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Moving the Cheese

The Critical Approach to Thinking about Change

By Rory Litwin

A talk presented at the 2004 ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, Fla., at the Office for Diversity-sponsored program, “New Voices, New Visions: New Leaders Speak on the Future of Libraries and Librarianship.”

Rivers and Struggles

Many people think of change as being a natural force, like a river or stream that flows where it is going to flow regardless of what we do. By this way of looking at it, our task in moving into the future is to “adapt to change,” to move with the river rather than trying to stand against it—being an implementer (of changes which are taken to be inevitable) rather than a stick in the mud. But I do not believe that change is so deterministic or even natural. I believe that social, technological and economic changes (and perhaps some changes in the natural world) are nothing other than the results of decisions and actions of people. The essential question is whether we make those decisions through a process of careful, collective, conscious deliberation, with attention to what they really mean, or whether we make them unconsciously, with the attitude of “going with the flow,” accepting someone else’s decisions as though they were inevitable.

Who Moved Our Cheese?

How many of you are familiar with the book Who Moved My Cheese? It’s a very popular little book with a valuable idea about how to have a productive attitude in the face of changes in our environment that we can’t control. There are definitely changes taking place in our individual environments that we can’t control, and the book is helpful for thinking about these kinds of changes. But in terms of responding to and creating change collectively and on a larger scale, the book presents a problem and actually can teach an attitude that is unhelpful.

In the metaphor of the book, we are like mice in a maze who must deal with our cheese being moved around by an unseen hand while we sleep. This idea perpetuates the fiction that the changes we must deal with originate from outside the system, as though they come from God and are not the product of the collective decisions of people. (It is true that if we’re caught sleeping, we will wake up in a changed environment, and we won’t have participated in the process of change.) So in a sense, the “bad” mouse who absurdly asked “Who moved my cheese?” actually had it right. It is good to know who is moving our cheese, how it serves their interest to move our cheese, how they are doing it, where they are putting it, etc. And knowing these and other facts about the system as a whole we can begin to control it—to move THEIR cheese if we want, but also to build a cheese production and distribution system that works the way we want it to work. The point, with respect to the library profession, is that we shouldn’t always assume we are powerless to effect change and that must always adapt to it; and that the key is to study the forces that are shaping our future at the level of policy and to insert ourselves into the process strategically. We can do this through our organizations and we can contribute to the effort in various ways as individuals.

A Critical Attitude

More generally, what I’m talking about is having a critical attitude. What does it mean to have a critical attitude regarding the future of libraries? I think it can mean a lot of things, but one basic one is not to accept that things are necessarily what they are called. For example, we shouldn’t assume that something is really “access” just because it is called “access,” just as we shouldn’t assume that something is really democracy just because it is called “democracy,” just as we shouldn’t assume that someone is literate because they tell us that they know how to read. (Literacy workers know that many people who will tell you they know how to read actually need literacy services, because their reading comprehension is so poor that they need to have important documents read to them.) Accepting hype as truth means accepting a state of affairs that could be otherwise if we choose.

Regarding Access, to pursue the example a little bit, I can think of a couple of different ways in which the reality is often not as advertised. One is the barrier to access that emerges where resources are provided whose full use requires skills or knowledge or levels of literacy that library users sometimes or often don’t possess. To a degree, this problem will always exist as long as we provide a truly broad range of resources. But there are also cases where the library can do more to meet users half-way—whether through better designed interfaces, clearer information in library catalogs, or information literacy instruction conceived as a part of providing access.

Another, perhaps more hidden way that Access is often not what it is purported to be concerns what we are providing access TO. One of the major assumptions of modern libraries is that a central purpose of our existence is to provide access to the information that people need to participate in a democratic society, meaning to enable them to help shape the future and to have control over their own lives. The question is whether we are providing access to the real information that can give people that control, or a corporate substitute, which through propaganda artificially circumscribes the power that people can actually have, typically by offering choices where real education is what is needed. To the extent that we are providing access primarily to corporate substitutes for real information, we are not providing real access to democratic participation.

Three Phases of Technological Change

I have another point regarding technological change specifically. This is an idea I thought of as I was preparing for this talk, so it may be complete baloney, but I think it’s worth thinking about.

I think that technological change occurs in three phases, which are distinct but overlapping. These are the phases of innovation, standardization, and regulation. During the innovation phase, the new technology presents a huge range of possibilities and inspires visionary ideas, but it is not yet clear how it will end up being used or integrated into society. Anxiety about the new technology emerges in this phase along with the excitement, because new technologies can disrupt aspects of life that we all value, whether we think about it or not. The phase of standardization begins to see implementation of the technology, and it begins to enter people’s lives to a limited extent and to take on a clearer shape. The full integration of the technology into life requires policies about how the technology will fit in, where it will extend and will not extend, and when these decisions are made we are in the phase of regulation. To most “end users” this all seems like a natural process, like water flowing to where the ground is lowest, because they are not taking part in the decisions that define the way technologies are integrated; indeed the avenues for that participation by regular people may realistically be limited. But in reality, it involves policy decisions and regulatory activity by governments, and these decisions are informed by both the anxieties and the excitement that the technology generates. So, when you hear librarians warn of the privacy implications for RFID, it is a mistake to consider them as sticks in the mud, standing against the flow of change. In reality, they are contributing to the regulatory phase of technological change, thereby playing an important role in the way a technology is integrated into our life and work, determining its extent and interactions, and thus playing a positive role in technological change.

Final Comment on Diversity

I have one last comment that may be more controversial to some, that has to do with diversity. It is not enough, in my opinion, to provide access to information that exists solely within a given cultural group, e.g. Latino literature for Latinos, for us to say that we are serving a diverse population. To truly serve a diverse population, we must provide that population with access to the technocratic discourse where decisions are made that affect everybody. To do that may require new kinds of literacy and information literacy training, interpretive work, and greater diversity within the professional staff, but it is necessary if the kind of access we provide is going to be relevant in terms of providing opportunities to help shape the future and to give people the tools they need to control their own lives.

Rory Litwin is a Reference Librarian at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.