Who is "John
Doe"?
A man awakes, naked,
in a fetal position on an island somewhere. Disoriented, he finds himself
walking off shore, then drifting through the ocean, to eventually be
found by a fishermen's ship. The fishermen on the boat cover the shivering
man up with a blanket and begin to ask him about his situation. They
ask him where he thinks he is. He tells them that he is located off
the coast of Seattle. They ask him what time and date it is. He tells
them the month, day, year, hour, minute, and second of that current
moment. Another thing: these fishermen are from China and the man finds
himself giving them the answers in Cantonese. Finally, one of the fishermen
asks him if he knows what his name is. The man stares at the fisherman,
and finally admits that he doesn't know his name, or who he is in general.
This is the opening
scene of the pilot episode of John Doe, a mid-season replacement
series that aired on Fox last fall. In the tradition of a more popular
Fox show, The X-Files, John Doe is a mystery series with
a surreal twist. The stranded man is the main protagonist in the series,
a man who seems to know everything except his past and who he is. He
names himself "John Doe" and begins to help out the Seattle
Police in solving complex mysteries.
John's abilities are part of a growing trend of characters in science
fiction, people who are gifted with what can be described as "information
intuition," either having a direct link to information and knowledge
automatically, or having the ability to use vast amounts of information
in various ways. In John's case, his information intuition can also
be called an "auto-pragmatic sense" due to what information
abilities he has and, more importantly, what information abilities he
doesn't have. For example, John Doe knows general knowledge, facts,
figures, people and places, pretty much the kind of information that
you have to answer in games of "Trivial Pursuit." He also
knows academic knowledge, mathematics, physics, psychology, etc; the
man is a walking university. Interestingly enough, he also has a temporal
sense, he knows the current time instantly, and never carries a watch.
And of course, he knows every living and dead language created by man.
But John's awareness
has limits, he only knows people of public record, public figures, celebrities;
he doesn't seem to be a human phone book. Also, he's neither psychic
nor pre-cognitive, so he can't read men's minds or see into the future,
so the information that he knows, although constantly updating itself,
does not contain information of a personal or confidential nature. Finally,
he doesn't have any super-analytical ability; he's no Sherlock Homes.
But he doesn't need to be super-analytical. Why go through the analysis
of the information when he already knows the information that would
be come from the result of that analysis? That's why John Doe's awareness
can be called auto-pragmatic, because he knows the knowledge already
without going through the psycho-linguistic process of information-to-knowledge
transformation.
John Doe as
an Information System
If you told a
systems analyst to create a Data Flow Diagram of John Doe, she would
throw the case file back in your face and say that you were insane.
If John Doe was analyzed as a data process, he would be known in the
systems design world as "a miracle" (of course, that does
seem to be the plot, doesn't it?), a process that can output information,
but has no known source of where that information comes from. But imagine
if you asked that same person to do a user interface analysis of our
friend John. She would probably come back later and say that he has
the perfect user interface. John, despite his extraordinary abilities,
is a human being, processing the same gift of human communications as
anyone else. He could take the vast amount of information he has at
his exposal and transfer it to others through conversation. And he,
like anyone else, has the ability to know what specific information
people are looking for. Such casual queries would be too ambiguous for
even the most sophisticated information system with natural language
processing properties to decipher. Hell, I personally would like my
own "John Doe." Of course, my version would look a lot like
Halle Barry.
Information
initiatives in popular culture
Although John
Doe is a cool idea, like most Hollywood-spawned works, it is not
really an original one. In fact, characters that can be labeled as information
intuitives are growing in number in popular science fiction. The most
well known and prolific creator of information intuitives is the man
who created the term "cyber-space," cyber-punk pioneer William
Gibson. Gibson has created information intuitives as central characters
in four of his novels, Mona-Lisa Overdrive, Idoru, All
Tomorrow's Parties, and the upcoming novel, Pattern Recognition.
Two information intuitives of his creation, "Colen Langley"
and "Candyce Pollard" have an ability that can best be described
as super-cognitive data mining. They don't have the automatic information
base that John Doe has, but can magically know future trends and events
by looking at vast amounts of data. These abilities are a bit more practical
than the John Doe example, but are still just as significant. But what
does all does this mean, especially in the context of the information
itself?
Is information
magic?
Well, we all know
that information is not magic, or do we? Take the idea of magic itself,
in particular magic in Western-European mythology. In those myths, old
men with long white beards utter words from books, and amazing things
result. Even in this era, people of various religions pray to a god,
an information transfer between devoted and deity, with the hope that
he/she would answer. Of course, I'm only scratching the surface of this
question. A better source would be Erik Davis, author of the book Techgnosis,
Myth and Mysticism in the Age of Information. But either way, the
information intuitives discussed in this article can be described as
modern day or even future day (in the context of the Colin Laney character)
magicians, those with the gift to tap into the old and hidden power
of information. But enough with the philosophy of things; back to John
Doe.
John Doe and
the Library Profession
So what do John
Doe and other characters of information intuitive abilities in general
have to do with the library profession? In the context of library and
librarianship advocacy, the answer is a bit complex. First, since neither
Mr. Doe nor any information intuitive characters that I have come across
are librarians by trade, you can't say that they give librarianship
a spotlight (although there is one scene in the first episode of John
Doe where John goes into a library and starts answering reference questions
for patrons, but all that really resulted in was embarrassing the reference
librarian on staff). But if people who are fans of the show or any other
works in which information intuitives are key players can relate the
characters' extraordinary abilities with the skill that librarians have,
it may be of great benefit of the profession, but only if.
Another issue
is whether or not librarians may even want to be associated with their
mythical counterparts. For information and information professions to
be considered mythical, there has to be an aura of secrecy and an almost
unattainable link to it. Noam Chomsky once said that the first property
of power was to make it secret and closed off from the witnesses of
that power. As a profession, do librarians and other information professionals
want to sacrifice easy access to users of their information gathering
and analysis for that of legend-caliber notoriety?
Perhaps the way
that these characters in fiction can benefit librarians is in the fact
that they do show the power of an informed person, and that librarians
are a resource in which people can be their own unique John Does, without
the commercials and the hour-long time slot. In general, librarians
can just stay the way they are, committed to service and to satisfying
the information needs of the user, and perhaps one day a super-hero
like John Doe will appear in fiction that has an MLIS degree.
Footnote
Two things: if
you want to see John Doe, I'm afraid that like most mid-season
replacements on the Fox network, poor John may have been dropped for
an absurd Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire type show on Friday
nights. Hopefully, what ever content they have of the show will be available
on video at some later date. Also, the writer would like to express
that he wrote this article in a bar in Capitol Hill while in the process
of getting drunk (man, I really need to get a girlfriend).
