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Secrecy is not privacy.

When we talk about privacy with regard to our information in the digital age, we're talking about a number of different things. One of them is secrecy. Not revealing a person's secret may be essential to protect them from the consequences of their becoming public knowledge - discrimination and persecution. On the other hand, revealing a person's secret may be necessary to prevent them from harming others.

The saying "Three can keep a secret if two are dead," was popular centuries before Google, Facebook, and the Patriot Act. In pre-industrial societies, you had no secrets because everyone you knew, knew everyone else that you knew. Even the king wouldn't recognize you on sight, the selectman knew you, and he could inform on you to the magistrate, and so on.

Then there was a blip in history where people concentrated in cities, anonymous in the crowd. Differences of race, culture, class, occupation, and recreational preference formed self-contained information networks. Gossip in the Screen Actor's Guild might reach in Congress, but it required attention and effort. A socialist, a homosexual, a light-skinned African American, might pass for a member of the mainstream. An enemy or overly curious person might find out, and accidental discoveries could happen, and these were subjects of much anxiety for people attempting to pass.

The difference now is that your inquisitive counterpart has Google search and Facebook's raison d'etre is facilitating accidental encounters. Federal subpoenas pull up not warehouses full of paper, but digital files that can be transmitted and analyzed in fractions of seconds. The digital medium is so fast and cheap that much more data is being retained and examined for useful patterns than was ever possible in the era of print.

But a lot of us are still passing - or trying to. Many forms of discrimination and persecution are now illegal, but they still happen. There are always loopholes, dark corners, subtle and sneaky attacks that are undetectable or unenforceable. And there are other forms of discrimination and persecution that are still legal and socially acceptable in at least some milieus.

We are still trying to hide our secrets, but it's getting harder and harder. All it takes is a photo of you in someone else's Facebook album, a blog post you forgot to mark private, or a webpage you long since took down that's still in Memory Hole. If there's a federal subpoena, even more is available to scrutiny - your library records, your webmail archives, purchases made with your debit card, websites accessed from your IP address...

Is the problem that we can't keep our secrets anymore or that we still need to have them?

Would it be easier and more advantageous to reinforce our personal information fortresses or change law and culture so drastically that these facts about our personal lives could not be used against us?

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

Information overload - they quote statistics on how a modern person takes in as much information in a day as a medieval person knew in a lifetime. I don't know how they quantify this stuff, but I could find out. I could pull up statistics, quotations, research methods, and a fistful of works that have cited it, all in the time it takes for my tea to steep, using a free, nigh omnipresent tool that's so popular that its name has become a verb.

Human beings are different than we were in the Middle Ages. I would argue that we're different than we were when I was a little girl. When I was in grade school, what an ordinary person could learn was limited by what you could walk or drive to, or get mailed to you. By the time I got a job in my college's computer lab; I found most of my materials for research papers on JSTOR, and used search engines to find answers to questions that I would never have bothered to investigate before. With hypertext, one tidbit might lead to infinite tangential strands of inquiry. What was disparagingly called surfing let me see worlds of information - broadly, if not deeply - that would have been beyond my access or even awareness before.

Brains, like muscles, grow to meet the demands we place on them. Psychology and culture shift to accommodate new ways of thinking and doing. We are a new race, but incompletely evolved to fit our niche.

I have certain advantages: fast reader, fast typist, fantastic memory for facts and "where I found it." A degree in library science. Also, I came of age as the Internet did. I don't feel overloaded.

Many are still flailing in the ocean, not drinking from the stream. Their senses aren't yet tuned to this environment; their skills aren't yet honed for it. In this provident habitat, they feel at a loss, threatened, overwhelmed. What I am as a librarian, what I do and know, boiled down, is what we all need. My job, as I construe it, is to do that boiling down, find ways to make "information literacy" not so much a discrete skill set as an integral part of the way we think, read, listen, watch, and learn.

It can't be a degree, or a course, or a quick how-to. At least not just that. How we handle our relationship with information can't be as isolated as it's been because it has too significant a bearing on every aspect of life. And yet, it can't be as much as that either, because there is so much equally crucial matter to cram into an education, to fit into the day.

Issues of equity, motivation, andragogy, issues of time and resources... How am I supposed to figure this out? I'm just a librarian!

I'm a librarian - it's my job.

Hello world.