Denouement

Building for a better world: zombies and eugenics

2012-01-30T16:57:00.000-08:00

From the very start I would like the fact to be noted that I think zombie studies, in general, are pretty dumb. However, the impact of zombies as a cultural movement that can be read in possible parallel to other historical or present happenings is intriguing. Mainly because the character and actions, so described by the big and small screens, of zombies provide, whether I like it or not, windows into how people think about other people.
With zombies there is often a problem of location. One group of people, now transformed through some event (sometimes stated (The Walking Dead, Night of the Living Dead), sometimes not (World War Z) is trying to overcome the other group in the location that the latter group believes to be, up until that point, secure. Typically in these scenarios the zombie group is much larger than the non-zombie group, hence the dramatic tension-will the smaller group outwit, destroy, and otherwise survive the larger devastating group. Because the larger group is indeed so devastating this is license, in the narrative renderings of the smaller group escaping, fighting for its life, is an excuse for a cinematic excess of blood, gore and general complete destruction.
The original Night of the Living Dead stands in some conflict to the contemporary view of zombie relations. A cursory glance through the related Wikipedia article under the reception heading shows, even from this 30,000 foot view, that zombies aren't just to be read as brainless, flesh-desiring, un-humans but as specters or visions of conflict. They are the brain-eating elephant wandering the room.
I have just recently finished A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era edited by Paul Lombardo. This book is frankly chilling, especially the last two chapters dealing with the issue of bottom-line mentalities and HMO's and how close this brings us back to eugenic-type thinking. But let's return to the zombies. What enabled state governments in the United States to pass enforced sterilization laws that were in place up until 1979 was fear. Many of the individuals pushing for enforced sterilization argued that there was a rapidly growing section of the population that would, if not checked through eugenic methods-mainly sterilization, would threaten to fully overwhelm and presumably devour the rest of the population.This group of the population was referred to often as "feeble-minded" or "deviant" and almost always found in the poor and incarcerated. These individuals were undesirable on some particular level either through their perceived lack of contribution to society (deviance, "feeblemindedness") or their taking from it (prison, welfare, etc.) So politicians kicked in the hype machine. (Note that much of the eugenic/sterilization use in the US predates Nazi Germany by at least 30 years.)
Again, I don't think zombie studies are particularly legitimate. That being said, these particular myths offer unique parallels to how proponents of eugenics, managing individuals' ability to reproduce, saw these groups of people.
1. Drain of resources (Those sterilized were seen as a drain on state resources and, more dangerously, likely to produce offspring that were also a drain on resources.)
2. Curb appetite. (Zombies are known for appetite which a headshot/decapitation eliminates. The original proponent of enforced sterilization originally posited that the procedure was to eliminate excessive masturbation and general unpleasantness in the prison inmates. )
3. Proponents of enforced sterilization stated numerous times, in different states throughout this period, that there was the distinct possibility of being overrun by those and their offspring, if not controlled.
This is not to say that eugenics and zombies are anyway related or that the thousands of people who were forcibly sterilized are related to zombie-type punishment. Rather the fashion in which the policy-makers and medical personnel reacted to the individuals whom they perceived as lesser, deserved nothing more than complete annihilation as though these "lesser" individuals were only capable of destruction.
This is simplistic, granted but fear/suspense is one of the main narrative drivers of the zombie film genre. Will the individuals make it into the truck or won't they? Will the cut-off team survive the next onslaught? Can the small group of survivors make it against the vast unknown zombie horde?
It is much easier to be afraid of something when you don't know how big it is.So politicians/proponents pushed the fear up by creating a fake horde claiming if something wasn't done to prevent this their way of life would disappear.
It is important to remember that when any individual(s) call on fear/terror for immediate decision making the shuffle and groan of zombie voices also begin to rise up. Ungrounded fear cannot be the vehicle by which any individual or group makes or bases their decisions in dealing with another group of human beings. Otherwise we may well found ourselves slaying what we believe to be zombies but when the blinders are removed, are rather fellow sojourners on this swiftly tilting planet.

SOPA Blackout

2012-01-18T05:27:00.000-08:00

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USTREAM-ZUCOTTI PARK

2011-11-15T11:30:00.001-08:00

Tim Pool (@theother99) has been live broadcasting the eviction from Zuccotti park from 1:30 this morning. The response to the injunction/eviction of the OWS group from the NYC park is supposedly coming down at 3:00 pm today (11/14/11). This is worth watching to both see what is happening and what will.

