User:Book/BlogEntry: 2008 March 11 14:11:10 EAT

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Revision as of 20:59, 11 March 2008

Yesterday, the daily paper I subscribe to (Hufvudstadsbladet, a daily paper Swedish here in Finland) had a long article on languages in Africa in the form of an interview with Axel Fleisch who is the recently appointed professor of African Studies at the university of Helsinki. For once this article gives a positive picture of Africa. The great number and variety of African languages and dialects are seen as a richness. The South Africans are proud of being a "rainbow country" of different languages and cultures and consider themselves to be pioneers, says prof. Fleisch.

Historian Basil Davidson was right, I think, in calling the Nation-State "a curse" (in The Black Man's Burden. Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, Three Rivers Press. New York 1992). The system of Nation-States is obsolete and mankind has to get rid of it. Yet I am glad to read (here, for instance) that the main contrahents in the political struggle in Kenya have now reached a compromise and agreement on how to run the country in the nearest future. At the moment, there seems to be no alternative. Powerful circles in the USA may still believe that their Nation-State is called to govern the whole world, but they are thoroughly mistaken.

World government probably will be a cybernetical (self-governing) system like, for instance, the Wikipedia. In so far as Cyberspace needs to be governed at all, it is a Librarian's task. Let's advance further in that direction.

Julie sent me the link to Literacy Leads to Hope. This is a community library project in Thika which is supported by American Friends of Kenya, Inc. It looks nice, so take a look! Have you who live in Nairobi ever visited it? If you have your way in that direction, why not pay them a visit and write a page about it on this site ? We need to document these community libraries! The article about the community library at Majengo was the first.

I am all for the establishment of community libraries, but community libraries have their limitations. Ideally, the community libraries should also be public libraries, but they are not, or cannot yet always be, that.

What makes a library public? Traditionally (this actually means in the European tradition of political history after the French revolution 1789) public means belonging to the public sphere of the nation.

However, the internet has created a new situation for the public sphere(s) of mankind. Or, let's say that mankind has taken a decisive step out from the national public sphere into the Cosmopolitan public sphere of the global networks. Therefore, we are now in the process of 'the separation of state from nation' (see A new Cosmopolitanism is in the air . Sociologist Ulrich Beck presents seven theses to combat the global power of capital.)

What does 'the separation of state from nation' mean from the point of view of the public librarian? Surely, it does not mean that the public library should fly away from its local community to some distant transnational sphere! No, the public library needs to become even better connected to its local roots than hitherto. (This, by the way, may be the positive meaning of Library 2.0. ) But at the same time, the library needs to become ever better connected to the Internet. The Internet is the common public library of mankind which can enable the people to think globally and act locally.

Warm regards,

- Mikael