Looking Back and Looking Forward
The Never Again Pledge
October 26, 2024, Vol. 2, Issue 45
Cite as: Coleman, Anita S. (2024, October 26). Looking back and looking forward: The Never Again Pledge. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 2 (45).
I’m pleased to welcome two paid (one renewing and one new) readers to Infophilia, a positive psychology of information. Thanks for your support of my writing.
When I started this newsletter last year, I had little idea of the journey ahead. Involved in the WWW and digital libraries since their inception, and called a "global thinker" by the writers and jurors of the 2007 Library Journal Movers and Shakers award, I’d left the field. But somehow, years later, I found myself back, eager to share about the concept of infophilia—a real-life phenomenon that I’ve been observing and practicing. Infophilia describes our deep-seated love for information and how it shapes our behaviors, decisions, and, ultimately, our world. In addition to the infophilic information styles on a spectrum from healthy to maladaptive, infophilia, I felt, had great potential - appeal? - to be a grand theory for Library and Information Science.
I also had a difficult decision to make—whether to write for free or shift to a paid model. As an open source software and open access supporter it wasn’t easy, but the more I reflected on it, the clearer it became: just as some technology workers stood up through the Never Again Pledge to ensure their labor wouldn’t be exploited for unjust purposes, I, too, needed to make sure my labor—my writing, research, and ideas—was fairly compensated. Ethical treatment of labor, whether in technology or writing and research, requires valuing the effort and expertise that goes into the work.