Levy: Scrolling Forward

i-ron-y [ahy-er-nee] (noun): realizing that you're skimming a paragraph about the decline of deep reading.

That chapter, "Reading and Attention", became Scrolling Forward's highlight for me. It discusses one of the book's central questions: what are documents for? It made me reconsider the role of libraries and librarians. So far I've focused too much on libraries as information repositories, and on librarians as intermediaries who connect seekers with information. But the library is also a sanctuary, and reading can also be its own goal: an experience rather than an information hunt.

I'll also remember the quote, "Attention is a finite and non-renewable resource." It made me wonder: in addition to being intermediaries who help people find information, should librarians increasingly act as throttles or filters, helping patrons survive an overabundance of information?

Throughout the book I found interesting connections to the arguments of Buckland's "Information as Thing". "Meditation on a Receipt" gave me the same take-away: that documents take many forms, so we should be prepared to manage and value them all. In "What Are Documents?" Levy asserts that not all artifacts are documents, even referencing the antelope-as-document question. (I agree: all artifacts are information-bearing vessels, but it's only a document if someone imbues it with the divine, "making it speak" as Levy would say.) Later he essentially refutes the idea of information-as-thing, writing that information is an idea, not the representation of the idea.

And, as with earlier readings, in "Libraries and the Anxiety of Order" we read about concern over the library's future in the digital age, though the fear's tempered by hope.