106 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING
'what' we will find so much as the way that information and knowledge relates to
the particular topic we are reasoning about.
Information understood by where we find it
Let us begin with a little history lesson.^1 J. C. R. Licklider was a leading US scientist
in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the founders of the Internet, and a visionary, he
was lead author of a report in the 1960s on the future of the library, and libraries
of the future. The report's main argument first of all recognised the value of the
printed page. It was a superlative medium for information display and processing—
'small, light, movable, cuttable, clippable, pastable, replicable, disposable, and inex-
pensive'. But, in an early sign of the impending crisis of information overload, the
report outlined how the collecting of pages into books, journals, magazines, and
bound documents, while necessary to allow even basic retrieval of information once
printed, negated many or all of the display/processing features while only partially
solving the huge difficulties of classifying, storing, and retrieving individual pages.
It also created its own organisational problems.
Licklider concluded 'if books [and we might include here all bound collections
of pages] are intrinsically less than satisfactory for the storage, organisation, retrieval,
and display of information, then libraries of books are bound to be less satisfactory
also'. A device, he said, was needed to allow both the transport of information to the
reader 'without transporting material' and, at the same time, some processing of that
information in ways that suited the reader's particular needs/uses of that infor-
mation: 'a meld of library and computer is evidently required'.
While we might think we have that device—the Internet—we can probably see,
even from the most cursory searching and browsing, that the Internet has solved
many problems, but only at the cost of creating a lot of new problems.
I use this example to make the point that the different categories of information
sources you encounter (e.g. monographs, edited collections, journals (both print
and electronic), newspapers, magazines, web sites, email lists, reference books,
conference proceedings, and so on) are primarily designed to assist in organising
information to make it readily available, rather than to assist you immediately to
decide what to use for your reasoning. They make information accessible rather
than making it analytical, sensible, or useable.
That said, we should not ignore the way in which the places we look for
information can, with careful use, provide some clues in the search for sense and
utility. While these places might be distinguished by labels that tend to describe the
form of their production (conference papers, monographs), these labels also imply
certain judgments about the value and reliability of information one finds there.
Here are some examples:
- Academic conferences are normally held to enable scholars and experts to
present the latest findings of their research or applied work to their