President’s Message, March 2025
Halò (hello in Scots Gaelic)
Hello friends,
This week I have been rewatching HBO’s drama Chernobyl about the terrible nuclear disaster in present day Ukraine. The leading character Valery Legasov says in the opening scene:
"What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: "Who is to blame?"
I am sure that I am not the only person whose radar pinged when hearing this. We live in unsettling times: fact-checking is optional, direct lies can be openly told by political leaders without challenge, and popularity is equated to accuracy. In the UK, a senior politician recently said in a broadcast interview that their supporters no longer needed mainstream media because they had social media where they could believe whatever they chose. Sometimes people fall for extreme positions because they lack robust evidence to make informed choices but the clear lesson from Chernobyl is that when truth is made optional and subservient to emotions, reputation, and personal goals, then other people suffer in deep and meaningful ways.
We cannot know if these changes in our information worlds are permanent distortions or temporary symptoms of disordered political landscapes. What we can know though is that society needs ethical leadership of the kind that ASIS&T scholars and practitioners provide. We provide tools that help people assess credibility and accuracy, we provide ways to reason about evidence and ask questions of decision-makers, we provide methods to interrogate information and its sources and to resist anti-intellectual stances. We are surrounded by turbulence but we can stand for the idea that founds our field, namely that ‘information is of central importance to personal, social, political, and economic progress’. The world needs us to stand strong so let’s regroup and drive forward.
As an international organisation we have to balance many priorities, including members’ preferences about where and how meetings happen, and will be keeping a watching eye on the political situation in various parts of the world. Please do keep in touch with us and use your SIG and Chapter meetings to raise issues with the ASIS&T leadership team.
I am sure many aspects of the current situation will be inspiring research across the world. We are in the final stages of the call for submissions for the 88th ASIS&T Annual Meeting. This year’s conference will be held in Washington, 14-18 November and the conference theme is Difficult Conversations: The Role of Information Science in the Age of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In many conversations I have been having with practitioners across different sectors, Gen-AI and Sustainability have been mentioned as two leading areas of interest. There is an interesting tension here as Gen-AI is data intensive whilst sustainable solutions often emphasise less power and processing. I am intrigued if there is a sweet-spot where good information solutions can offer sustainable Gen-AI. Whatever happens, we will be having many interesting conversations in November. The submission portal is open with a deadline of 9th April 2025 for all submissions. We are grateful to June Abbas as Chair of the AM meeting, Yuxiang (Chris) Zhao as Vice-Chair, and all the track chairs for their leadership of this meeting.
In case I am being too sombre, let me leave you with a joke.
The sky was looking dark so I asked Siri, "Surely, it's not going to rain today?" She replied, "Yes it is, and don't call me Shirley." That’s when I realized I'd left my phone on Airplane mode.
Okay, please yourself.
Best wishes for a happy week
Ian