Only Connect: Shaping Networks and Knowledge for the New Millennium

Citation

Duff, A.S. (2001), "Only Connect: Shaping Networks and Knowledge for the New Millennium", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 42-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.1.42.12

Professor Trevor Haywood, now enjoying early retirement from academic life, is still a thinker who deserves to be taken seriously. His writings are philosophical and free‐standing, the opposite of much current information science contract research. One might argue, indeed, that current managerial demands on working UK academics are such as to make the appearance of a fully‐baked monograph virtually miraculous!Anyway, Haywood’s latest offering, Only Connect, is a wide‐ranging set of reflections which return to many of the concerns expressed in his earlier Bowker‐Saur monograph, Info Rich Info Poor: Access and Exchange in the Global Information Society (1995), and more recently in the inaugural Ameritech Information Society Lecture (1997). Rampant technological determinism, the growing power of media organisations, informational inequalities, human‐computer parasitism, dysfunctional organisational cultures, genetic programming, cultural imperialism, democratic deficits, and all the rest: myriad threats posed by modernity are explored with an ironic, objective, and often insightful pen.

What is new here, not surprisingly, is an emphasis on the Internet, to which two full chapters are devoted. As its title indicates, the main thread running through the book is the idea of connectedness, construed as a human as opposed to technical relation. “We may”, Haywood writes, “make many more connections after 2000 but without some restoration of our faith in the value of connecting and in the integrity of the language we use to connect we will continue to feel less rather than more influential” (pp. 282‐3). Using a wealth of examples – like a good preacher, he is a master of illustration – Haywood explores the ways in which communication technologies have both advanced and impeded relationships between people. Thus telework can be seen as at once progressive and regressive, a move forward to flexible family‐friendly employment and a move backward to alienated labour; electronic connectivity between home and office (and home and globe) goes up, but face‐to‐face connectivity goes down. Similarly, the Internet as a whole has "established itself as the quickest way to disseminate both gossip and hard news around the world" (p. 181), a gain for both good and bad communications. The "connecting organisation", Haywood argues later, has opened up new vistas of collaboration but also given a new lease of life to bad manners in the form of curt or aggressive e‐mails.

Much of Only Connect is pure commentary, with the author’s judgements kept in the background, perhaps too much so. However, Haywood’s final stance on the way things are shaping up in the new millennium seems more negative than positive. While he cannot be ranked as a card‐carrying technological pessimist after the manner of a Theodore Roszak (1994), it is clear that he believes that “f2f” connectivity is being seriously undermined to the detriment of mankind. Haywood never comes anywhere near to articulating a systematic social philosophy, but his constant reiteration of the need for strong local communities points to the kind of values embedded in early twentieth‐century municipal socialism. This observation is not made with a sneer. On the contrary, I would suggest that any outbreak of old‐fashioned communitarianism could be welcomed (although not uncritically) as an antidote to some of the dubious trends – individualism, privatisation, computopianism, hedonism, cohabitation – which have swept across the chattering classes in the last decade or two.

If there is a weakness in this book, it lies not in its subject range or its author’s position, but in its sources. Info Rich Info Poor was chided for its over‐reliance on newspapers, and Haywood has evidently chosen to ignore all such reviews. Thus the reference list at the end of Chapter 6, on “Wires, Beams and Modems: the Internet”, is limited to Investors Chronicle, The Economist (cited twice), Time, and Harvard Business Review (cited twice). Elsewhere Haywood cites some of the more accessible books and reports on the networked society but he omits other vital texts, and in particular there is little evidence of respect for the academic journal literature, say of information science. Contrast Roszak who, in spite of being an outsider to information studies, finds “the most urgent questions of information technology and access being addressed more intensely and imaginatively at library conferences and in library journals than anywhere else” (1994, p. 181). Inevitably, then, Haywood will come across to his more critical readers as a something of an eclectic or even maverick. Nevertheless, Only Connect is a serious and timely meditation which could be read with profit by information professionals, especially those who want a larger view of the world.