The Commons

Well, sometimes I don't really understand what some things mean, so first off let's start with a definition of democracy. I pulled this from dictionary.com:

de·moc·ra·cy

  [dih-mok-ruh-see]

–noun, plural -cies.

1.

government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

2.

a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.

3.

a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges.

4.

political or social equality; democratic spirit.

5.

the common people of a community as distinguished from anyprivileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.

Well, I still don't fully understand half of what this means, but it makes sense that libraries are important to democracy in the sense of definition three. Libraries provide everybody in a community with the opportunity to learn from the literary works. It is an equal opportunity for all involved and readily available. It is a basic starting point for any sort of learning or inquiry. It is also a place where people come together with one common goal in mind. I don't think you can get any more democratic than that. In relation to the Internet, public libraries are basically the same. They both provide a plethora of information, yet the way people obtain the information is different. Libraries are generally solid copies of materials, yet some are more advanced and provide you with links to online resources where you can read the material. The internet is lacking in that it doesn't provide full works and sometimes has major gaps in information. I feel that libraries are more reliable, yet I know that much information on the net is more up to date and possibly more relevant. It is because of this lack of being up to date that libraries fall behind when people are learning new things. Also, libraries are more difficult to navigate than the net. Many people have grown quite accustomed to typing in a search bar rather than searching for a specific section of a library manually. Essentially, the use of libraries is a quickly diminishing art. However, I do realize that a lot of Internet sources gain their information from libraries.

I can honestly say that I barely understood what was being said in the book by Siva Vaidhyanathan. I don't fully grasp the whole idea of anarchy and public libraries. I even read some posts from other students I guess what they're saying makes sense, but I still don't understand it. It's confusing because to me, anarchy is the total loss of democracy and order which is the exact opposite of a library. I don't see how libraries are portals for pornography and the like. They are very scholarly in my opinion. I guess the only connection I see of libraries to anarchy is free information, but isn't that the main problem of the internet? I think he wants for libraries to live on, but I really don't know.