Alex Chambers: Libraries didn't always have books. Wait a minute, yes they did. But the Director of the Monroe County Public Library thinks may might not in the future. And, maybe that's okay? Grier Carson says in the 21st Century the purpose of the public library is--

Grier Carson: Bringing people together in a free and open space.

Alex Chambers: I wanted to talk with Grier, because he has a kind of amazing ability to balance smart thinking about policy, for example, he's a staunch defender of intellectual freedom. But he's not so worried about the recent rise in book bans. He balances that with big speculative futures, like how just being in person for social experiences, might become obsolete in the next hundred years. We'll talk about all that and democracy, and the future of narrative itself after this.

Alex Chambers:  A while back I went to our local public library to get to know the teen space. It's a whole section of the library just for teens, it's very cool. But I started by talking to Grier Carson.

Grier Carson:  I am the Library Director at the Monroe County Public Library here in Bloomington.

Alex Chambers:  The Monroe County Public Library, also known around town as MCPL. You'll hear us call it that once or twice. Grier and I met in his cozy third floor office, and our conversation about having a space devoted to teens, not just teens' books but video games, crafts, just hanging out, that led us to this bigger question that kind of blew my mind. Does the future of libraries need to include books at all? I know librarians have been talking about this for decades, to the point where a librarian friend of mine posted on Facebook about her exhaustion with the whole discourse. But libraries are evolving, and Grier has a lot of thoughts on the future of libraries and, related to that, the future of narrative. So, with apologies to my friend Katya, I've got a conversation for you about libraries as public spaces, how video games are changing our relationship to narrative, and whether we'll need libraries at all down the road.

Alex Chambers:  If that sounds cynical for a library director, Grier Carson is anything but. He caught the library bug in college, here at Indiana University, working in residence hall libraries.

Grier Carson:  Over the course of a couple of years of doing that my junior and senior year at IU really, I started thinking more and more about how cool it would be to work in libraries.

Alex Chambers:  He moved to Cincinnati, worked in a couple of public libraries there. Then he decided to go to grad school for it.

Grier Carson:  And like a lot of kids who go into what is now the Luddy School of Informatics, you go in thinking, well, I'm going to work in academic libraries because that's the most interesting area in terms of subject matter or ability to specialize. And like a lot of kids who come out of Luddy, you realize, no there's something about public libraries, it's a little bit cooler.

Alex Chambers:  He actually started as a school librarian and then things took off from there. But, you know, library work can be hard, it's not going to get you rich. Grier's had other reasons to stay in it.

Grier Carson:  I do believe very deeply in the mission of public libraries to provide free and equitable access to resources. In a sense, participating in the democratic structure that we enjoy, and upholding it, and trying to help it grow and change as needed, it's a noble area of work. And so you think about that almost every day, but certainly on days where you're like, well, I'm not sure if I want to go to work, I don't feel it, or whatever, this is going to be a tough day, whatever it is. Then that kind of creeps into your head and drives you a little bit.

Grier Carson:  Also, the people that I've been fortunate enough to work with, really every library I've worked since graduate school, demonstrate a similar belief in everything they do, really, and everything they talk about, which is why issues of intellectual freedom and censorship, and so on, are so serious. We take them so seriously because it really gets to the core of why you do what you do. It's not that different from, I think, what a lot of educators feel when they face nothing but challenges in the workplace, and sometimes throughout their career. But if you were to press them on, well, why do you keep doing this? I think the answer would be something similar, because deep down I really believe in this, and I can't shake that, so here I am. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  So, traditionally circulation's been the main metric of success for libraries, but how can you compete with Google? Nonfiction books have become irrelevant, you can go to the Internet for any of that.

Grier Carson:  So why do you need to go to a library to check out books, unless you're just a bibliophile?

Alex Chambers:  Some of us are, Grier. But, okay, we're a niche demographic. Luckily for book lovers, fiction circulation's been steady, and it's even increased from time to time.

Grier Carson:  And I'm not really sure why that is. A lot of it seems to be because the youngest generations, the last two generations of readers have realized they much prefer to have a physical book in their hand over reading an ebook on a device or something like that, so that's probably some of it.

Alex Chambers:  Also, young adult fiction exploded in the past couple of decades, people realized there's good writing happening there. Still, people aren't checking out as many physical items as they used to. There's still plenty of circulation, if you want to call it that, plenty of people use the library for electronic resources, ebooks, audio books, movies and so on. But it's not just because of everything you can get on the Internet that libraries are less focused on physical books.

