In this Issue

Throughout the three decades I spent working with college undergraduates as they were introduced to the habits of scholarly inquiry, I always hoped to shift the teaching moment from being able to complete graded tasks to something more durable: leading students to that lightbulb moment when they recognize they have agency and a role to play in producing meaning, recognizing themselves as participants in a community of knowledge, sharing a respect for honest methods and solid evidence.

Yet, two big questions continually troubled me: Do students genuinely understand how information in its various forms is produced and circulated, or have they simply learned to mimic a narrow repertoire of academic ways of knowing? And, do the ethics and values they develop around information production and use in college transfer to life beyond graduation, as they engage with information flowing through a variety of ever-evolving channels? In other words, does the identity they’ve crafted as knowers in an academic context prepare them to participate as free human beings in an increasingly complex society?

That challenge was underscored as I drafted this essay for the first issue of the PIL Provocation Series, “Lizard People in the Library.” As trust in a common reality was systematically eroded and conflicting information channels diverged from the traditional guardrails of common sense, a conspiracy theory that attracted hundreds of thousands of adherents through social media channels, many of whom traveled to Washington, D.C. to join up with white supremacists and neo-Nazis on January 6. Some of them were inspired to live-stream their participation in a violent insurrection, attacking the U.S. Capitol as Congress was holding a joint session that would finalize the results of the 2020 election.

Where does a democracy-threatening event, nurtured and executed through a tide of disinformation leave those of us who care about information literacy? As I write in my essay: “The rise of the multi-headed hydra of conspiracy theories that are factually absurd, yet are widely disseminated online and in public life, shows how a community was able to form itself around a radically divergent set of assumptions about how we know what is real." This is fundamentally an epistemological crisis. To succeed in college, students need to know how the library works, but that’s not enough. To participate in the world as it is today, they deserve to learn about how larger information systems work in — and on — their world. As we saw on January 6, 2021, the stakes for understanding how these systems affect society are higher than we may have realized.

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