Substack's Library AI Blindspot
Kawaii Maps for Information Literacy & Infophilia
Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information | January 26, 2026, Vol. 4, Issue 7 | Updated: 01/27/26 added dedication, note on kawaii culture, and corrected title and cite to fit Substack title test results (previously: Culture and platform power: Kawaii maps for AI literacy & infophilia)
Dedication: To Dr. Linda C. Smith, the Renaissance Scholar of LIS - my birthday gift.
Intellectual Freedom | Civic Infophilia | Technophilia | Toolbox | Wellbeing
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter exploring how our love of information and connections can help us all thrive, individually and collectively. Avant-garde research.
Today’s essay explains adaptive infophilia—the explicitly non-Western, yet universal, relational framework for human information behavior using Japanese kawaii cultural epistemology—while documenting 2025 Substack library AI discourse: who's visible, who's invisible, who left, and why algorithmic platforms may undermine their own stated values. It's playful AND it's research. And it’s adaptive infophilia playing out at the platform level.
📌 Access & Attribution: This serial offers free previews always and occasional open access essays to keep scholarship accessible. Students and those facing financial barriers can request complimentary access. If you find value here, please cite the original work and consider supporting the public scholarship through subscription. Proper attribution sustains this work and models healthy information engagement.
Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026). Substack’s library AI blindspot: Kawaii maps for information literacy & infophilia. Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information, 4(7).
Substack’s Library AI Blindspot
Kawaii Maps for Information Literacy & Infophilia
How Library AI Whisperers, Resisters & Ambivalents Embody Information Styles
While a historic storm buries North America from Rockies to Atlantic, I’m cozy with my oldest plush friends—mapping librarian AI personas through the lens of kawaii infophilia. Perfect timing for kawaii – adorable – humor amid all our storms. Whether you’re a Whisperer, a Resister, or just trying to figure out what AI means for your lifestyle, reading style, and your own work: stay warm, stay safe, and most of all take time to enjoy a smile. Get your favorite plushie and settle in. 🧸✨
The Tenor Has Changed
As regular readers of Infophilia know, I curate LibStack—a directory of library voices on Substack. In doing the 2025 annual update, I noticed something: the tenor of library AI conversations has shifted, mostly thanks to new voices joining the discourse.
In 2024, Reed Hepler (CollaborAItion), The AI School Librarian (Elissa Malespina), and I (Infophilia) appeared to be pretty much the only library voices writing regularly about AI on Substack, “the home of great culture.” In 2025, Hana Lee Goldin launched Card Catalog for Life, Aaron Tay migrated his Musings on Librarianship blog (running since 2009) to Substack, and Casey Mullin started Cataloger in the Loop while on sabbatical. The conversation moved from niche concern to mainstream library discourse—at least on Substack.
Notably, in 2025, university presses like Princeton and Louisiana State have joined the platform, though the big five commercial publishers haven’t. The Substack ecosystem is carving out space between traditional academic publishing and commercial media.
What makes this shift fascinating? These voices embody different information styles—different ways of engaging with the AI storm. And kawaii culture (the Japanese phenomenon that started with Hello Kitty in the 1970s and that’s now a part of research and development in many disciplines including Human-Robot Interaction, HRI) offers the perfect map for understanding them.
The Infophilic Spectrum
(As Explained by Adorable Characters)
What if I told you that your relationship with information could be explained through kawaii culture? And what if that relationship shifts depending on context—that you might be wise about your work information but dopamine-chasing about celebrity gossip or sports, thoughtful about health decisions but overwhelmed by news feeds?
Western library and information science has long treated people as empty vessels to fill with information. But kawaii culture—with its emphasis on emotional bonds, relational connections, and context—offers a fresh new way to understand the theory of adaptive infophilia, a framework that honors how our love of information actually works in real life.
My Melody embodies the Infocurious—with her unicorn horn shining, she’s still developing critical thinking skills but curious, willing to learn. She asks “what’s this?” with genuine wonder, explores information for the joy of discovery. No agenda, just growing wisdom.
Badtz-Maru is the Infoseeker—that mischievous penguin with moderate critical thinking ability, open to new sources, building digital literacy. He can evaluate information effectively when he needs something specific. Mission-driven with attitude.
Pikachu is the Infovore—consuming large amounts of information with electric energy but struggling to distinguish credible from unreliable sources. Gotta catch ‘em all, but wait... are all these facts actually true? High consumption, developing discernment.
Charmander channels Infophile acumen and energy—tail flame burning bright with passionate engagement. Using information effectively in daily life, making informed decisions, solving problems with high accuracy. But there’s also higher regulation of information flow, deeper flow states, evolved relationship with knowledge itself. Think of the colleague who doesn’t just research a topic but enters flow state, loses track of time, emerges with a synthesis they created for pure joy.
