Reimagining Innovation Culture
From Bibliography to Civic Infophilia
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of information | June 14, 2025 | Vol. 3, Issue 34
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter on how our love of information and connection can help us live wisely and well. Here, I explore the hyper-evolving terrain of our digital lives with care, curiosity, and conviction, asking how we might shape information lifestyles and knowledge cultures that sustain ourselves and society. This is my living lab, a space to refine my writing voice and reach new readers who, like me, believe knowledge should nourish, and information should heal, not harm.
Curious how this path began and where it’s headed? Start with my foundational piece on Infophilia and the Dopamine Connection (2023), the origin story. Explore recent thoughts in Serendipity’s Charm (2025). Browse key sections like Artificial Intelligence and Infophilic Information Styles for a preview of my book, Infophilia Unbound. You can also check out the full Archive, Local News, and Knowledge Structures Toolbox.
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Share this letter with your favorite librarians, scholars, acquisitions editors — anyone shaping how knowledge moves in the world.
Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2025, June 14). Reimagining innovation culture: From bibliography to civic infophilia. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 3 (34).
The summer heat hasn't yet fully arrived in Southern California and coastal cities are still waking up to the marine fog layer that is typical this time of year. Yet, this summer is different and likely to be remembered by many—including those yet to be born. Downtown Los Angeles has National Guard troops and Marines, America's safest city has ICE raids, and nationwide "No Kings" day protests are planned for Saturday, June 14. The mythos of innovation culture is fraying. Innovation, sold for almost a century now, as a sleek engine of progress and prosperity, of disruption, freedom, and ingenuity, is revealing its darker scaffolding: control, spectacle, and social construction masquerading as inevitability.
Protesters gathered not just against specific policies, like immigration control or deportation, but against a growing unease that the very institutions shaping our lives, governments, borders, markets, and technologies, have shifted from permanence to performance. These institutions are imaginaries, social contracts built on belief and consensus, not unshakable truths. And innovation culture, for all its slick branding, thrives on these belief systems. It promises transformation, but often within the confines of already unequal architectures.
Going beyond political dissent, the protests are a refusal to cede imagination to elites, algorithms, or kings in any form. They ask: Can we innovate without erasure, without spectacle, without violence? Who can help us escape innovation culture and reckon with the real?
Some information professionals, including library and iSchool professors, are already leading the way. What they offer is not another innovation framework, but something more fundamental: civic infophilia.
Today, critiques of innovation culture are surfacing everywhere. Technological innovation is now recognized as a massive social and cultural problem. Once dismissed as slow to innovate, librarians now face a different dilemma: how to respond ethically and meaningfully in a world overrun by innovation's excesses.
I’m drawn to this framework of civic infophilia from my recognition that C.W. Williamson's 1921 critique: — "Long overworked and under-paid, submerged in routine duties and free from a strong public demand for efficiency, librarians as a whole have not themselves been innovators" — no longer holds true. Today’s librarians are innovators, actively shaping the future of information access, technology integration, and community engagement. (However, burnout and overload are now recognized as systemic issues in libraries, archives, and museums, requiring institutional and organizational attention to support the retention and well-being of their staff.)
I’m also drawn to the mysteries and love of bibliography and its antecedents through time and space. This essay reimagines innovation culture through the lens of library history and Krummel’s idea of “bibliographical civics” to present civic infophilia.
Defining Civic Infophilia
Civic infophilia is a deep and socially responsive love of information oriented toward democratic life, critical awareness, and prosocial action. Building on adaptive infophilia theory — which recognizes that individual information styles vary by context from healthy to maladaptive — civic infophilia operates at institutional and societal levels. Here, information is treated not merely as content, but as connective tissue binding people, memory, and power.
Where infophilia denotes human affection for knowledge and connection, civic infophilia directs that impulse toward collective memory work, responsible information stewardship, and public-facing forms of inquiry. It is grounded in information ethics, civic imagination, and the values embedded in public institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums.
The Myth of Innovation and Its Failures
The federalized military presence in LA isn't just about law and order. It's a form of political theater — a signal to the nation, a stage upon which narratives of power, sovereignty, and progress play out. The planned "No Kings" protest is a rejection of authoritarian drift, and the illusion that our systems are neutral or naturally evolving. They're not. They are curated and protected by force when consensus begins to crack.
In these times, the downsides of innovation culture — its addiction to scale, speed, and profit — are impossible to ignore. Wars on Poverty and against Drugs have failed. Rising prices and environmental crises, lack of affordable housing and increasing joblessness continue to be huge problems. Now, drones are being used to surveil citizens during protests in the U.S., with significant concern from civil liberties groups about the use of advanced surveillance technologies. AI-powered rent-setting apps are actively driving up rents in major U.S. cities, including those marketed as "smart cities." This practice too is facing increasing legal and political scrutiny due to its impact on housing affordability and market competition.
Innovation culture's promise of neutral technological progress can no longer mask what Matthew Wisnioski (2025) calls a society "altered by its pursuit of innovation as an organizing theme." Innovation became "a way of life" only after World War II, beginning humbly in rural sociology, and transforming from a barely registered cultural concept into something "ingrained in our institutions, our educational system, and our beliefs about ourselves."
This begs the question: What futures are we building, and who gets to imagine them?
Bibliographic Roots of Resistance
And, this is where bibliography offers an alternative.