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My dad prided himself on keeping his sideburns level with his eyeglasses’ earpieces, even well into the hairy 1970s.

“Don’t bother about being modern,” one of his artistic idols, Salvadore Dali, advised. “It is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”

Perhaps that works for some artists, but librarians wanting to avoid becoming bibliotechnical versions of blacksmiths must keep abreast of new trends in acquiring and spreading information.

Like many public librarians, I subscribe to PubLib, an online e-mail list serv that’s notable for its helpfulness and civility. Unfortunately, angry, biting comments were on the rise at PubLib recently until a swelling tide of librarians began posting messages that reminded us about PubLib’s traditional collegiality, recognized most of the flaming messages were from a very few participants and expressed determination to not allow rudeness to dominate our discourse.  Being librarians, this led to discussing how observing National Eat-An-Oreo Day on June 19 was better than being angry. This brought up the preference of many PubLib members for the now-extinct Hydrox cookies, and a colleague reported that, according to www.hydroxcookie.com, a special 100th anniversary edition Hydrox will be marketed by Kellogg Foods later this summer.

This roused interest in the proper plural form of Hydrox: “Hydroxen”? “Hydroi”? That’s PubLib’s charming aspect, but it’s primarily an exchange of practical library information. The flaming e-mail episode consequently sparked discussion of whether we live in increasingly rude and stressful times.

Some people apparently enjoy being vituperative and abusive when they’re screened by the Internet. An editorial by Rhonda Wickham in last month’s Wireless Week discussed how cell phones, the Internet and recent social interaction technology have enabled school bullies to thrive.

“Kids are using social networking sites to publish negative information about classmates,” Wickham writes. “In Japan, there’s the 30-minute rule, in which a child that doesn’t respond to an e-mail within half an hour is picked on by other classmates.”

She also cites a Trinity College Dublin survey that increasingly young children “are being targeted by cyber-bullies through various forms of communication, such as mobile phone calls, text messages and e-mails.”

The utter facility of modern communication over even a few years ago is shocking, and since the Internet’s rise, bad information has been disseminated worldwide with amazing and intractable rapidity.

For example, 10 years ago many “futurists,” and some prominent librarians, thought the Internet would cause libraries to go the way of village smithies. They saw falling computer hardware prices and exponential surges in information available online and declared the library dead.

They didn’t recognize that the need for libraries’ fundamental functions — collecting, organizing, and disseminating information — have remained constant for 5,000 years with no end in sight. So much information is being generated now that, rather than become anachronisms, libraries are being used more than ever before.

Walt Crawford, a respected writer on communications technology, publishes a well-regarded “web-based journal of libraries, policy, technology, and media,” Cites & Insights (www.citesandinsights.info).

In 1998, he wrote an important essay for Online Magazine titled “Paper Persists: Why Physical Library Collections Still Matter” that stated, “Books continue to matter, now and for any plausible future. Not as the only means to transmit information, entertainment, and knowledge. … Not as the dominant force among media. … But as a vibrant, healthy medium — one that serves a variety of needs better than any alternative and that makes good economic, ecological, and technological sense for the new millennium — the book just isn’t going away.”

A central point of Paper Persists was exposing “the Great Technological Handwave,” which Crawford defines as “the futurists’ response to any shortcoming in technology, any unmet needs, anything that’s lacking. … The great technological handwave turns ‘ifs’ into ‘whens’ and ‘whens’ into ‘just a couple more years.’”

Too often, futurists look at today’s situation and presume it will continue unabated and predict accordingly. They change “ifs” to “whens” and employ the Great Handwave, like Dickens’ character John Podsnap in “Our Mutual Friend,” who “with his favorite right-arm flourish which sweeps away everything and settles it forever.”

As Oscar Wilde noted, “Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern, one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.”

Greg Hill is director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries.