Re: What could it mean?

  Hi James:

  First, thanks for responding! And, no, you did not sidetrack the 
question. What you did was make some very salient points. There may be 
others (those infinite [?] "possibilities"), but your observations are 
definitely on track:

On Thu, 4 Aug 2011, James Weinheimer wrote:

> ... this article ... was obviously written to excite debate ... the
> comments ... may be even more enlightening when considering "critical
> thinking" .. One of the first comments was by a librarian who misspelled
> [a word], so some said this person was stupid, and much of the
> "discussion" degenerated into some people calling others stupid and so
> on and so on ... "Hagar's pretty tough, but he's easy to sidetrack." ...
> I have seen this happen on many of the library email lists. Yet, perhaps
> I too, am guilty of precisely the same thing here, since I just
> sidetracked John's original question into another one?

Summed up as:

  1. The article may have been written to "excite" debate.

  2. The public comments on the article provide additional information 
relating to the topic "critical thinking."

  3. Much of the public debate over the article degenerated into personal 
criticisms and use of the word "stupid."

  4. The comments indicated sidetracking from the issue raised by he 
article itself.

  5. People (librarians especially?) have to be *very* careful how they 
perform in public so as not to distract from the issues being discussed 
and the agenda of the people initiating those discussions.

I would add:

  1. The biggest problem with the article is that one needs to *respond* to 
it. The author has taken the initiative away from the librarians (and put 
them on the defensive?). A question one could ask a "critical thinking" 
class is: how can the control of the issue be returned to the librarians 
and their patrons when they may simply be scoffed at, no matter what they 
say?

  2. The article is written in a manner that can justify its immediate 
dismissal as mere insignificant rhetoric: entirely negative rather than in 
any way constructive. The central problem here is that absolutely no 
negative or destructive statement can be proven, so such statements should 
be ignored in favor of constructive remarks. The students would probably 
have to be taught that, since playing the author's game seems empowering 
and, well, entertaining!

  3. The nature of the comments on the article can be examined from various 
directions themselves, including that they *might* be said to be 
indicative of any number of problems characterizing the body public (our 
beloved and highly respected "patrons"), e.g. entertainment is more 
interesting that issues, taking things personally screws up debate, people 
can be goaded in to emotional reactions and be thus rendered harmless, 
etc.

  4. The commenters could be characterized (one "possibility") as having
been sucked into pointless debate for the entertainment of the author.

   Now, where I might disagree with you is that it anything can be 
considered "obvious." What is "obvious" is that many *possibilities* 
exist, such as, the author's intent might have simply been to elicit 
negative, reactive, perhaps even "stupid" and sidetracked, reactions, and 
to simply sit back and watch the fun. Or, perhaps [or in addition], the 
author may have wanted to jab at libraries in order to contribute to 
justifying their demise.

  So, I'll return to one main point of teaching "critical thinking" (there 
are others) which is to raise awareness of *how* and *why* things may be 
said as being as important (or more so) in many cases than actual content. 
If responses to such articles emphasize those aspects, it might be 
*possible* to dismissed them out-of-hand (which is what the author of the 
article *may* have been trying to do with libraries).

  Wouldn't you say that people like the commenters on this article *could* 
benefit from a course in "critical thinking", especially if it were 
initiated as a required high-school course, and then followed-up by the 
custodians of information?

  Cheers!

jgm

  John G. Marr
  Cataloger
  CDS, UL
  Univ. of New Mexico
  Albuquerque, NM 87131
  jmarr_at_unm.edu
  jmarr_at_flash.net


     **There are only 2 kinds of thinking: "out of the box" and "outside
the box."

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