Grier Carson:  The idea of libraries as a third space is also part of the equation. More people are starting to realize that a library is by definition a house of books, and it's got a lot of materials, and everybody's tax dollars pay for the materials, and we all get to share them. That's great. But that accounts for, at best, like half of the reason why people come into the library anymore. The rest of it is to have those third space experiences. To meet up with people, to have a free shared space to put a performance on, or have a special meeting, or work on a project, or whatever it is. And more and more now to participate in really, really cool library programming, which is what more librarians are coming out of school wanting to do. I think more librarians have sort of like a performance mentality about their jobs now, where they come out thinking of themselves in some ways as performers. And rightly so, because in a public library we hire librarians to do that, to come up with really new, interesting programs.

Grier Carson:  And, just to clarify, a library program is really like any event that the library puts on for the public, that's free and open to everybody. It could be a book club, it could be a book talk, it could be a video game tournament, it could be a makerspace activity, it could be tabletop game development. It could be all kinds of stuff. And librarians are coming out of school now thinking less and less about how do I get into managing collections? Which ultimately leads to circulation, and more about how do I engage with the public and put on programs that keep them coming back and keep them feeling like the public library is indeed theirs? We say it's theirs, let's demonstrate that it's theirs. And you can do that through putting on really cool programs and then responding to the public's input on what they want to see more of, and then adjusting and presenting more of that. And so that's kind of where a lot of our heart and energy is these days, more so than in circulation.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, but maybe you're like me and you grew up turning physical pages. And you've got to admit between audio books and Instagram, you're not reading as many physical books as you used to either. It still makes you a little worried to think that no one's reading books anymore. Like, are people still reading? They're just doing it electronically?

Grier Carson:  Yes, very much so, yes, people are still very much reading. Yes, and it's an encouraging thing to realize, like, when we look at our monthly circulation stats, it's not all DVDs and video games, for example, or even audio books, some of the audio books are hugely popular. But the majority of circulation happens with regard to printed material, written material, even if it's in electronic form. So, yeah, it is very encouraging. And that's not to belittle alternative media. I'm somebody who happens to believe that video games are just as legitimate a narrative artform as a novel is, and will probably one day eclipse the novel. I mean, that just seems logical if we're going to continue on this technological wave. But seeing that young adult fiction, that graphic novels and manga, and that indeed adult fiction just continues to circulate, with pretty strong numbers month after month, and it's not people over the age of 60. That's really encouraging.

Alex Chambers:  Encouraging for those of us who believe in reading in print. But here's where I had to stretch a little, because maybe print is not where the world is going.

Grier Carson:  You can't take for granted that libraries are always going to have print books on the shelves, you just should not, that's not a good mentality. It's not the same as saying, "We will be a bookless library by 2050, so get ready." Like, that's more of an agenda. But being aware of the fact that the book is about a 2,000 year old piece of technology that's done exceptionally well, for a lot of reasons, historical and innate, but it is a piece of technology, and all technology evolves, and some of it withers, and some of it turns into something else and gets replaced. And we are in a period in which this sort of technological transformation happens at a more and more rapid pace, it is, I think, wise and healthy to not take books for granted, or really any format for granted and say, "Oh, you know, vinyl is a superior form of audio recording, so we should always have vinyl somewhere in the building." I don't know, that's not what public libraries do, it's what museums do in archives.

Grier Carson:  We respond to what the public interest is, which means we still have DVDs, even though more and more people stream content. Enough people check out our DVDs, or ask for things on DVDs or Blu-ray, that we keep those collections. We do the same thing with print materials, and will up until the point where we're like, "You know what? A very, very, very small percentage of our patrons have any interest in checking out a physical book anymore, what are we going to do?" That's when and how we make decisions like that, not we're anticipating that by some date in the near future there'll be all of these other resources and we won't need print books, so let's start scaling back now. We think of it as responsive development of library services rather than reactionary, or even anticipatory. But, again, just a little bit of that future thinking, future-proofing mentality is healthy when we have to make those decisions.

Alex Chambers:  So then what is a library for?

Grier Carson:  For bringing people together in a free and open space. I'm just making this up, I don't know, it's for a lot of things. But that's the first thing I think of, it's for people, a library is for people. A library is for people in a community who may not share a whole lot in common except that they all live in that community, and they all want a shared space for one reason or another, and the library can provide that. And then the question becomes, a shared space for what?

Alex Chambers:  And that's so different from what we usually think of libraries as being for.

Grier Carson:  Yeah, it's not a house of books, nobody needs a house of books. I mean, schools need access to print materials, and people who love reading need access to print materials, but the average community member needs access to a computer and the Internet. So if you were to say, what's a foundational reason to have a library building with stuff for the public? I would set aside the avid reader and I would say, for everybody, it's access to the Internet. But that's not how we think of the library anymore, like you said, we don't think of it in terms of what is the product we're offering? It's a tangible thing, that costs money, that we curate and maintain, and people borrow and bring back and share, it's the whole experience of a facility, or just an organization whose mission is to bring people together, to bring them in, to use the space more or less however they want. And then our job is to figure out, how do we remain nimble enough to adjust what we're delivering or what we are allowing so that it continues to meet that mission? And that can't just be about collections, nor can it just be about programs, or access to computers, or anything else. We're always thinking about what is the thing that people want to be able to do, that they can't do now, and is that something we need to put on our list?

Alex Chambers:  So we've been exploring this tension between the traditional idea of the library as a house of books and how access to the Internet is really the most basic use of the library now, at least if we're thinking of it mainly as a repository of information. As Grier said, there are books that still circulate. Fiction, young adult, graphic novels, stories. We still want narrative. But here's the thing, in that first conversation with Grier, as we sat by his fireplace. Did I mention his office has a fireplace? Yeah, it's gas, but still. We also talked about the future of narrative itself was probably not in books.

Alex Chambers:  It's time for a break. When we come back, we'll hear where Grier thinks narrative is headed. It made me feel old, but in a good way. Stick around.

Alex Chambers:  Inner States, Alex Chambers. We're talking with Grier Carson, Library Director at the Munroe County Public Library about the future of libraries and at the moment of narrative itself, especially for those if us who grew up as library kids, narrative happens in fiction novels, in books and of course movies. We have movies and TV shows, and of course there's the rise of "The Sopranos" and all the narrative law inform TV shows. Prestige TV, that's the phrase I was looking for. Certainly we see narrative there, but do you see our consumption of narrative shifting, it sounds like you do, and what does that mean?

Grier Carson:  Well, I think the reference to movies and particularly prestige TV is very important because it seems like that is the gateway into this longer form alternative narrative that video games in particular promise, and maybe virtual reality in general seems to promise. That is much closer to what the novel originally was like or even epic poetry where this is a massive, heroic story. You have to immerse yourself in it, it's going to take more than two-and-a-half hours. Sometimes it takes days and whole point of it is to live inside of this alternate reality and see things from a different perspective and then be changed by that experience. We're seeing more and more of that with video games.

Grier Carson:  I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the most popular types of video games we're seeing made now are these open-world RPGs. Every game developer seems to be competing to make the biggest open world possible. When Skyrim came out in 2011, the map is literally as big as Great Britain is in real life and that was a big deal at the time. Every big open-world RPG since then has bested that. Why are people doing this, because it takes a lot of time and energy to get into a game like that, let alone to complete it. Is it because shows like "The Wire" or "The Sopranos", or a lot of these prestige shows that go on for seasons and seasons and do it really well?

Grier Carson:  Is it because they're encouraging people to really immerse themselves in these law-informed narrative experiences and get something out of that, and by comparison a two-hour film or even a 250-page novel comes up short, feels a little different. Maybe so, I just think it stands to reason that if you're looking at printed words on a page and then you shift 150 years forward and you're experiencing storytelling mostly through a two-dimensional image on screen, and you're immersing yourself in that. Then you shift to an interactive version of that that takes much more time, if we get, and we will because we're almost there to the point either through wearable tech or implants or whatever it is, what you're experiencing is digital in some form and it's created by somebody else, you just live in it, and maybe it's less and less structured or less temporal and more just open and experiential.

Grier Carson:  How can that not dominate peoples desire for narrative, for storytelling because it's so immersive and you get so much out of it. I do feel like that's the way most of the world of narrative storytelling is starting to go. There's an argument against that, and I get it, which is the book or the written word as a craft has something else to it. Much like you could say painting on a canvas with oil paints is very different from digital art. It doesn't matter what the end product is to the audience. For the artist and the people who care about that particular art form, there's an art for art's sake argument for saying reading a book that you hold in your hand that has a beginning, middle and end is inherently valuable.

