Government Docs, Libraries and Democracy

Looking at the titles of the reads for this week, I didn’t think I would find them very interesting, but to my surprise I did.  The Nerves of Government: Government Communication, the Welfare State and Technology especially caught my interest. This article seems to be from the 1980s, although I didn’t look up the exact publication date. As I was reading, I kept thinking about all the information we were given by the government on weapons of mass destruction. This was information that we could not verify independently, we just had to take the governments word for it. And while I can’t say for certain that the government provided that information in order to sway the public’s opinion, I find it highly likely. Which made me think about where can we, as private citizens, get information of this type if it doesn’t come from the government?

This also made me think about some of my parenting techniques. I may, on occasion, only tell my children certain facts I want them to know. For example, I can tell them that eating all that Halloween candy will rot their teeth, and thus, they can only have 1 piece after dinner (leaving more for me after they are asleep!) But what I don’t tell them is that they could simply brush their teeth after eating candy, and their teeth will be just fine. By selectively telling them the truth I can control what they do much more easily. My children don’t have the ability to research topics like oral hygiene themselves (they are only 6 and 4) and so they have to depend on the information they get from me. 

In the case of my children, in many ways I do know best, and I can make decisions for them. My goal in selectively giving them information is to get the results I want, with minimal resistance. However, I do not believe this is the role of the government. How can we, as citizens, make informed choices about topics like WMDs when all the information we can get is controlled by one (possibly biased) source?

The CWD article touches on this in some ways. The article discusses whether web sites contain information that is “needed by individual citizens to make private decisions or take private actions” (67). Or if perhaps the government provides information that “facilitates citizen assessment of agency policies and performance” (68).

The difference here is that the first quote would be referring to the type of information the government was providing in the WMD situation. Basically, the government is telling you these are the facts. They are absolutely true; you’ll just have to trust us. They don’t give dissenting opinions, they don’t show how the information was collected, or with what certainty the results are produced. In the second quote, you have the government providing information, as well as dissenting opinions, sources, information on how tests are run and what the results actually mean. In this way a person can draw their own conclusions, and even give the government their own opinion on the “facts” presented.  I would hope that all the information provided by the government was of this second type, but I have my doubts about that.

The last article was a little bit different. It was discussing the Federal Depository Library Program. It talks about keeping electronic records of government documents. For me this article raises a lot more questions than it answers. I am interested in how digital data can be preserved, and how we can know that it is uncorrupted.  I know this is a topic we touched on earlier in the class. I hope that we can talk a little bit about it in the lecture this week.