Copyright 1997 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 58-60. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@cause.org

Intellectual Standards in the Information Resources Industry

by Mark Sheehan

December started out badly for me. Within a few days I reviewed a really disappointing book, then listened to a really disappointing speech. Though unrelated in any other way, both were in the context of information resources, flavored with higher education. The disturbing thing was that both lacked integrity. They showed -- almost flaunted -- a lack of attention to intellectual standards.

The book, by a computer science professor, was a vapid popularization of topics in information technology, blending sensationalism and opinion, frequently contradicting itself, and having little other apparent purpose than the author's glorification of his own wit. The speech was better. It made excellent points. But those points were supported not so much by carefully researched data as by metaphors drawn inappropriately and out of context from fields clearly outside the speaker's area of expertise (but coincidentally well within mine). The effect, on me at least, was to tinge with doubt even the most intuitively valid points the speaker made.

As I griped to colleagues and friends about these disturbing events, I found that many of them had been noticing and feeling the same things in other, similar contexts. And as I tuned into discussions on my campus and in the media, I noticed that a lot of us in higher education are starting to develop a very bad feeling about the quality of the information we receive and about current standards for intellectual and academic integrity. I began to wonder what's going on in higher education, and what role information technology might be playing in the apparent lowering of our standards.

Technology has a long history of enabling intellectual dishonesty and otherwise seeming to subvert the academic process. I think of the way the printing press made it possible to fake documents, or the way photographic technology made it possible to fake pictures of the Loch Ness monster. On a smaller scale, closer to our academic homes, the typewriter made an individual student's work more anonymous. The photocopier made it easy to duplicate someone else's work and pass it off as one's own. The calculator was seen for years as a threat to basic math competency, as I assume the slide-rule and abacus were before it. Microelectronics have enabled all kinds of high-tech cheating. In this context, pulling a term paper off the Internet is just the latest technique in a centuries-old bag of tricks.

It would clearly be a mistake to blame technology for academic dishonesty. The National Rifle Association (with which I happen to agree on this one minor point) says, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." I'll paraphrase that here as "Technology doesn't lie and cheat; people lie and cheat."

But there may be more subtle ways in which technology promotes a decline in intellectual standards. The electronic media, in many complex ways, have led us to expect quick, slam-bang information exchange. The sound bite is the best example. Our collective attention span seems to be shortening. Many of us have become impatient with extended discourse that lengthens meetings, with elaboration of ideas, and with reading material that is not presented in a series of bullet points. We focus on the "executive summary" as if somehow the highest ranking opinion on a subject should be the least, or the most shallowly, informed.

Conference planners are finding it increasingly difficult to get speakers to provide written versions of their talks. Bullet points that worked well for the speaker as notes don't provide the same window into the speaker's thoughts as a well-written prose article. In the era of sound bites and bullet points, what happens to the sharing of ideas and thoughtful analysis? What about the domino effect of one person's ideas sparking others'? These concerns extend to the archiving of listerv discussions -- should the sponsor preserve the literal list of messages on a topic, or should someone sift through them and produce a summary or analysis?

Clearly one doesn't want to risk turning away a dynamic speaker who is simply too busy to write a paper for the conference proceedings. But how much is lost when only the 50 or even 200 people who can attend in person benefit from a Great Presenter's ideas, and the rest of us (and the world!) remain uninformed?

The average World Wide Web home page provides more evidence that our industry, and the popular culture it spawns, is growing lax in the application of intellectual standards. The similarity of the Web to a library has not been lost on the information industry. Nor has the fact that the average integrity of what's on the Web is a lot lower than what's in most libraries. The problem, of course, is that on the Web virtually anybody can be a publisher. There's little peer review of Web publications. Editing is generally up to the individual publishing the page. No matter who you are, you can publish whatever you want. There's a famous New Yorker cartoon, the caption of which is: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."¹ Extended to the Web, that becomes something like "on the Web, nobody knows you're a fraud."

A few months ago my hometown newspaper took up this topic. The reporter chose to pan the Internet and the Web as sources of valuable information. The article suggested the Internet was a source of "dangerous ideas." This seemed a needless exercise to me. I don't deny there's useless stuff on the Web, but just a little exercise of "critical thinking skills" should be enough to keep most people from falling for the hype. (You wouldn't go to the tabloid racks at the supermarket to research a serious topic; why would you meander through some lurid Web site if you wanted legitimate information?)

