blogmarch

This week has been full of big news about books and print media.  Oprah loves Kindle, and maybe so will Lindsay, Google settled it’s copyright lawsuits with various publishers, and the Christian Science Monitor will no longer offer print versions of its newspaper during the week.  All of this has been making me think about the way books, and printed reading material in general, are evolving.  Also about how readers are evolving.  Some of the things I have been reading lament the fact that people are reading less, and that their attention spans aren’t able to handle whole books anymore.  I wonder if this is true.  Everyone I know still reads books.  My 21 year-old neice is the most “continually computing” person I know–Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, texting, IMing–she does all of it, sometimes all at once (or so it seems).  But at the end of the day, before she goes to sleep, she reads books.  She and my sister choose titles to read and discuss together.  My husband, a web programmer and computer-obsessed freak, still manages to read an average of two books a week, the same as he did when we first met.

So I wonder, are we reading less, or is the way we are reading changing?  When Lindsay pointed out the features of the Kindle, she mentions being able to make notes in the margins, ask online “reference” people questions, look up words in the dictionary.  Doing all of this may make the reader’s attention span wander, but what a way to wander!  It seems like the features would only enhance the reading experience.  There are so many times that I mean to look a word up, but don’t because I don’t want to get up.  Lindsay also discusses how great a Kindle would be to keep kids engaged.  I agree.  In a magazine my six-year old’s teacher sent home there is an article “The Future of Literacy.”  Various experts discuss technology and teaching.  One of the panelists, Bob Stein, of the Institute for the Future of the Book, is asked about how reading is changing.   His reply is that now, if a child is reading, s/he will put down the book, and go to the book’s website, look at forums and maybe respond, then return to the book.  Then, s/he will put the book down again and Google some query about the author.  This kind of interactivity makes reading even more exciting and so much more informative than it used to be.

I see how exciting this kind of interactiviy can be as I teach my six year old.  Last week, we were looking at one of her Halloween books, and there was a cartoony picture of Frankenstein.  She asked about the inevitable push-pin looking things in his neck.  She wanted to know if Frankenstein was a monster. I started to explain about how he is kind of a monster, but kind of sad, too, because he has human feelings inside a monstrous body made up of dead body parts and gears and things.    I asked if she wanted to see other pictures, so we put the book down and went to Google Images (she is a six year-old who has always liked morbid stuff).  Then we went to look for information on Wikipedia about Frankenstein.  Then we printed out Frankenstein coloring pages.    Then I decided that I should get out our copy of Mary Shelley’s original story for me to read again.  Reading begat technology begat more reading.  We both had a great, interactive Frankenstein experience, as fractured and interrupted as it was.   And we both came away with a more well-rounded experience.  Google claims, with its book digitization program, that it wants to provide access to all of the world’s information.  Every time I read that, it sounds so exciting.  I realize this is the feeling I have every time my daughter and I look things up.  It really feels that between all of the books in the world and all of the technology, that we really do have access to all of the world’s information.

First, I read Inside the Minds of Teens who Post Sexual Images of Themselves on the ABC News website.  Specifically, the article refers to a 15-year old teenager who sent naked pictures of herself to classmates.  If convicted, she could face probation or several years in a juvenile detention center.  While the main thrust of the article is about the “porning” of America, the author posits the notion that the teen’s “quest for notoriety (in a) culture where pornography has gone mainstream and fame can be had in an instant by simply distributing a sexually explicit video with a cell phone or on the internet.”  I found this quote interesting, because it echoes some of the ideas that were the foundation of my context book.

A couple of days after I read this article, a friend of mine got a call from the police.  She had lost her phone a few weeks ago and it had been found and turned in.  They told her that she had to come to the sex crimes unit for questioning because not only had they found her cell phone, but they had seen pictures of her 6 and 4 year old sons, naked, on it.  While they were somewhat relieved to hear that the owner of the phone was the mother of the naked boys, they told her, in essence, that she wasn’t out of the woods.  She still had to come down for questioning.

Then, this week, it was my youngest daughter’s birthday.  She turned 3.  My older sister sent her an IPod shuffle for a present.  The first thing my daughter did was pretend the IPod was a phone, and then threw it against the wall.  My sister’s kids are all older (in their twenties).  My husband said, after the Shuffle hit the wall, “Her kids weren’t little with all of this technology.  She doesn’t get it.”

