James H. Billington served as Librarian of Congress from 1987-2015. He died on November 20, 2018.
“The idea of knowledge-based democracy, propounded and exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, the founder of this Library, is being threatened in our time in a peculiar fashion by the flood of information generated by the new technologies and by the relentless advance of the audiovisual, multimedia world. We talk about the Information Age, not the knowledge age. The first outline of a proposal sent to me by a legislator some years ago talked about the need for forming ‘nodal points of local information dissemination’; I picked up the phone and said, ‘These things already exist—they happen to be called libraries.’
“I am haunted by the thought that all this miscellaneous unsorted, unverified, constantly changing information on the Internet may inundate knowledge, may move us back down the evolutionary chain, back down from knowledge to information, from information to raw data. We may be falling away from, rather than rising up to, wisdom and creativity, those twin peaks that are humanity’s highest intellectual attainments. Instead of a knowledge-based democracy, we may end up with an information-inundated demogogracy. Information itself is sometimes degraded into ‘infotainment’ and ‘infomercials’ and various other crudities, raising the problem of whether we can go on creating—let alone, making use of—knowledge.”
Source: James H. Billington, excerpt from keynote address at “Exploring the New Media: Partnerships in Electronic Publishing,” the second annual national electronic publishing seminar, held in Washington, DC, March 14-16, 1996, in Kristin Knauth, “Dr. Billington Addresses Electronic Publishers Meeting,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 55, no. 6 ( April 1, 1996): http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9606/ndl.html.
