The library is in a digital age, and so are the rest of us.
We're not just in the age of Covid-19, or the age of insurrections, we're in a digital age and it comes huge responsibilities and privilege. Thankfully, the library has been leaning into this digital age for quite awhile.
Yet, here we are, the information is everywhere, so why are so many of us resistant to accessing ideas that might make us rethink our biases?
People, especially people of color, no longer have to do the exhaustive labor (free, performative, educating) to convince onlookers of systems of oppression. All of the information is available, *digitally available* in easily accessible language and generously, freely given media. Still, what is stronger than the digital age and more powerful than the access that allows most of us to be informed, is the uniquely human unwillingness to turn toward information that doesn’t reflect back our own rooted biases and fears that allow us to other those that we view as different.
I hope you didn’t think I had an answer for what keeps some of us seemingly thriving in specifically narrow areas of the digital age, like the latest soup recipe for your instant pot, but never investing the same energy into "pinning" methods of oppression. Maybe if there was a Pinterest for just that sort of thing.
Wait! Have you heard of Black Twitter?
You can be entertained and educated, digitally.
Works Cited
"He Looted Speaker Pelosi's Office, and Then Bragged About it." NYTimes.com Video Collection, 8 Jan. 2021. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CT649189062/OVIC?u=cclc_palomar&sid=OVIC&xid=4f5c3d01. Accessed 29 Apr. 2021.
Sharma, Sanjay. “Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion.” New Formations, no. 78, Aug. 2013, pp. 46–64. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3898/NEWF.78.02.2013.
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