All of a sudden, it hit me.  A lot of us don’t get it.  Some do, but for many of us, our minds haven’t caught up to the technology yet.  We are not sure of the appropriate way to use this bounty of access to information of which we find ourselves in the midst.  Teens posting nude pictures of themselves might not be looking for notoriety.  They might just be doing what teens have always done–being stupid, pushing boundaries, being “naughty” for their friends, not thinking about the fact that naked online pictures  meant for your friends might be naked pictures for the world.   Teens (and others) post naked photos online because they can.  Same with my friend.  Her boys were wrestling naked.  As a parent, I understand the impulse to catch the ridiculously cute moment.  She caught the moment with her cell phone because she could.  Now that I am on Facebook, I look up all kinds of people.  I snoop into acquaintances’ profiles that are not my friends, but are on pages of people I know.  I look up the women who teach the classes I take at the YMCA.   I am always afraid that I am going to slip up and say something I know about them from Facebook, something that makes me look like the nosy person that I am.   I do it because I can.

I don’t think that the interconnectedness and the transparency of technology, particularly the technology of the last 5-10 years, is fully entrenched in our psyches yet  For many of us, especially those of us who are digital immigrants that Lindsay refers to in her book report, it still doesn’t compute that thoughts, ideas and pictures that we put into digital format go from being exclusively “ours” to being part of the permeable world of public information.

My husband has had a  cult of the amatuer experience this week.  He is a web programmer who loves all things computer.  Which means that even in his spare time, his head is working on programming and math problems.  One of his current obsessions is a website called Stack Overflow, where programmers post and answer technical questions.  It is set up in a Digg-type way, with users voting on the quality of both the questions and the answers that other users come up with.  The more good votes you get, the more points you gather, the higher your ranking.
Earlier this week, a user who is new to programming  and trying to teach himself, posted a question asking about learning some basics about PHP and mySQL programming.  He says that there seem to be some basic terms that that come from a “common base of familiarity between all languages” that he just doesn’t yet understand.  He asks the group if there a a book about programming in general that would give he, as a beginner, a good basic understanding of general terminology.

The beginning programmer got many replies.  My husband gave a detailed list of resources, including Wikipedia’s general computer science page, tutorials available on YouTube,  class material and resources available from MIT and Stanford, and his own explanations and definitions of certain topics within computer science.  (If you want to see his answer and others, his name can be found on his reply in the lower right hand corner under the name Corbin March).

I think my husband’s reply is great (maybe I’m a little biased).  What is interesting is that another participant, Will, gives an equally great reply, basically saying the same thing that Corbin is saying, but taking away all of the pointers to expertise and specific resources of Corbin’s post. Will says that he likes Corbin’s answer, but takes an opposite approach.  He says that with today’s system, you don’t need to know the “low level” details of systems.  Like Corbin, Will feels that the internet itself is the best place to find all of the answers that any programmer needs, but instead of having other people tell you where to go, he suggests “using your inner muse” to guide you to the answers.  Will says that “the fact that folks can get as far as they want ‘without having a clue’ is a testament to how far the field has advanced.”  The most important thing is jumping in and doing it, getting it done and not worrying about it being perfect or “doing it the right way.”  He closes with “Don’t let the yahoos in their ivory towers poo-poo your questions or shred your designs.”

I think that Corbin and Will are coming from the same place.  In fact, Corbin said as I sat down to write, “Make sure you don’t say anything bad about Will, his answer is great.”  And it is.  The interesting part about it all is that even though Corbin and Will probably use many of the same resources, many of them peer-created, I think Will is wary even of presenting his own self as more knowledgeable about something, even though he probably does know more than the beginning programmer.  In my context book, Against the Machine, author Lee Siegel says “Having made living life itself a type of professional skill, the internet has produced another effect.  It has created a universal impatience with authority, with any kind of superiority conferred by excellence or expertise.”  Are we becoming afraid to even tell other people what we know or point them in good directions for fear of seeming to lofty or know-it-all?  This interaction between my husband and his peer is an example of this impatience, or at least lack of faith in, expertise and authority, even our own expertise, that is so much a part of internet culture.