Grier Carson:  I think that's where most people are and that will, of course, shape how we shift into the next era of the narrative experience because who knows what that's going to look like. I heard somebody say this not that long ago, they said, "The promise of opera is realized in video games." If you look at the production credits behind a video game, everything about it. Except for the idea that opera comes from drama and music, everything else about it is effectively an opera except you are the one participating in it. If you're really paying attention to what's going on in those games, you can see that. It's a total work, it really, really is and I have a hard time believing that that isn't going to play a dominant role in the way people experience narrative going forward. It just seems inevitable.

Alex Chambers:  It feels like one of the distinctions you're making is between the closed narrative of a novel, both in the experience of it because you can't make choices. There are the choose your own adventure books, but those are a little bit limited.

Grier Carson:  Which they now do on Netflix with some shows. I think it's very funny, they're Gorilla shows, which is interesting.

Alex Chambers:  That's a pretty limited form of choice and so you're experiencing it in a closed sense, you're also experiencing it passively. With video games I think there's these two things. It's active, you're making active decisions, but then there's also the question of whether you're going through something that has some sort of narrative art, you're making decisions toward a particular goal, the quest, or you're experiencing something in order to explore and choose your adventure.

Grier Carson:  And there are people who goodness knows how they have the time to do this, but there are people who will play through a big open-world game like that so they can follow every single potential narrative arc that the game presents. A really good game will have a lot of different narrative arcs depending on the decisions that you make. There are some people who really want to see what everything is that's built into this game. Which I think is really fascinating, they have to be a very small percentage of the people who ever play the games, because again, they just take so much time. But you're right, the book is, like a movie, it's a closed form. It has a beginning and an end, and we are linear creatures so you could rightly say that we're given to understand the world through the closed narrative experience.

Grier Carson:  Which I guess is a way of saying that will always be some way that we create narrative forms for ourselves. It's silly to say we'll move past that and become super-humans or whatever, I mean that's a different line of thought. But will it look, feel and act a lot like a book did, its just you have more choices? That seems to be where we are now and eventually that's going to evolve into something else. Will any of this look like a narrative experience or will it all be just a version of what you're doing that day? Sort of the theory that gaming will eventually be what you do in life. Your work is a form of gaming. You're social experience is a form of gaming, all of that. There are a lot of people who write and think about that, and say this is highly speculative. But if we continue on this trend with technological and artistic development, we can see getting to a point where the games go away.

Grier Carson:  We don't call them that anymore, and the entire experience we think of right now is really just your life. It's the ultimate heroes journey, I guess. It's like yeah, I finally am the hero now, I'm doing all of this. That's what I always wanted. That's what was cool about "The Odyssey" it just didn't get there. I don't know. But I think those things are really cool.

Alex Chambers:  But you're doing that like,virtually? Is that you mean?

Grier Carson:  Yes, I think that's ultimately where it's headed, yes.

Alex Chambers:  Interesting.

Grier Carson:  My mind goes to this whole other wonky sci-fi area of thinking, the tri-lateral theory of Nick Bostrom's and this whole notion that the likelihood that we're already in a simulation is pretty high and there's a lot of good reasoning behind all of that and a whole lot of speculation, and you know. But we're forced to think and talk about these things just because of the world we live in right now. The exponential rate of change is incredible and arguably impressive. I don't know what it was like to live around the time of Gutenberg but it must've had a similar effect. We are going through that, which in some way accounts for a lot of the reactionary narratives that are out there in our culture, and this lets stop and make things different. Go back to the way they were, whatever, and all that kind of stuff is maybe in part a response to this crazy ride that we're on because nobody really knows where we're going.

Grier Carson:  The stakes always feel really, really high when you're in unchartered territory, so I get that.

Alex Chambers:  So, we might not be able to answer whether we're living in a simulation and how that affects your decision-making as a director of a library but I do think we could...

Grier Carson:  Thankfully not.

Alex Chambers:  I'm glad for your sake and all our sakes that you're not having to deal with that. But I am curious about those questions, about how we're experiencing narrative affect how you think about the direction of both your library, our library and also libraries in general.

Grier Carson:  I think the biggest thing that comes to mind for all of us working at MCPL is what is the patron experience with narrative and then how does that inform collection development and then programming. Because if people want a closed narrative experience, very traditional, then a great program for that for youth would be story-time and then as you get older book clubs. Those are analogists in some sense, and that centers around that closed, very linear experience. But we do a lot of programming around video games and around game design.