Kiiroitori (Rilakkuma’s yellow bird friend) is the Infopragmatist—using information effectively in daily life for making informed decisions and solving problems with high accuracy. Practical, grounded, gets what’s needed done.
Snorlax (Relaxo in German!) is the Infofool—drawn to information that triggers dopamine hits without considering accuracy. So overwhelmed by the information flood that the only reasonable response is strategic retreat. Sometimes the healthiest thing is to block the path and nap.
And here’s the beautiful part: you can be all of these at different times. Infophiles in your professional fields, infofools about doomscrolling Facebook. Infopragmatist about grocery shopping, infocurious about a new hobby. Adaptive infophilia recognizes that healthy information engagement is context-dependent and relational—not a fixed hierarchy. That’s why information styles exist on a spectrum.
Adaptive infophilia honors how humans actually work, drawing on non-Western cultural wisdom that Western library science education has too long ignored.
The Library AI Debate
Where Kawaii Culture Meets Substack Reality
Now here’s where it gets fascinating. The 2025 Substack library AI voices? Watch how they embody these kawaii personas.
The AI Whisperers
Infopragmatist Squad
Reed Hepler leads with ethics-first authenticity. His newsletter CollaborAItion: Bringing the Human to Human-AI Interaction asks: “Instead of AutomAIting, why not CollaborAIte?” As Digital Initiatives Librarian, he trains ethical GenAI for libraries and education, deploying tools “stealthily” (custom GPTs like SavoyGPT) with his 3 Cs framework: Copyright, Citation, Circumspection. He calls himself “the most anti-AI AI proponent”—pure Kiiroitori pragmatism focused on quality over hype.
On February 3, Reed is teaching “Evaluating AI Content”—moving beyond “Was this made with AI?” to “Was this made well?” The question matters: in a world of AI slop, AI alloys, and AI-influenced work, librarians need skills to evaluate quality and human judgment. That’s infopragmatist discernment.
Aaron Tay runs an AI tool testing laboratory, evaluating everything from research assistants to search engines with methodical precision. Aaron Tay’s Musings about Librarianship has 4,300+ subscribers who trust him to assess AI tools with high accuracy. He sits on the Clarivate AI governance board (and other boards), writes about RAG architectures, benchmarks tools openly. Fully free (no paid tier), sustained via his board position, job, talks, and influence. Pure public good—maximizes impact over revenue. Classic Kiiroitori generosity: tactical, economical, pragmatic.
Casey Mullin launched Cataloger in the Loop four months ago with the tagline “Slow AI for Fast Work.” He’s building ErgoCat (short for “Ergonomic cataloging”—or “I cat[alog] therefore [I am]” if you love Latin puns!) as a sabbatical project for music catalogers. His approach? “Not all components of a cataloger’s workflow can, or should, be handed over to the facile abilities of a large language model, but not all of those things should be left to the human’s manual effort either.”
Automate the drudgery. Preserve the expertise. His recent posts document struggling with Microsoft Power Platform’s image capture—the mundane reality of building AI tools. No hype, no refusal, just practical problem-solving. Pure infopragmatist Kiiroitori energy: using information effectively to make informed decisions about human-AI symbiosis.
Hana Lee Goldin—Card Catalog for Life organizing AI chaos into searchable knowledge for 3,000+ readers, monetizing a freemium toolkit, and “teaching you how to think like a librarian.” Using information effectively, solving practical problems for her readers making informed decisions about AI literacy frameworks. Infopragmatist with cottage-core aesthetics and paid Substack bestseller status.
The AI School Librarian (Elissa Malespina)—The AI School Librarian’s Newsletter serving weekly briefs to 3,000+ school librarians. Prompt libraries, hallucination-detection guides, practical AI boot camp. Using information effectively to help educators make informed decisions. Mission-accomplished pragmatism. Also a paid Substack bestseller.
These Whisperers aren’t just consuming AI hype—they’re infopragmatists applying high critical thinking to build effective frameworks (3 Cs! CLEAR! SIFT! and more!) and tactical solutions. Some monetize (Goldin, Malespina), some sustain through influence (Tay), some build open tools (Mullin, Hepler). All use information with high accuracy. No hype. Pure utility.
But here’s the revealing pattern: The top AI Whisperers by subscriber count—Tay, Malespina, Goldin—aren’t just writing long-form essays. They’re extremely active on Substack Notes, the platform’s social media feed. Not just excerpts of their essays, but constant engagement, conversations, micro-posts. Notes functions like Twitter or Instagram—algorithmic, feed-based, engagement-optimized. The voices that master Notes visibility get amplified. The ones who just write thoughtful essays? They get buried. No flywheels, no reads!