Against the Machine:  Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob turns a critical eye to the internet, or more specifically to the culture that has been influenced by the internet, social networks and other Web 2.0 technologies.  The author, Lee Siegel, is a former writer for the New Republic and Salon.com.  His experiences at both publications, especially the New Republic, led him to question what happens to a culture that “gives everyone a voice,”   one that allows us to create our own asocially social, isolated online worlds.  Siegel was let go from the New Republic because of incidents (and a prank he orchestrated) between he and some participants of the magazine’s online blog.  He makes it clear that he does not blame technology.  Technology, in and of itself, is value free, says Siegel.  It is what is being done with some technology that troubles him.  Of particular concern is the cutting off of individuals from the reality of other people, as they self-obsessively disclose every secret, every unedited, waking thought to the anonymity of the computer screen in forums such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.  By existing more and more in these privatized and customized, completely personal spaces, we forget about the boundaries that come in the form of other people–their wants, needs, opinions and physicality.  Eventually, as our “self” becomes our one and only reference point, other people become less and less meaningful.  We get “impatient with realities that don’t gratify our impulses or satisfy our picture of reality.”

Another of Siegel’s  concerns is the commodification of our leisure time.  Along with all of this self-disclosure comes the morphing of disclosure into performance.  People are crafting their private lives into “marketable, public style.”  This marketing of self is what seems to trouble Siegel the most, as consumers of online information become “prosumers.”  Prosumers are people that produce as they consume.  In other words, the people who will use a product or service are the same people who create the product or service.  Much of Siegel’s argument against prosumers takes aim at Malcom Gladwell’s popular book The Tipping Point.  Inner life has become marketable, as popularity has become the main criteria for success.  Gladwell’s book looks at the way “cultural epidemics” occur, how influential people can create cultural “memes,” making products or ideas wildly popular.   The world is divided into connectors (people who know a lot of, and the right, people), “sticky” people who know the connectors, and everyone else.  Everyone else doesn’t matter.  Siegel’s take on Gladwell’s book is that the world is divided into manipulating winners and manipuable losers.  Online, everyone is trying to craft themselves into one of the manipulating winners.

One of the most compelling sections of Against the Machine is the last third of the book dealing with the difference between information and knowledge.  Information, Siegel tells us, is made up of facts that one has recently learned.  You can know a lot of information without really understanding it.  Knowledge, on the other hand, comes from understanding–a comprehension of the meaning of something.  Knowledge, says Siegel, “illuminates the hidden relations among events, and the degrees of value between events.”  The desire for the most recent and most popular information coupled with the egalitarian culture of the internet, where the only qualifications one needs to participate in cultural discussions is access to a computer and an opinion, have created an atmosphere of contempt for knowledge as well as knowledge’s companions–expertise, authority, merit and critical thinking.  Opinions, feelings, perceptions and judgments are all that matter in the world of social software.

The issues that arise in the last third of Siegel’s book is where librarians and the tools of Library 2.0 are most needed.  With the glut of information that the internet provides, much of it of a personal, subjective nature, there needs to be some sort of check and balance system to determine what has merit on a large-scale level.  Not censorship, everyone should be allowed to create a blog, post videos on YouTube, Twitter or tweet to their heart’s content.  However,  not all of the information created by these means is useful or valid to society as a whole.   Siegel claims that “what the new, crude egalitarianism is doing, in the name of democracy, is allowing the strongest assertion to edge out the most conscientious talent.”  Online culture is an anti-authority, anti-expert one that thrives on newness rather than on excellence.  Gone are the days of critical thinking, now everyone has a voice and everyone’s voice is equally valuable.  Sounds nice in theory, but often the most interesting voices, the ones that may allow us to turn information into knowledge, get lost in the tidal waves of information that flood the internet every day.  It is the job of librarians, especially in this 2.0 atmosphere, to do what they have always done best, help users to make sense of all of it–show them how to find the excellence in the sea of information.  We have always done that–determining the best reference tools or the most applicable database for a user.  Now we can expand and link to provocative, well-written or informative blogs and wikis, direct users to educational or thought-provoking podcasts or video content–help them to get past the merely popular to find their own way to knowledge.

To watch or listen to  Lee Siegel and others discuss the book from a reading at the New York Public Library, click here.

To read the New York Times article about Siegel’s dismissal from the New Republic, click here.

Picture of book cover from Amazon.  Click here to see it, as well as other journal and user reviews.

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Here is a good article in response to the “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” piece in the Atlantic Monthly a few months ago.  This one, from the N.Y. Times, is called “Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down.  It Frees Our Minds.”  Twitter is discussed as an example of new technologies that make people downright angry.  The author does a good job, in a short article, at describing how there is always resistance to new technologies, from the printing press on.  Especially interesting is the author’s reference to a theory by futurist Paul Saffo, who divides people who react to technology into “engineers” and “natural scientists”.  The engineers are optimists who think that all problems can be solved with the right tools.  The natural scientists are more pessimistic, seeing the world in terms of “entropy, decline and death.”   I realize that I tend to fall into the natural scientist mode more often than not, but I am a natural scientist who is trying to be more engineery about the whole thing.  It is worth reading both articles for a look at both sides of the cultural impact of the technology issue.

This week, we were supposed to explore various social networking sites.  I have said in some of my posts that I don’t really get the “social” aspect of social networks, and that I use most 2.0 tools as just another way to get more information.  I have also gone as record as a 2.0 “lurker”–listening to other people’s music streams, getting movies recommended on Netflix, using Wikipedia.   I never contributed before.  So I challenged myself this week to actually participate.  I went to Jango, my music-sharing source of choice, and I finally uploaded a picture for my profile, and I started to rate the music I was listening to.  Small step, but I only have so much time.  I also joined a Ning for St. Paul parents, as well as the Ning for our group project.  I kind of had to do this for the group, but it fit in nicely to this week’s assignment.  I realized with the Nings how really easy it is to do things on most of these sites.  I had always thought that it would take lots of time to figure it all out, but it really is easy to do pretty much anything–add pictures and video, start a new discussion, etc.  My final task was to join Facebook.  It’s fun!  The best part has been trying to make my husband laugh, which was an unexpected aspect of Facebook for me–it lets me just be me, as I was before I had kids.  I can cuss, and say inappropriate things that crack my best friend and my husband up, without having to think about my own or anybody else’s kids listening.  Actually, I guess lots of other people and other people’s kids can read what I write, depending upon their connection to me.  That has been the weirdest part of the experience, realizing that not only my husband and friends can read what I leave for them, but so can their “friends.”  This aspect is mentioned in the “7 Things to Know about Facebook” article that we read for this week, the fact that some people get into trouble because they post very private things, because it feels private, in a very public space.  It takes some getting used to–the publicly private conversations.  It also is very tempting to puff yourself up, make your day more interesting than it really is, make yourself funnier than you really feel.  I can better understand how people get caught up in the narcissistic side of all of this.

I thought this was interesting–a 3-year study of university library users has shown that 60% of all users said  that “library technology played a role in their navigation 95% of the time.”   Library catalogs and web pages are now the main starting point for users’ online searches.  The article attributes this to libraries successfully accomodating users’ changing behavior.  Very 2.0. A good example of libraries successfully using technology to stay current and now, more relevant than mainstream search engines.

How fun is this? My sisters and I used to stay up late back in the 70’s and watch this show. It’s called Fernwood Tonight. I couldn’t find it on Netflix, but it’s here--with Tom Waits, no less.

Here is another one:

I’m on twitter (I think).  My user name is marchofficial.

It has occured to me this week that maybe there is a need for categories in Library 2.o.  I think that what is scary about the Library 2.0 (or any 2.0) concept is that it involves a lot of information about a lot of information.  Once we separate the philosophy from the technologies, I think that we need a further breaking down of the various technologies, and a consideration for which particular tools might appeal to different personality types.   I would imagine that many librarians and I.T. people buy into the philosophy–the basic tenets of user participation, constant and purposeful change and reaching out to potential library users.  But I think that the technologies get all lumped together, kind of like “OK, now that you’re all on board with the philosophy, we’re going to be using blogs, wikis, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  There will be gaming nights, knitting book clubs, put up some pictures on Flickr, and we want you to all learn how to do podcasts,  and every once in awhile, the library will have concerts.”  It must be a little overwhelming.  I don’t work in a library, in fact, I don’t work at all (I’m a stay at home mom), so maybe it actually is that workers can choose to be involved with the technology that interests them.  I think it would be helpful.  I have written in a few of my posts already that I don’t really get the Facebook thing.  And the Twitter thing gives me a nervous stomach every time I read about it.  But this is very in keeping with my personality.  I am a person who doesn’t want to be constantly available or have people be constantly available to me.  I infuriate friends because I screen phone calls and will choose not to answer if I want to be alone.  But other technologies I love.  I love the personal and on demand stuff like podcasts.  My favorite gift ever was the IPod my husband gave me with 25 episodes of This American Life already downloaded.  I love the idea of IM for reference.  Blogs are fun.  Wikis, are right up my alley because they are neat and organized and chronological.  Teenage gaming nights?  Not so much.  Teenagers, even nice ones, have always scared me.  They did when I was a teenager, they do now, and they probably will when my own kids become teenagers.  So even though I don’t want to be involved with teenage gaming night at the library, I will defend to the death the right for the library to have one.  Especially if they only make people who are interested in teenagers, gaming, or both work the event.