Alex Chambers:  One of the other current tensions that we have chatted about a little bit prior to this today is around challenges to materials. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about how you deal with that at MCPL and how that reflects in other places.

Grier Carson:  The first thing I'll say, which is very positive, is that here in Monroe County we are not dealing with a whole lot of challenges at all.

Alex Chambers:  I actually should just say, by "challenges" when we're talking about that, most people think of "Book Dance". I was using the internal term that I've heard you use but in book dance, so maybe you can describe the distinction between, you know.

Grier Carson:  Sure, so you can challenge a book, a film or game, or any item in a collection in a library. You can also challenge their programs, you can challenge their displays, you can challenge the policies, and all of that is fair game. That's healthy, that's a very good thing. What we have seen in the field over the last 10 years, more or less, I think it really kicked off in 2016 or 2018, we went from a standard set of annual challenges to books and programs and what public libraries are offering, to just an absolute explosion and it centers around books more than anything else. I can't remember the data points, but the ALA puts this out every year. They came out yesterday with their top 10 banned books for 2023.

Alex Chambers:  That's the American Library Association?

Grier Carson:  Yes, American Library Association. They track this stuff, they've been tracking it for a little over 20 years and we did see in the early to mid-teens just a complete explosion in book challenges. It's not the first time its ever happened in our country, but it is very recent and it's very intense. MCPL gets very, very few of those. On average maybe one a year and I'm very pleased to say that they tend not to be super ideological, they tend to be almost old-fashioned. "Hey, I checked out this book and I was reading it, and it occurred to me like wow, there's a lot of stuff in here that I think of as being 18 and over and you've got it in the young adult section." That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Either help me understand why or maybe consider moving it into the adult collection, just because commonsense.

Grier Carson:  That's not an ideological challenge, that's a help me understand as a tax-paying patron why this thing is in this collection. That's mostly what we get in terms of challenges. When we do get the ideological ones, are not unlike what you see in other libraries that have made some headlines. They're fortunately not as intense and I credit our staff with that because the first thing we do when somebody presents a challenge is we try to have a conversation and we try to walk through what is it about this that concerns you? Have you read the whole thing? Give me your thoughts about it. What suggestions do you have for the library to consider if we're going to make any changes at all? Then a little conversation about what intellectual freedom actually means, and most of the time you find a very polite way of saying, intellectual freedom means that you have the right to tell me you don't like this thing and wish we hadn't bought it. Fair enough. But the next person who comes in gets to read it for themselves and decides what they think.

Grier Carson:  Which maybe is exactly the same or maybe completely different, and knowing our community, it tends to be very, very different. Everybody's got a different opinion about what they read, watch, play. That's really, really healthy and I'd say the pace at which we're fielding challenges in Monroe County, at our library now, is a pretty healthy one. I don't see any signs of this massive campaign to pull every other book out of the teen center or anything like that. But we talk about it amongst ourselves and we follow what's going on in the wider world around book challenges in particular.

Alex Chambers:  Because it is a big challenge, a struggle, across the country by account.

Grier Carson:  It's a huge struggle and people have a bit of like, the sky is falling mentality about this right now and I think that makes sense because it's alarming. In 2022 we saw more challenges to books. The ALA attracted more challenges to books than we had seen since they started tracking this twenty-some odd years ago. In 2023, we saw a 92% increase in book challenges for public libraries. It dwarfed the previous year's record-setting number of challenges. So, everybody's right to think okay stuff's going on. I don't think it's hard to figure out why that's happening and that's a whole other area and libraries by and large stay out of that, we're politically neutral. The only thing we're advocates for is intellectual freedom itself. But I understand why it's very concerning for a lot of people.

Grier Carson:  One of the things that we talk to our patrons about, if we're given the opportunity in these front-line conversations before it escalates to a formal request to re-evaluate an item, is to really reflect on the value of being able to go into an institution like this and find something on the shelf that you love and discover it for yourself or your friends and partners, or family, and that potentially changes your life in unexpected ways. That's the definition of a rich, literary experience. Why would you want to rob someone else of that experience unless you goal is to make sure they have the exact same experience that you did, and that has flaws, and most people get that. So, if you put it in those terms, again I credit our community, we have a very intelligent and empathetic community, they don't want to see that go away. Even if they're adamantly against some of the stuff we have our shelves, at the end of the day most people in Monroe County are like, "But I don't want them to take away the stuff that I like and I really don't want to infringe on somebody else's right to think for themselves." Which is really all it boils down to.