GPS Tracking or What is Privacy?

2011-11-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday regarding the privacy of citizens, specifically regarding the ability to track vehicle movements via GPS without a warrant. First read about this in Wired in this article Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV which has a good sum-up of the case, with full details and pictures of the GPS trackers including manufacturer details and specs. The biggest issue in this that should really disturb us as citizens is the basis from which the government is arguing for warrant-less placement of GPS devices on vehicles, namely "... that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices." (Wired)
If you're not familiar with the case the NYT has a quick summation Court Casts a Wary Eye on Tracking by GPS . "The case concerned Antoine Jones, who was the owner of a Washington nightclub when the police came to suspect him of being part of a cocaine-selling operation. They placed a tracking device on his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a valid warrant, tracked his travels for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison." (NYT)
NPR has a slew of articles on this, though none on the front page. High Court Troubled By Warrantless GPS Tracking This is one of the better articles as it has some excerpts from the hearing transcripts. What The governemnt's attorny, Dreeben, is pretty well prepared, articulate and seems to recognize that this is not simply about the case which brought this to the Supreme Court. The defense attorny, Leckar, seems to lacking a full understanding of the greater implications of this hearing. Driving home and listening to this last night caused me to wonder if a lawyer more cognizant of the wider impact of this decision could have been chosen. Especially one who doesn't admit to the Supreme Court that he thinks London's CCTV surveillance is "scary". In context Justice Kagan is discussing Lodon's surveillance and Leckar replies: "It's pretty scary. I wouldn't want to live in London under those circumstances." Justice SCALIA: "Well, it must be unconstitutional if it's scary."
Reading through the transcript, Leckar gets beat up pretty good while Dreeben is much more persuasive. While the Supreme Court is a substantially intimidating group of people, Leckar really needed to be on his game and this transcript makes me nervous that he does not do an adequate job in defending privacy. To Leckar's credit privacy has become a difficult term to define but this decision is going to set precedent for the future and to fail to address this meaningfully, I think, is going to dramatically change the way we live.

The full transcript of the is available here. Towards the beginning of the transcript Judge Scalia asks the question, which I think is key to this debate, "...are you obtaining information that a person had a reasonable expectation to be kept private?" This is at the heart of the current privacy debate. Dreeben goes on to argue that GPS offer a less time-consuming method of collecting this data to which Judge Alita responds "...in the pre-computer, pre-Internet age much of the privacy -- I would say most of the privacy -- that people enjoyed was not the result of legal protections or constitutional protections; it was the result simply of the difficulty of traveling around and gathering up information." This difficulty of gathering people's information
The two other questions raised here, I think, are 1) what is privacy and 2) is that privacy a right of the citizens of this country.

Supreme Court Hears Arguments In GPS Case
Do Police Need Warrants For GPS Tracking Devices?
GPS Tracking: Supreme Court Debates Privacy Limits On Police (Huffington Post)

All the world's a screen

2011-10-28T05:46:00.000-07:00

This is a recent video from Microsoft doing some potential crystal ball gazing into the future of the integration of the physical world and the tools of technology/computer. Where everything is a potential screen and information is neither digital nor physical but can be shared, moved and manipulated from surface to device. In watching this video, this future world is both completely urban and very sterile. All surfaces are immaculately clean and much of the. It seems that this new digital world has no room for piles of stuff or leftover bits of projects because it's all pixels. There's some corollary to this project in Chris Harrison's work on Skinput or Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense Project demoed in this TED video.

The description of the Sixth Sense project follows as taken from Mistry's website: "'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant like wearable device, 'SixthSense' sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects we are interacting with. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets us interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or our interaction with the object itself. 'SixthSense' attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer." The last sentence nicely captures the point of Microsoft's video. If the entire world is our computer then this seems to imply that our informaiton is necessary to be the world's as well so that the world as computer has something to process. A recent NYR article Over the High-Tech Rainbow asks this question: "... should we just assume that all this personal information being generated and collected won’t be used against us by insurers, or employers, or lawyers, or marketers, or the government?" Not that our personal information isn't already collected and used against us but the increasing drive to remove any perceived barriers between the desire and the ability to share information should warrant increased scrutiny of how that information is actually used by and against its progenitors.

