“Imagine the life of a sceptic who doubted the accuracy of the telephone book, or, when he received a letter, considered seriously the possibility that the black marks might have been made accidentally by an inky fly crawling over the paper.”
This whimsical aside is from Bertrand Russell’s 1926 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the Theory of Knowledge. It’s a very minor point in the article, but it set me off on a train of thought at the library today.
When I wrote my proposal for this research and development residency, one of my aims was to think about the dualistic nature of the modern library: how it both contains (holds/encompasses/controls) official knowledge and simultaneously releases unofficial information (especially via the communication technologies that people use within it). Rather than focusing on either the former or latter, what I am finding most interesting about this is what happens at their intersection: what’s growing there is damaging mould for the library, but it’s fertile ground for the digital world, which happily houses fact with fiction in a way that no library has ever wanted to.
If he time-travelled to 2013, Russell’s sceptic would be right to question the accuracy and authorship of much of what he reads, but would it still be his primary concern? Perhaps not, because the act of recording and the generation of information are becoming more important than the acquisition of knowledge, which, bizarrely, might even mean that the unintelligible markings of an inky crawly fly have some value out there.
