As a symbolic space, a type of collection, a kind of building, the library gives institutional form to our collective memory.
Public libraries and other institutions established boundaries between public and private life that have become crucial to the modern meaning and experience of community.
Community in postmodern America has itself become a function of niche marketing, in which “culture” has become synonymous with leisure and consumption.
Where exactly is culture, in a world where the forms of knowledge have been reorganized by new media and digital technology, where the experience of public life is increasingly realized through private acts of consumption?
1 The Library as an Agency of Culture. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 15-16
2 Graphic by Aaron Louie
