Loved or lonely? Why libraries should still matter.
Imagine this. One day, a child comes up to you and asks why? Swamped with your other several dozen responsibilities (like finding the last of the clean water not yet seized by technocrats and AI data centres), they decide to change course and ask their hyper individualised, always friendly best friend - a chatbot. Except this time, the result it spits out causes the child to tug on your sleeve about the sure-fire hallucination it’s made up.
“Did places like libraries really exist? For free?”
Of course, this story sounds farcical but it hints at a wider concern - established institutions like libraries and their hidden benefits are often forgotten in the name of progress.
In a world that appears to be evolving at a breathtaking pace, with most things available at the touch of a button, libraries seem archaic, like relics of a bygone era. A growing lack of understanding of the utility of libraries means that they are seen as static lending centres as opposed to the holistic community third spaces that they often are. Continual years of depleted government funding means that councils have had to contend with choosing what services to sacrifice - and unfortunately all too often when it has come to a choice between letting streets pile up with rubbish due to a lack of funding for bin workers and refuse collection or funding libraries, it has been the libraries that have suffered the cut.
When forced to choose between the simple optics of a bin strike and buying more books, it seems obvious which should get the cut. Often seen as ways to make ‘easy’ cuts by successive governments, years of poor funding means that libraries have suffered the biggest cuts in council budgets since 2009/2010, second only to the catastrophic cuts made to youth services. In allowing this cycle of cuts to be made, the government has only played its own hand in failing to combat the multitude of social issues haunting modern British society.
Libraries, at their heart, are inherently collaborative, aiming to foster bonds within not just the community but also synoptic links within people’s everyday lives. Fiction and non-fiction allow readers to bridge the gap between theory and practice, exploring how most fields require an interdisciplinary approach (and how, in order to live the most exciting, vivid lives, we require a village from those of all different backgrounds). Alongside being one of the best facilities in encouraging social cohesion by allowing a platform for those both old and young, highly literate and those just learning, libraries are also home to free entry, free seating, free toilets - all facets that at many other modern institutions you would be forced to pay for nowadays and while designed to suit everyone’s needs, they are remarkable in their abilities to give a helping hand to those most in need of support in our societies. There is no subscription fee paywalling 'better' quality books or DVDs you can access. Unlike their AI counterparts, libraries are unique in their lack of sycophancy too, offering instead a plethora of sources (rigorously checked and subject to the approval of publishing houses) for the public to consume instead of regurgitating and stealing from the very same sources.
The act of going to visit your library may be more beneficial than you initially imagine too. For example, take this basic example of the cognitive load exerted by a) mindlessly offloading the work via an AI prompt or b) taking the trek to the library to do the required reading. A student may simply type a prompt into AI and within a few minutes, it generates a somewhat relevant response to their initial query. This differs to the thought process that libraries require. First, people must make the decision to visit the library and how best to suit their needs. Upon visiting the library, the student then heads over to the shelves or asks a librarian for the appropriate shelves on which the appropriate literature is. Having headed to the shelves, the student must make a meaningful selection in what exactly they are going to narrow their selection on. Once having chosen their book(s), they will then have to read over the relevant sections in order to glean the most useful and relevant information. Although this may seem like an unnecessarily tedious and arduous process, the process in itself is rewarding in that it develops the ability to discern what is of value and cultivates critical thinking skills that are increasingly prized in an online environment characterised by information overload.
Overall, in a world where algorithms are largely inaccessible to the average person, libraries continue to advocate for improving accessibility and serving the underserved. From the homeless to the hopeful, they can offer the ability to facilitate social interaction, media literacy and education in a way that is unmatched by AI as of yet. After all, pouring billions into emerging infrastructure that may help tackle the country's stagnant growth may seem like a clever idea in the moment, but, in the words of late American journalist Walter Cronkite, "Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation."
By Aimen Azeem
Sources :
[2] https://www.librariesconnected.org.uk/news/libraries-essential-service
[3] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/local-government-funding-england
