Andrew Weiss: “Lean Into the Difficulty of Thinking for Yourself”

Andrew Weiss, digital service librarian at California State University Northridge and author of the books Counterfact: Fake News and Misinformation in the Digital Age and Big Data Shocks: An Introduction to Big Data for Librarians and Information Professionals, wasn’t always a lover of libraries. As a child growing up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he found them intimidating and tough to navigate.

“Remembering that experience makes me want to help students who may struggle now, even in the current internet era,” he says. “Facilitating access and eliminating barriers — of all sorts, not just bibliographic barriers — is an important mission statement for me!”

Now, as a librarian specializing in digital services, he works toward making libraries accessible to all. With the advent of AI, digital literacy has become even more important, with some people unable or unwilling to do the work to sort fact from fiction.

“The key is attempting to instill cognitive engagement with information sources; how can libraries better support that engagement, especially in the light of AI providing quick answers to everything and allowing people to ‘cognitively offload’ learning and information processing?” Weiss says. “This offload is perhaps the most influential negative aspect of AI.”

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Weiss worries about the cognitive effect of skipping the effort of learning, which is a crucial part of the process.

“Thinking and reasoning and learning new knowledge require significant effort,” he says. “Learning to lean into the difficulty of thinking for yourself will earn you dividends in terms of mental acuity; yet, it is so easy now to offload that effort. Libraries could provide a safe space to provide avenues of inquiry into any subject, sans AI, and could emphasize the value of ‘no pain no gain’ as well as the rewards of curiosity when it comes to cognitive engagement in a subject or area of inquiry.”

In addition to providing a safe space for learning, libraries can bring people together. “Online life increasingly fragments and alienates people, and so providing a forum for people to speak to (and not at) each other defuses tensions,” he says. Digital resources at the library also give patrons “a way for people to come into contact with the culture of the past that is openly available as well as the current culture that is built upon it.”

Weiss has written extensively about digital literacy and misinformation. “Misinformation involves a wide range of phenomena,” he says. “From mistakes shared by accident to hoaxes to purposefully falsified information to politically motivated propaganda, it is influenced at the same time by a user’s personal characteristics and situation: low cognitive engagement, fear of missing out, information overload, et cetera.”

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He sees libraries serving as an information buffer to combat fake news, digital manipulation, and AI hallucinations. “Libraries can act as purveyors and protectors of quality control for information, including providing valuable context about the information and the collection of differing viewpoints,” he says.

“Libraries cannot police every piece of information they collect, but they can provide the wider context and time and space to breathe (hence a buffered, critical distance) that people need to reason through whether something is true or false. The internet — and social media in particular — with its immediacy and virality, general lack of critical distance, and manipulative nudging techniques, does not provide this control; in fact, it often bypasses such control in order to satisfy the ulterior motives of its owners (namely diverting your attention for profit).”

Libraries are often seen as trusted institutions. Weiss sees maintaining and strengthening this trust in a time of deepfakes, algorithmic bias, and AI-generated content as a primary concern.

“Libraries have staked their reputations on ensuring that collections mirror not only their constituents but also established avenues of thinking and well-accepted domains of knowledge,” he says. “Widespread hoaxes and content creation could be problematic, but likely aren’t in and of themselves going to dent a user’s trust in a library. Instead, the concern is much more about the relationships that libraries have with the large academic publishing vendors that also serve as information brokers. The loss of trust may come more from the financial support libraries provide to such publishers and the potential exploitation of user data from the same vendors.”

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Weiss points out the need for library patrons to understand what is private and what is not when it comes to their data. “The loss of trust appears quite quickly when people are aware of being watched and observed; people quickly change their information-seeking habits and behaviors when they believe what they are looking for is risky to themselves. As a result, libraries need to be clear about what does or does not become observed by other entities when using library resources; what does and does not constitute fair game in terms of data collection and brokering.”

In addition to serving as a trusted resource, Weiss believes libraries can bring people together and even help them feel seen.

“So long as libraries emphasize community and prioritize their users’ needs, they serve as humanizing organizations,” he says. “Everyone wants to feel valued or be seen as valuable. Libraries can tap into that desire by providing an avenue to this feeling. Those who might assume libraries serve little role, or provide a marginalized role at best, when information is available anywhere, lose sight of the fact that people need and respect organizations that help them feel like they are bettering themselves.”

At the library, patrons can find many ways to better themselves through learning new skills and becoming more engaged with their communities.”Without the sense of trust to help contextualize or frame the information, the online search result may be useless anyway if you feel you can’t believe what you find, or you just go with what’s at the top of the page,” he says. “Personal agency and empowerment matter as much as, if not more, than the search box.”

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