The People's Library in my library

2011-10-24T14:16:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street (specifically NYC) has many facets that bear discussion but one of the things that has stood out to me is the fact that they have a library. You can check out the library's web page here the official title of which is The People's Library. What's interesting about this setup is that there are no, as far as I can tell, ebooks, databases or otherwise digital media in, or part of, this library. There is available internet connectivity but there is not, as far as I've read, any subscriptions to library vendors or databases.
What really intrigues me is this people's library exists as a library of necessity and purposeful in scope. The books chosen seem to be based around the ideas of free speech, response to government, etc. (Check out the related links below for additional info on how people are picking books.)
While there has not been a particularly well-stated set of specific goals of those doing the occupying, there seems to be a perception that the library's provided sources of information is needed/interesting/pointedly relevant in order to help those protesting to do so better or more intelligently, or help inform about how the nation got to the point it's at, biography of national leaders, etc.
Why does a protest movement need a library? It's hard to tell not actually being there but my own, from-a-distance-personal conjecture follows. Here goes: many of these books have all been available for a while (Zinn's a People's History of the United States is a good example) but it's not until these reader's need have changed that these resources are now recognized as important or helpful. The importance of the object is elevated relative to the current need of the user. Libraries are supposed to exist to meet need(s) but one of the challenges is trying to figure out or identify exactly what drives patrons/users to act on their information needs or to realize that there is a resource that meets a need that was previously unvoiced or less urgent.
This library has comes to the protestors directly. It has arisen out of the gathering of people to meet a specific need and is therefore valued because it is need-based.
The tradition of acadmeic libraries is that they are developed to meet a specific need but because there are other immediately available sources.
The People's Library exemplifies the five quote unquote laws of library use codified by S. Ranganathan.

Books are for use.
Every reader his [or her] book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
The library is a growing organism.

I wonder if patrons of The People's Library may actually have an easier time of selecting resources because there is a specifically limited focus and reaourxes which they are concerned.

Location also matters.

im tempted to decamp parts of the collection into a rolling cart and haul it around campus.Recently I brought three books over to a colleague in Student Development who had requested some "interesting stuff". Another staff member happened to overhear our conversation, expressed interest in one of the books and ended up walking away with it. This is an individual who is very unlikely to engage with the library resources on a regular basis. But presenting them with a manageable chunk of a resource in a subject area they were interested in, piqued their interest.
How do I, then, turn my library into a people's or in this case, a student's library? Or better inform users what is in the stacks? I want my student users to have the same sense of purpose, relevance and excitement that the OWD have about their books. What are additional ways to increase the transparency of what's in the stacks?The other, more difficult bit, is to highlight the importance of the works both for for its own sake as well as for its potential applicability to a particular research or information-gathering project.

Matthew Battles on Reading, Libraries and Occupations

2011-10-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

This video by Matthew Battles discusses the idea of libraries and occupations. He asks the perfect question of "Why do we need libraries for an occupation/movement?" Battles draws parallels between the occupy movement and the Chartist movement of 19th century Britain. (If you're not familiar with the Chartist movement, don't worry neither was I. Battles gives a nice explanation.) More importantly Battles describes an interaction with an occupy library, perhaps better described as a reading room, as possessing "...a wonderful energy of charged contemplation". This idea of "charged contemplation" is very much what I was thinking, and couldn't quite get to, with my previous post. That there is a very particular and meaningful reason for using these resources it seems that it's not just the people who are charged with contemplative meaning but the materials themselves. I like Battles' highlight of the 19th century reading room concept as it seems to be more applicable to this particular constellation of collected items. Regardless the occupy movement has one and, I think, it has interesting implications for doing library work and especially outreach.

Flooding

2011-09-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

After my thinking and writing about how the camera effects how we see, here's a bunch of pictures from the flooding in our area.
There is currently a state of emergency and we're really not supposed to be traveling but we were out and seeing how bad it was. Last night I worked for three hours with friends to move hundreds of pounds of tools and fiberglass materials from their plastics plant to safety. Our friends Walter and Kristen with their two girls called us up at 1 am due to the mandatory evacuation and have been hanging out with us today. They live two streets away from the park in the images below.
We are up on a hill so that with the lack of rain it's quite tranquil. All of the flash flooding that closed streets last night up here has diminished. Helicopter are periodically flying over and sirens regularly approach and recede.There are many better images and news reports but these are the shots from my iPhone around Endicott.

