The Information Scientist as a Straw Man Villain

Who can we rage against when we find the weather or the tide does not suit us? Are these not natural occurrences that, outside of a religious explanation, have no source of responsibility? It is much the same with the "Information Age," a natural process set in motion by human innovation that has increased the access to ideas and images far beyond what Gutenberg or any of his contemporaries would have envisioned. There is no one person, or group of persons, to "blame" for the death of print, the increasing irrelevancy of the codex, or even the shortened attention spans of our younger planetary citizens. That is why I have invented the "Information Scientist" as the nebulous cause of all this change, and presented him/her as an evil entity focused on nothing less than the destruction of our collective heritage. In setting up this straw man I have been assisted by graduate schools of Library Science (of which I am an alum) who have jettisoned the word "library" from their institutional labels. (Contemporary librarians seem almost embarrassed of the title, and bemoan its branding connotations with dusty shelves of books and stern faced dowagers who shush the noisy.) Now that that the formerly named library schools are churning out information scientists rather than librarians, they seem obsessed with presenting their graduates as modern, a-go-go professionals whose internet savvy qualifies them to be the mediators in any person's search for relevant material online. The problem with this image is that contemporary internet users really see little need for the intervention of a third party to tell them if their Google hits are trustworthy or not. Indeed, the upcoming generation is rapidly becoming capable of finding anything on the internet that they want without instruction, and a growing number realize their search results are better vetted by those whose education is rooted in the discipline at hand. Thus the librarian, in his transformation into an information scientist who jumps between the user and the computer to claim authority as a judge of its quality, is doomed from the start. In other words...