Alex Chambers:  How are other librarians dealing with that? I'm sure you're talking with other librarians.

Grier Carson:  Not every library is as fortunate as ours in terms of the community challenges they're facing, and some libraries, including here and Indiana, are dealing with a community that is so splintered and so divisive that the library itself becomes one of the targets. And yes, we've had a few peer libraries in our own home state who have struggled with that. It's disheartening and concerning, I think, for the profession. In most of these cases, the board and the director worked together and they come to a sound decision and they move on, and every now and then a library does remove an item or re-catalogs an item is a more common thing. But then they get through it and they move on. In some cases it can bring the entire organization down, and it has in some high profile cases. But I understand the concern that anyone in the field might have. Okay, I got into this work because I believe in that ethos we were talking about earlier, and now potentially my livelihood is being threatened because some law makers are floating bills or ideas for bills that would threaten my livelihood and suggest that readers advisory are providing reference service or collection development work.

Grier Carson:  Which we all went to school for and is just part and parcel of librarianship some aspect of that could be considered a felony. I mean this is scaring a lot of librarians and rightly so. But, every chance we get we say to ourselves at MCPL, let's remember the long arc that we're a part of. Libraries live through all of these intense, historical moments. We don't change our policies and our practices in response to those moments. We keep the view of the long arc and intellectual freedom is as long an arc as any other idea about freedom. You don't want anybody telling you what to think, what to read, how to interpret it and then the impact it's going to have on your mind. I mean that's sacred, and most people still feel that on some level even if I don't think they're talking about it. That's what it means to be able to go to a library. I'm going to jump on line and buy something on Amazon or stream something from Netflix or whatever it is, you're making a choice.

Grier Carson:  There isn't somebody saying you don't get access to this, but it could easily happen, very, very easily happen and that's why the threat of censorship is so serious.

Alex Chambers:  It's time for another break. When we come back we'll hear how libraries are thinking about services across the lifespan and then Grier will blow my mind with his speculation that in a hundred years our lives will have gone so digital that we might not need libraries at all. I was skeptical. Don't go away.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome back to Inner States. I'm Alex Chambers. I'm talking with Grier Carson, the library director at the Monroe County Public Library here in Bloomington. Let's get back to it.

Alex Chambers:  As we're thinking about libraries as a space for democracy and for coming together, for intellectual freedom, for experiencing narrative in various different ways, but as you've said it in various points, for people to be able to come together in the community for free. A free space. What are some of the ways that you, MCPL expanding services at this point, as I said when we first met, in relation to the teen space. One of the things that you mentioned then was that you're really trying to think about the lifespan. Can you talk a little bit more about that.

Grier Carson:  Yes. So, teen services are something that libraries started to take very seriously a couple of decades ago when we all realized, hey, everybody comes in with their parents or guardians until a certain age, and then they kind of disappear, because it's a library. Oh you know, I get enough school, I don't need anything else. Then you come back when you're a parent and you do the same thing with your kids. Then, at some point, maybe it's retirement, I'm just generalizing, you start to use it for yourself more and more. That's why we get a lot of senior patrons who are like, this is my primary source for content, for entertainment, for enlightenment, whatever it is. A few decades ago libraries figured out, there's no reason we can't engage teens. We just have to shift our thinking about what public libraries are in order to bring them in, and it's been wildly successful.. We're proud to say, at MCPL, we have a version of that success, but we are not at all the only library doing that. I mean, it's kind of the norm now.

Grier Carson:  If you think about the next sort of age bracket. You've got people in their 20s, you sort of age out of teen services. What are you doing for your 20s and into your 30s? You're focusing on your career, whether or not you want to have family, where you want to live, and this "adulting" kind of stuff. Well, how does "adulting" fit into library services? Well, it's a whole other age group that we're really not thinking about. When you matriculate and you leave the teen space you're like, Welcome to the vast age span that is adult library use. Well, that's silly, because we really mark our ages, but in 10 to 15 year increments, and there are big changes that occur when you're in your 20s and 30s and then into your 40s and 50s and beyond. So, can we, sort of, almost focus our services on those different age groups in a better and more meaningful way? We can, because working with teen services over the last few decades has taught us how to do that a lot better. We're still trying to figure out what that looks like for "adulting" and a professional age groups and so on. That's what we have to be thinking about in terms of serving audiences.