This is at Miserau Park at around 7:30 am. The flood wall is the green bank in the background.

This is the same park about three hours later and bit farther down. The slight rise behind the pool of water is the flood wall. The Susquhanna is just behind the wall.

If you look in the background in the left hand corner, you can see the water pouring over the flood wall.

Another shot of the park.

This is is my favorite picture. You can see the water has come up the pole significantly and the sign is just ironic.

People coming out to see the river, take pictures and call their friends to let them know how bad it is.

The perspective isn't great but the parking lot is lower than the grass you can see in the foreground and the water has completely filled that area.

This medical building is to the right of the picture of Kmart. They are building sandbags.

National Guard on the scene. Kmart is to the picture's left.

It's never good when the Red Cross floods.

2011-09-05T14:43:00.000-07:00

The NYT tossed up an article today "When the camera takes over for the eye"with an almost inspired quote regarding on how we do the recording-as-better-remembering act: "...the camera is a way of connecting, participating and collecting fleeting experiences." The piece is short but adds to this ongoing discussion of what the image-taking process means for us as viewers and consumers. This is not just for art but for family outings, special events or moving sunsets.
Jaron Lanier has a recent interview/article in the Edge, I'm still working through this but Lanier has some interesting ideas that relate to this camera idea.
"Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?"
Seemingly, those with cameras can now re-make the world so that a piece of art that is physically stuck in pcae can now be carried, printed or displayed wherever the individual's device allows. So we cease looking at items in their settings and look to see the most advantageous vantage point or interesting view point to capture the piece rather than simply being with it. The camera diminishes the art by reducing it to pixels and thus allowing the viewer to bypass the aesthetic experience or challenge. By capturing an image of the piece/scultpure the need to further interact with the work is pushed into the future since there is an artifact that can, if needed, be considered at leisure without the need to return to the thing itself. The world remade in the eye of the beholder holding a tiny lens and screen.

To stare at Maria Abramovi's image is not to sit down with her. What would it have been like to have sat down with Maria Abramovic in the MOMA for "The Artist is Present" and brought out a camera phone and interposed it into the visual space? You can see many of the people who sat with Maria here. But without cameras no one outside of that room would have seen/experienced this event. There would simply be a blank square.

Is it simply because the technological devices are now available to us that we persist in recording these events? We are interested in recording and then digging those recordings up after they have been covered in dust but who is going to shift through the terabytes of digital files to find the important stuff?

Perhaps it is that we are too afraid of loss to stop recording.

I've recorded everything I've done since I was three

2011-08-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

My friend Jon, writing over at Beans from Merriville, posted earlier this week about his process of disconnecting from the world. (Don't be too startled by the photo at the top of Jon's post; the rest of the post is much less alarming.)

Recently this interview between Tao Lin on behalf of the Believer with author Ben Lever and they had this really interesting discussion about, among other things, the real and the virtual and the pros/cons of experiencing the world through both. About halfway through the interview Tao Lin comments that
"The idea of the virtual seems to apply to all domains of human experience, not just to novels and poems—the inevitable disappointment of the actual due to the awareness of a virtual."
In thinking about this interview and Jon's post, the way that people interact with live events or picturesque moments also popped into my head. I play bass in a local Christian rock band and so we get to be out playing on a fairly regular basis in front of groups of people and often with other bands. So I've had the opportunity to regularly hang out at a bunch of big and small music events over the past two years. Just in observation of these shows, there seems to be a disposition to want to record or capture what is happening live rather than experiencing it. It seems that our default reaction to an interesting, memorable or picturesque moment is whip out some sort of recording equipment, typically video+audio, to record that moment.
Granted there are very positive aspects to this capturing ability. The revolutions in the Middle East would not be as nearly accessible to the rest of the world if it were not for this possibility. Perhaps they would not have succeeded at all. Nor would an issue like the BART in San Francisco killing cell service in response to protests be as crucial a matter.
And often, in order to avoid missing that moment, individuals will record the entire show/event/what-have-you. What seems then to end up happening is that instead of watching the actual or authentic live event the observer watches the entire event played out through the tiny screen held inches away from their face. How does this affect our interactive experiences? How does this affect our memory? If we are so intent on capturing the world around us are we forgetting to interact with it? Hence why this Toyota commercial is both funny and sad.
Interestingly enough since I've started writing this post earlier this afternoon (Wednesday 8/23), NPR posted this article entitled Does the Internet Make You More-or Less-Connected. (I swear I wrote the above before I read the NPR article.) Coincidentally the lead image has a bunch of kids with phones with the caption "The new concert experience: Is that digital device an impediment or an enhancement to your life?" The author, Dave Pell describes being at an Arcade Fire concert behind a guy who was recording the concert and sums up nicely the current concert/show experience:
"...a guy in front of me held his camera phone towards the big screen that flanked the stage and hit the video record button. He stood like that for a long time, separated from a live concert by two screens. Maybe he gained some social benefit by sharing the video with a friend or a broader Internet audience. But the concert provided him an opportunity to lose himself in the music and the moment. He let a screen block that experience."
It's as though we each begin to create our own digital arcade, a structure of seemingly random events held together by the individual doing the recording. Are we going to get to a point when I ask how was the concert instead of describing it the queried individual will simply whip out their recording device and show the person asking the question. Since we're often not terribly good at explaining experiences through words anyway perhaps video is more effective.
Pictures have been credited with being worth far more words than they really are worth. Video is even worse. If we are afraid of being disconnected from our devices because we are afraid of losing our place in the constant stream of data, are we also afraid of disconnecting from recording everything because we have become distrustful of our own ability to recollect and recount?