So much for Substack as “the home of great culture” prioritizing depth over virality.
Key Finding: The top AI Whisperers aren’t just writing essays—they’re constantly active on Substack Notes, the platform’s social media feed. Master Notes visibility, get amplified. Just write thoughtful essays? Get buried. So much for ‘the home of great culture’ prioritizing depth over virality.
The Resisters
Also Infopragmatist Squad—But NOT on Substack!
Here’s what else is fascinating: the library AI resisters aren’t on Substack. They’re publishing zines, academic literature, organizing through different channels. This tells us something about platform and discourse.
Matthew Noe—Co-authoring AI doubt literature, contributing to refusal guides. Using information effectively to make the informed decision that GenAI conflicts with librarianship values. Pragmatic assessment leading to principled refusal. Same high accuracy, different conclusion.
Violet Fox—Publishing zines declaring AI violates ALA ethics. She’s done the information work, evaluated the sources, made an informed pragmatic decision: refuse. Not anti-information—supremely thoughtful about which information tools serve the mission.
Library Freedom Project—”Resistance, rebellion, refusal” from strategic infopragmatist wisdom. They’ve assessed AI’s costs and benefits with high accuracy and concluded: this fails our values test. Informed, effective, pragmatic refusal.
The insight: Both Whisperers (on Substack) and Resisters (elsewhere) are infopragmatists using information effectively to make informed decisions. They just reach different pragmatic conclusions about AI—and choose different platforms for their discourse. No hierarchy. No “one side is smarter.” Both are doing the work with high accuracy.
The Adaptive Ones —And What Platforms Hide
I (through Infophilia) cycle through the entire kawaii spectrum in real-time: infocurious (playing with open source and selective commercial like Claude, exploring AI as mirror of human flaws); infovore (consuming developments across platforms and disciplines); infophile (passionate flow state with information behavior theory); infopragmatist (making informed choices about what to engage), and probably infofool sometimes (lost in rabbit holes). The essays on Infophilia also aim to document this moment—how the library profession responds to AI—creating a part of the historical record for future philosophers and scholars.
But here’s the crucial caveat: Substack is a tiny, tiny, slice of the library world. Do you know how many new serials and blogs in library and information science launched in 2025? This essay documents what’s visible from my particular platform vantage point—which itself reveals something important about algorithmic visibility and discourse.
While updating LibStack, I discovered other library voices on AI that launched in 2023-2024: Michael Ridley’s Exploring the Information Ecology, Ask a Librarian, Smart Libraries, Smarter Librarians by Laura, and Hybrid Horizons by Carlos Iacono. Ask a Librarian and Smart Libraries were especially actively questioning—not just explaining or promoting—AI.
The revealing part? None of them surfaced in my initial searches. They don’t enjoy anywhere near the visibility of our top AI Whisperers, despite doing thoughtful questioning work.
And it’s not just about who’s invisible—it’s also about who leaves. In February 2025, Kelly Jensen’s Well Sourced migrated from Substack to Buttondown, choosing a platform that prioritizes email-first newsletters over social media integration. Platform choice is itself an information behavior—a pragmatic decision about which tools serve your mission and values.
What this tells us: Substack’s platform dynamics—its recommendation algorithms, its “bestseller” mechanisms, its Notes feed—may actually undermine the “long-form reading and writing culture” it claims to champion. Questioning voices get buried. Pragmatic frameworks get boosted. Resisters choose other platforms entirely. Some voices leave altogether for quieter, less gamified spaces.
Platform Critique: While updating LibStack, I discovered questioning library voices that launched in 2023-2024. None surfaced in my initial searches. They don’t enjoy anywhere near the visibility of AI Whisperers, despite doing thoughtful work. Substack’s algorithms may actually undermine the ‘long-form reading culture’ it claims to champion.
Even within a platform supposedly built for depth and nuance, certain information styles get algorithmically amplified while others remain invisible.
That’s adaptive infophilia playing out at the platform level—and it matters for where library discourse happens and who gets heard.
Kawaii Culture Beyond Being Delightful
Theoretical Contribution: Adaptive infophilia recognizes that healthy information engagement is context-dependent and relational—not a fixed hierarchy. You can be infophile about climate science but infofool about celebrity drama. You’re not broken. You’re human.
Western library and information science has operated on a model of hierarchy: there’s a “right way” to evaluate information, and people need to be taught it. Static. Prescriptive. Often ignoring non-Western epistemologies and ensuring that even non-western librarians can sometimes carry on western biases.