Grier Carson:  I also think more and more about what we do with our digital presence. Where are librarians and public libraries on the Internet? How are we engaging with people? Again, in a meaningful way, not a, you know, put up your sign and say "Come to us if you need us" kind of thing. How are we actually engaging with patrons on the Internet? There's no end to possibility with that, and in most cases, requires less money. It's just a shift in the way you think about providing library services. Ultimately, I think we're going to have to ask ourselves how much of what we do, and therefore what we spend money on, and how we develop policies to support it and all of that. How much of this is really about bringing people into a building for a particular purpose, to access things, or get together or whatever? How much of it is providing low or zero entry to the wide world of information and resources that are largely proprietory and licensed. Somebody has got to be able to provide that access, which basically does make us something like a government co-op. I mean that's what a lot of people want out of a public library, and that's very much what we do.

Grier Carson:  If we continue down that path there will be more and more of a call for that. Which means we have to keep diversifying the way we think about our services and how we're going to expand them.

Alex Chambers:  You told me, last time we talked, that some of the feedback from the community, from the strategic plan work, was that people wanted more kitchen teaching. Like at the southwest branch and maker space and other kinds of actual in-place activities, which I would say does really seem like an essentially piece of what a library can provide in this age of the Internet, when we can access so much information at home, but we can't access each other at home. We can't access the public at all.

Grier Carson:  That's a great way to put it, and forgive me, I sort of went in a different direction with that, and I'll tell you why in a second, because it gets into another ridiculous train of thought. What you're talking about with bringing people together and having those shared experiences, and the experiences that you can't have on your own for whatever reason, again is a huge part of what we do now, and we're developing more of that. I do think the next few decades we're going to see more and more of that for public libraries, for sure. That's that third space idea, that like, you can't do anything, from go to the bathroom to practice a new recipe in a public space, without paying for something. That's just the way it is, except at a library. Okay, we'll take that example and just expand it to whatever people are interested in. I mean, we have people asking, Can you create more of a collection of instruments, so I don't have to buy a $700 guitar just to figure out I don't want to take lessons. Yes, we can do that and we do that actually. So, we're taking public feedback about the kinds of experiences they want to have in the library, and turning it around into a form of service.

Grier Carson:  The only catch with that is that nothing is permanent. So you can't say, Well in 2015 we think that everybody wants a digital creativity space, a publicly accessible free space to create high quality videos and audio content, or even video games and now 3D printing opportunities and so on, and say, Okay that's the model for public library service going forward. We need to do more of that. Well it is kind of right now, but that's going to evolve very quickly and we have to be able to respond to that evolution. So it's a mind set about what the on-site experiences are for people. The one thing that probably won't go away, and this leads me to my ridiculous train of thought, is that desire for people to come together in a shared physical space and see each other. Once again, I can't believe I'm bringing COVID up this many times. That is something positive that came out of COVID, was people feeling like, You know what? For a few months I wasn't allowed to see anybody and talk. It doesn't feel good, and that's the thing about the Internet I don't like.

Grier Carson:  So, I'm going to high-tail it to the next book club meeting. Or, the minute the grocery store lets me walk in, I'm going to put a mask on and go grab whatever I want, just because I want to be out around people. I do think that's going to continue to be a very important priority for library patrons and will keep pushing us to do more in person on site experiential stuff. However, just like I think it's inevitable that the book, as a piece of technology, will disappear or evolve into something else unrecognizable, I also think it's inevitable that our social communal experiences are going to be digital at some point. It is not going to be physically getting up from the chair and going into a building somewhere a couple of miles away, and then going back home and saying, Oh I saw so-and-so today. Like, all of that is just integrated in the virtual existence that we will likely have in some fashion. That's probably a bigger challenge, or maybe just the paradigm shift for public libraries that we think the book and Internet competition thing is.

Grier Carson:  That's not the paradigm shift for library services. It's, Do you need a physical space for people to come in, to talk, get information, guidance, borrow things, experience things together, witness performances, all of that? That all requires brick and mortar and flesh, and at some point it seems inevitable that that will no longer be the case. At that point, what do we do with public libraries? Where are the libraries in the 21st, 22nd Century? That does seem to me inevitable, and also, very interesting. I mean, really, how is that not interesting? It's such an exciting time to think about what library services are going to look like going forward because there are just no givens at all.

Alex Chambers:  That's very true.

