In this post, I would like to describe a few themes and specific questions that I developed in my fifteen minutes of word vomit, where I tried to decide what I would like to research, if I were guaranteed not to fail. In general, I seemed to focus on happiness and freedom; more specifically, I focused on how these two states are related to the sort of knowledge that librarians facilitate. To unpack the previous sentence, I'll provide a few more details about what I mean by happiness, freedom, and knowledge in turn.
To operationalize the term happiness for use in quantitative research I could have participants point to a specific emoticon in a set of emoticons, where happiness is represented by this face :) and unhappiness is represented by this face :( On the other hand, to operationalize happiness for qualitative research I could define happiness in a broader way to account for the complexity of the term happiness and the complexity of people's feelings about their own happiness. The latter method seems more fitting to the sort of research that I would like to conduct, namely, research about the happiness that comes from human flourishing, rather than eating a chocolate bar.
Next, I'll define what I mean by freedom by sharing my personal experience of installing the operating system (OS) Linux on my computer. At first, I was drawn to the idea of using Linux as an OS because it would allow me to customize and control many aspects of my computer that I could not manipulate on Mac OS; in other words, it would give me the freedom to take control of my computer. However, I realized very quickly that the sort of freedom a Linux noob has in comparison to a Linux guru is very limited because a noob like me simply does not have the knowledge necessary to customize an OS. To return to my original goal, which is to define freedom, I define freedom as being able to do what one wants, without being hindered by external barriers or internal obstacles, such as, lack of knowledge. So, what is this knowledge that noobs are lacking and how is it relevant to librarians? Here I am operationalizing knowledge as any sort of information that is acquired through conversation and claiming that librarians facilitate conversation, which, in turn, facilitates knowledge creation because I agree with most of what David Lankes argues for in his Atlas of New Librarianship (2011).
In an attempt to try to link these three concepts, I'll pose a few research questions that I would be interested in studying:
- Is freedom really freedom without knowledge or could it be the opposite?
- relevant terms: info glut and synaptic pruning
- Are knowledge and happiness correlated? In what way? What facets of each are related?
- Does visiting the library or interacting with a librarian increase happiness and/or freedom? The freedom aspect of this question only really seems to make sense if freedom is dependent on knowledge.
In general, I'm interested in these sorts of questions because they are fairly positive (I mention happiness often), they are a little bit philosophical (when I mention human flourishing I am hinting at both Plato and Aristotle's discussion about eudaimonia), and they intersect library science with computer science (more discussions about my adventures with Linux are sure to follow).
References
Davis, K. (Photographer). (2007). Freedom Street [Photograph], Retrieved September 20, 2013, from: www.flickr.com/photos/kevandotorg
Lankes, R. D. (2011). The atlas of new librarianship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Interesting topic. I have also felt the same way before, especially on the relation of freedom to knowledge. It is a common feeling, I think, to feel limited by your own lack of knowledge. Very often we wish we know how to do something to improve ourselves.
ReplyDeleteAlso, how did you manage with Linux? I have been interested in trying it out, do you have any suggestions?
From reading your comment about how this sort of feeling is common, I can think of so many examples where I have felt this way, whereas, before I could only think of that one example. It is amazing how understanding somebody else's perspective can really open your mind. I feel a bit silly but I also feel some camaraderie : )
DeleteAs for my adventures with linux, I hate it and I love it. It is a huge time suck because there is so much to learn to make it work well, and hours of my life have gone missing trying to figure out why my window manager was crashing, when the only problem was a random number 6 in my theme configuration file. I would really suggest using it though, because its so much fun to learn and you can customize pretty much anything. The main piece of advice I would give is read the documentation or man pages for whatever you are trying to do before reading forums : )
I like and agree with your point that freedom doesn't necessarily presuppose happiness (as in the case of your Linux example). Despite having the freedom to do something, there are still knowledge based constraints and obstacles to overcome in order to get that something done. However, a pretty profound satisfaction is obtained when that learning is accomplished and its empowering capability is experienced. It's a shame that it isn't easier to come by (which is why mentors/incentives are so important) but I think that really is what makes it so sweet in the end.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree, it took me two weeks of research to figure out why my computer was overheating when dual booting with linux and then finding a fix for this problem, as a result, I was ecstatic when I finally got it running without overheating!
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