewhere in the future,
> technology, as it changes the way we socialize, means that we will
> also be changing our academic educational models, including how
> students will be taught (more participation, socialization), what
> role our faculty will play in the educational process, (as
> designers of new learning environments, rather than vehicles
> dispersing old knowledge), how we will judge our faculty (more
> interdisciplinary, comfortable in many mediums (electronic, print,
> distance learning)).
>
> >From a legal viewpoint, the view is even more exiting, and
> challenging. John Perry Barlow asserted that the challenge for the
> legal profession is to stop trying to regulate the internet and
> information on the internet as if it were a solid physical object.
> (Actually, Barlow is of the opinion that the US government should
> stay out of cyberspace.) He believes that the Internet is like the
> western frontier before it was populated. Law as the "civilized"
> knew it was not necessary because people relied heavily on personal
> relationships to regulate behavior. If and when the time comes for
> the Internet to fall under regulation, any law needs to come from
> the people who "inhabit" this frontier (we already see some this in
> the form of "netiquette"), and it needs to reflect the special
> characteristics of the net (eg, it can not be old law with "book"
> crossed out and "internet" written in).
>
> Whether or not one agrees with his assessment, his comments and the
> views of the other speakers do indicate that the future is going to
> be very interesting for us.
>
> This was just the first session. There were other speakers, some just as
> exciting as this first panel. Some exciting names: Clifford Lynch,
> Director or the Division of Library Automation for UC (in charge of
> MELVYL), Richard Lucier, Librarian at UC SF Health Sciences Campus on
> the Human Genome Project, Jack Kessler (He is at UC Berkeley. His name
> should be familiar, as he has posted on law-lib several times).
>
> This conference was very exciting, and I wish that you could have been
> there.
>
> psa
>
> Pauline S. Afuso
> Reference Librarian
> Law Library, University of Southern California
> pafuso@law.usc.edu
>
>
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