Grier Carson:  I probably won't be alive by the time that shift happens, but who knows? I mean, Ray Kurzweil says that 20-40 is the singularity and other people said No, it's more like 2050. I don't know if its going to happen or not, but if we continue on this path, there will be a moment where the older generation no longer recognizes anything that the younger generation does. There will be such a split that the new experience and the new social norm, all of that, will look so different that libraries will be forced to say, How do we provide any service within this paradigm? Thinking about that now is healthy. Does not drive our decision making right now at all [LAUGHS] but thinking about it is a good thing. Should always be thinking about that stuff.

Alex Chambers:  I'm not sure I agree that I think it's inevitable that all the interaction is going to be on-line in the future, and I certainly hope that that's not the case, but maybe I'm just getting old.

Grier Carson:  Well let me ask. What do you think will keep people wanting to interact with each other principally, in person, in the flesh, face-to-face, this kind of a thing? What is it about human beings, or about social structures or society that makes you think that isn't ever going to go away?

Alex Chambers:  I mean, one thing is, at this point at least, technology can't give us all the signals that we pick up on when we're interacting with each other. Obviously we're talked about that for a few years now with Zoom. That's just a box and we're only seeing, you know, shoulders and face. Even just sitting here in the studio with you, like I'm gesturing and unconsciously reading your posture and things like that. In theory we could get more of that information down the road, through technology. Just like I think that it would be hard to manufacture a perfect vitamin; in theory maybe possible, but more complicated than we think; I think that that's the same with trying to somehow technologically represent or replace everything about an in-person interaction. Then also, the kinds of experiences you can have with a group of people; being in a place, knowing and having that embodied sense of being in a group with other people; it's kind of hard to imagine being able to fully replace that. Plus we like to move [LAUGHS]

Grier Carson:  Yeah, that's right, we're very physical.

Alex Chambers:  And we have bodies and if everything is on-line and virtual, what are we going to do with our bodies?

Grier Carson:  Yeah, that's a great point. Yes, you could be right. Then what comes to my mind, and this sounds really cynical I guess, is that, like, all of that assumes that people are more or less the way they are today in another few generations. That we do have this need to fully represent yourself, to respond to physical cues and to have the full body communication, not just verbal communication that we sometimes take for granted. But what if that isn't the way people are in the next few generations? What if decades and decades of growing up and being conditioned by the digital experience, which is very much about sound bytes to the en-th degree, changes the way we think about ourselves as social creatures? To the point where the base line has very little to do with, I want actual communicative experience with another person. Instead I just want to get my opinion out there, or put my bumper sticker and T-shirt out there, and that's communication. Which is kind a lot of what social media is right now. So, what if that is the starting point for changing the way people actually want to interact with one another?

Grier Carson:  In that case, getting together in a physical space and interacting seems like it would be frightening and anathema to the human experience of the time. So it's science-fiction y, I get it, but a lot of the times when I'm just sort of gazing at the way social media is functioning right now, that's where my mind goes. You can call it DE-humanizing, or post-humanizing or whatever it is, but this kind of thing, which is very much who we are as social creatures, can we take that for granted? Is that a definite thing? It's certainly changed over the millennia. Technology has a way of changing us in ways that we're not expecting, and again, there is an accelerated or exponential rate of that change going on right now. So, in 50 to 100 years will we even recognize what human social interaction looks like? If not, the idea of it all being virtual just seems the default. What do public libraries do then?

Alex Chambers:  I don't have an answer to that. I don't know, Is there a need for service?

Grier Carson:  I mean, that's ultimately where the library mission starts, is what is the need? We're always going to have disenfranchisement of some form or other, and we're always going to have people who need a safe space, a warm space, a physical space, right? Hopefully we will always have a desire for people to learn and grow intellectually or spiritually or however you want to think of it, and libraries play an important role in that too. I don't know that all of that is just a given and that it will always be the case, and if it isn't, it's very hard to imagine what a library would like in another 100 years. If it would exist at all, and that's okay, that's part of this [LAUGHS].

Alex Chambers:  Thank you so much Grier.

Grier Carson:  Thank for for having me Alex, I appreciate it.

Alex Chambers:  And that's it for the show. You've been listening to Inner States from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. If you have a story for us, or you've got some sound we should here let us know at WFIU.org/innerstates. And hey, if you like the show you can review and rate us on Apple or Spotify. What's even more fun than that is telling your friend. Okay, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first, the credits. Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our assistant producer is Avi Forrest. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar and we have additional music form the artists at Universal Production Music. Alright, time for that pound sound.

Alex Chambers:  That was onions being sautéed, recorded by Jane Chambers. Thanks Aunt Jane. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks, as always, for listening.