But there is hype on the Internet, and inaccurate information, and it's written by sources that are far from authoritative. What worries me is that some of us in the information resources professions have fallen for the hype ourselves. The faculty author of the book and the successful commercial author who made the speech I mentioned at the beginning of this article are two examples of people who have found themselves able, for one reason or another, to publish successfully in the print media. Like thousands of people who have found Web publishing gives them an easy outlet for their own opinions, they seem intoxicated by this ease. The author and speaker seem to me to have abandoned some of the standards for information interchange that have been part of our culture, at least in academe, for centuries.

Please don't get me wrong. I like the free-wheelingness of the Web as much as anyone, and I would never want to make it harder to publish there. T. Matthew Ciolek, publishing in a recent issue of Educom Review, suggests that "serious and energetic remedial steps" are needed to snap the Web into line, lest it become "a poor [multimedia mediocrity]."² I disagree. A look around any bookstore, through any collection of alternative magazines and newspapers, or even through any library will reveal mediocrity galore. Besides, one person's mediocrity is another person's stroke of genius; who would you trust to make that distinction for you?

In any medium, including the Web, I believe free choice and free market mechanisms along with a Darwinian survival of the fittest will ensure that the most relevant, most useful, most valid information will persist. The less meaningful will generally be an easily overlooked annoyance and will eventually be priced out of the market (to be replaced by the next fly-by-night bit of trivia). In their choice of information sources, people will always need to exercise individual judgment based on critical thinking.

For those of us in the higher education information resources arena, what seems more appropriate than imposing controls is to set good examples at our institutions. Many of us control or influence our institutions' Web presences. We consult and collaborate with sister institutions in our communities. Some of us have formal outreach and extension duties built into our missions. Most of us get involved from time to time with the local media, professional organizations, service clubs, and the like. Many of us take on consulting assignments outside our regular jobs. In all these venues we have opportunities to influence the proportion of signal to noise in the information we broadcast. Hundreds if not thousands of years of academic standards stand behind us if we urge (and pay) attention to accuracy, completeness, timely updating of facts, responsible use of statistics, adherence to time-honored methods of investigation, responsible, verifiable reference to other people's work, and objective reporting of our conclusions.

Here are a few more ideas to help us support higher intellectual standards in our industry.

• Avoid instant expertise. Many of us are at the cutting edge of our fields. We're asked for our opinions by the masses who lag behind us. It's tempting to talk or write beyond our actual areas of expertise. To know a little about a new technology is to appear to the masses to know a lot. It's an old aphorism that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Let's keep that in mind as we talk to the press, to our peers, to our clients, to our customers.
• Consult close to home. I don't mean to suggest that travel is bad. I mean that if you've had some successes and you know why you were successful and you didn't just manage to squeak past the horns of the dilemma that gored your peers, then you should consult. The farther afield you go -- the farther from your true expertise and the more serendipitous your successes have been -- the more you contribute to the decline of standards in our industry.
• Respect credentials. The cynic's view of a college degree is that it's a credential purchased with tuition dollars and by the sacrifice of one's early-to-mid twenties. We need to remember that credentials earned in higher education or through long experience in a particular field are worth something. As you shop for consultants, look for seasoned veterans with strong credentials.
• Demand proof; demand performance. After fifteen years of inhaling vaporware, most of us have developed a tolerance for hype. Some of us still get a little giddy about the promises of new systems, and in that we are fair game for vendors who lack integrity. A healthy skepticism is a good thing to have, as is an expectation that systems will perform as advertised. Hold the vendor accountable. Promise yourself you won't pass along unverified vendor claims or other information. Hype is a primary enemy of integrity in information technology.
• Take a stand. Standards can decline only if we let them. Look at your own game. Look at the games your staff are running. Expect a lot of yourself and expect a lot of them. Your honesty will foster theirs. Their honesty will support yours. If we keep standards high in our own organizations, we'll add a piece to the larger puzzle our academic brethren are trying to solve. We'll become a part of the solution and we'll lower the profile of technology as part of the problem

Endnotes:

¹ P. Steiner, The New Yorker, 5 July, 1993, p. 61.

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² T. Matthew Ciolek, "Today's WWW -- Tomorrow's MMM: The Specter of Multimedia Mediocrity," Educom Review, May-June 1997, 23-26.

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Mark Sheehan (sheehan@montana.edu), a member of the CAUSE Current Issues Committee, is director of the Information Technology Center at Montana State University. He lives in a glass house and is not without sin.

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