Kawaii culture—and adaptive infophilia—offers something radically different: relational, context-dependent, honoring that our connections with information shift and change. You’re not broken because you’re an infofool about celebrity drama but an infophile about climate science. You’re human.
The Whisperers (infopragmatists) are genuinely useful—they’re building effective frameworks. The Resisters (also infopragmatists) are genuinely necessary—they’re protecting values with informed decisions. The ambivalent theorists are documenting the complexity. Even the overwhelmed (infofools) are valid—sometimes Relaxo energy is the healthiest response.
Adaptive infophilia as a grand theory of library and information science corrects Western LIS’s oversight: People aren’t empty heads to be filled with information. We’re in relationships with information—relationships that are contextual, emotional, cultural, embodied, and beautifully complex beyond the cognitive.
Kawaii epistemology corrects Western LIS's prescriptive "right way" model with relational, emotional, contextual framework.
The library world is big enough for My Melody’s curiosity, Pikachu’s consumption, Kiiroitori’s pragmatism, Charmander’s passion, and Snorlax’s strategic retreat. The 2025 Substack voices show us these styles in action—different approaches to the same AI storm, all valid, all contributing. But they also show us how platforms themselves shape which voices we hear.
Take time to know your infostyles. Recognize they shift. And most important, keep smiling. You got this!
P.S. I was inspired to bring kawaii culture’s relational wisdom into library theory—something Western library science has too long ignored, even when citing Ranganathan’s Five Laws rooted in Hindu philosophy. This is adaptive infophilia at its core: cultural knowledge returned to library and information science where it belongs.
May your plush friends guide you through the storms.
About the image
The Kawaii Infophilia squad: My Melody, Snorlax, and Kiiroitori plushies with Charmander action figure (Badtz-Maru and Pikachu went into hiding!)
Notes
Please let me know your favorite kawaii (or other cultural character - I enjoy the Moomintrolls too!), any corrections you see needed or mistakes and observations; and do remember this is a preliminary content analysis.
LibStack directory and platform analysis remains an ongoing work. The library fifth estate of library discourse is explained in LibStack. But Substack’s library pulse is tiny; even our top AI Whisperers remain under 5k readership.
Stats on academic Substack growth, monetization patterns, and visibility dynamics reserved for upcoming essay on public scholarship.
Full theoretical framework: Coleman, A. S. (2025). An introduction to infophilia, a positive psychology of information. Journal of Information and Knowledge, 62(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.17821/srels/2025/v62i1/171701
The Renaissance Scholar of LIS: Professor Linda C. Smith. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/128815
Kawaii (Japanese) is not only a worldwide cultural, aesthetics, design and marketing phenomenon, it’s also one of the most popular topics of research in behavioral sciences and affective engineering. It’s an active model for how humans engage with information. Where Western LIS sees distraction, Kawaii sees relational engagement. Nittono’s 2016 paper is seminal in Human-robot interaction / Kansei engineering (engineered emotional engagement): https://cplnet.jp/en/kawaii/ And here’s a linguistic perspective. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9683379/pdf/fpsyg-13-1040415.pdf
Kawaii culture goes far beyond Pokémon—to Sanrio (Hello Kitty merch power), San-X (Rilakkuma's subversive self-care). These three layers are exactly what LIS theory, education, and GLAM practice often miss: the relational, affective side of how people live with information. (There are exceptions.)
My Melody brings the epistemology vibe—"How do we know what we know?"—while Rilakkuma embodies adaptive chill amid info overload, complementing her relational knowing.
Relational epistemology meets adaptive fragmentation relief—playing out right now in librarians' overload and burnout. That's why adaptive infophilia has the reach to theoretically function as a grand theory and make the field (LIS/GLAM) feel less fragmented.
I feel flattered to be included with the likes of Aaron Tay in this excellent post! As Anita notes, I was essentially the first person in library-AI world to start posting on Substack, along with Elissa Malespina. However, Aaron Tay has been posting about this on various platforms I was in high school.
Evidently, I need to be active here on Notes! Go ahead and read my blog and see if you would like to subscribe (it's free to get everything, but you can pay if you like it enough), or suggest topics. Because of the twins, I haven't posted in several months, but I do have 7 posts in the making.
I’m here! Although I write about library and information concepts applied to technology and organizations. I’ve been writing on Substack since May 2024 and other platforms since 2018.
Not sure that I count. I am a librarian with my MLS and used to be an academic librarian before entering the corporate world in 2018.
My newsletter is called Intentional Arrangement