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The Critical Pastafarian:  Evaluation by Authority in a Web 2.0 World

by Ryan Deschamps

Authority for local history searches is a challenge for the public librarian.  Which resource is more authoritative:  the scholarly document citing a litany of government and academic resources, or the sincere first-person account?   Does it matter if a community trusts the views and opinions of the latter more than the former?   If it does matter, how does that situation differ from a seasoned historian preferring the former?  And what is my role as a librarian in understanding authority in this realm?

Web 2.0 implies an affirmation of the first-person account.   Blogs are excellent resources for community members to provide local history from their own perspective.  As the public tend toward  Google more than online indexes for their research, it will be the blogger and not the seasoned historian that will come to the forefront.   This, in my view, is neither a good nor a bad thing.  However, it is increasingly difficult to understand the nexuses implicit in the creation of Web 2.0 knowledge.   For instance, are affirming commenters of a blog post often, sometimes or never friends of the writer?   Are naysayers enemies by default?    In a person-to-person environment, we can test such social cues based on body-language, clothing, interaction, post-conference pub sessions and the like.   In an online social environment, these cues are more difficult to notice and understand.

A family member showed me something she thought was a "good" book.  This book was, in my quick view, a work of pseudo-science and I was determined to prove my view to be true using a straight-shooting method that can only be reserved for family members. For an easy (and absurd) reference, let's assume the book was Bobby Henderson's satire Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

A quick Google search for the title showed sources from obvious card-carrying supporters of the purported pseudo-science.  Not surprisingly, Amazon reviews were as glowing as they were dubious.  Clearly, people who do not support the book's views were also not reading and/or reviewing the book.  Other traditional evaluation tactics (bibliography analysis, author biography etc.) also failed.  I lost this evaluation battle.  A few days later, my family member bragged to me about how great she thought her book was.

At the reference desk, a librarian does not have the luxury of being the kind of "straight-shooter" I am with a member of my family.  How can the public librarian support information literacy and encourage the radical Pastafarian to look at the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with a reasonably skeptical eye?

For one, we need to develop an institutional understanding of knowledge authority.  By this I mean we need to develop instincts related to the community behind a piece of knowledge to go along with subject and bibliographic analysis.  Technorati's "blogs that link here" feature can help, but ultimately this strategy requires asking "who" in ways more complex than merely pinpointing the authorship of a source.  In short, our own critical thinking needs to sharpen if we are to sharpen that of others.

Another strategy is outreach.   Librarians and other knowledge professionals need to become resources for authority away from the information desk, and into the blogosphere and environs such as Second Life.   That way, we can offer a straight-shooting critique of a resource without undermining the sanctity of the formal reference interview.   In the casual conversations of community meetings, coffee-house discussions and the like, Librarians can engage community conversations and help to nip pseudoscience, urban myths and so on in the bud.   We can also spread the rumor that [among other sources] the public librarian can offer a second opinion on information authority, Web 2.0 or otherwise.   If people come to librarians asking for our professional opinion, we can be more straight-shooting and at the same time share a systematic process for determining the authority of the work.

There are more strategies, I am sure.   Clearly, librarians and other educators should be looking for more so that information developed through consensus-seeking can be moderated with a dose of critical thinking and systematic evaluation.  We owe it to our Pastafarian public!