The revolution will not be shushed: guerrilla librarians fight for literacy

Technology and communications policy in Australia has increasingly been characterised by an appalling neglect of social philosophy … The ad hoc decision making in communications policy is the inevitable consequence of an essentially irrational Australian political process from which clear-sighted integrated policy statements have failed to emerge as blueprints for action.

It is clear that if the Universal Services Obligation is to be taken seriously, particularly including Internet "access", the libraries and librarians will need to be at the foreground of this policy directive.

Dissenters need to be facilitated to continue their role. Mike Moore could have found many commentators, residents of Fox News Channel, who would have agreed with the publisher that Stupid White Men was the wrong book for the post 9/11 world. It took courage - and a courageous librarian - to confirm that social democracy requires dissent, questioning and critique. Obviously libraries, schools and universities are not a panacea for the neo-conservative excesses in education. If we revalue librarians as socially conscious intellectuals, then we revalue the importance of thinking as a human activity. Instead of this critical function, our era loves its experts. What we are missing is the ratbag dissenter like Michael Moore - whose ideas may not always be popular, but offer a radical conversation with the truths of a time.

Literacy is a political project. Men and women have a right to read, but a responsibility to also understand and transform their own experience. To be able to read is to be literate in life, and to understand the political limits of society and citizenship. New technologies create opportunities and challenges, but the transitory commitments of hypertext can be a problem. We need to explore the consequences to literacy - let alone society - if the primary mode of communication is off a back-lit screen. There are shifts in our understandings of argument and proof.

The cost of describing the Internet - even metaphorically - as a virtual library, needs to be disclosed, and often. Too many students put three words into a google search and think that they are conducting research. The Internet is not a library: the organisation of knowledge into preservable categories has hardly left a trace on the Internet. While the web may appear to remove the physicality of information, we are yet to make the leap conceptually. Too often, information literacy training is reactive rather than proactive, while it should be the foundation skill for academic success. Information literacy skills are far more than preparation for the professional workforce, but provide the equipment for the "gymnasium for the mind". The great problem is how librarians and teachers manage students who lack the most basic critical and interpretative skills. Instructing students how to plan a search - rather than stumbling through Infoseek - is a start. This "data mining" refers to a capacity to discover the most appropriate information, rather than faltering through the irrelevant, misleading or propagandist. Skills need to be taught, rather than assumed. We remain in a continuous learning environment.

Michael Moore has shaken up publishing, the media and the notion that George W. Bush is an appropriate leader of the free world. Without an individual librarian venting her anger about censorship, Stupid White Men would never have been published. We are losing too many critical voices about peace and war, learning and teaching, dissent and citizenship. Through education, we can make a difference. Through teaching, we recognise what we need to learn. But without libraries and librarians, we lose a way of thinking.