Can we still lose ourselves?

In three's

2011-08-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

I'm curating the first ever library book sale, of my time here anyway. I have some downtime after spending most of the summer weeding, packing and hauling a over a thousand books to the gym. People are here and buying stuff which is really encouraging. If you're not doing anything, please feel free to head on over to Johnson City, NY. I'll be here until 5pm today and 8-12 tomorrow.

So as I'm catching up on some reading came across this infographic on student use of social/media. I thought the quote unquote sophomore slump, toward the bottom of the graphic, rather interesting though there is a distinct lack of actual data as to why this slump might occur. It would be interesting if there was more research to fill-in why there might be less social media interaction than other years.

Via Siva Vidhynathan's twitter: London, Egypt and the nature of social media by Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan. Solid article for a several reasons the best being this quote: "With or without these technologies, (social media) people will ultimately stand up and speak their minds." Srinivasan nicely lays out that the tools don't necessarily matter. They may help, and sometimes greatly, but all the focus on social media may miss the point slightly. This is especially true in light of British PM Cameron's proposal to shut down social media sites and restricting information access. "Mr. Cameron said the government was working on measures that would stop rioters from using social media — Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger, principally — to coordinate and direct their “horrific actions.”" There is some degrees of doubt that Facebook/Twitter were actually used to coordinate any of the riot and rather BBM was used as the primary vehicle (see Zeynep Tufekci and David Parry) The two-part question that has been raised in multiple areas 1) What specific action determines when the BBM would be turned off and 2) what would keep the government/police from leaving it off? Control is not easily relinquished by or wrested from official hands once those hands have enjoyed a tighter clasp.

What I've been working on and what it looks like

2011-05-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

This is what I've been working on in my library for the past almost two weeks. What was supposed to be a simple reorganization jaunt has turned into a massive reorganization and weeding. Those piles above, and following. That's about 80% of what is being weeded out. There's other books that haven't been added to the fairly epic Library End-O'-The-Summer Sale stack. I've been the solo librarian here for three years and I'm don't konw when the last time previous to me any sort of weeding had been done. So, here we are. Most of these are redudnant copies (as in the third or fourth) or simply outdated. Late 1800/early 1900 extremely esoteric and poorly aged religion and history stuff. I will be going through these and pricing them properly. My hope is that we can generate a decent amount of cash to fill the space left by these with some more quality works.

The whole goal being to make this, the upstairs of the library standing in for the whole place, better. You can kinda see there's already books on the shelves which we've been moving from the basement, where most of the volumes are kept to the upstairs to help make them more visible. I've also integrated the reference section directly into the circulation collection. The main reason is that students were super-confused by the reference section location and placement. The four stacks on the left hand side of the photo used to be the reference area. Students would get up from the computers with call number clutched in hand to wander about the reference section until I asked them if they were finding what they were looking for. The answer to which was 9.5 times out of 10; nope, so hence the moving around. The reference books won't circulate and they still have the 'REF' tag on each book.

This is my office. I'd like to say it is this messy because I'm working on my presentation for the Metrolina Library Association's 6th Annual Information Literacy Conference on July 16th in Charlotte, NC but this is a pretty standard state of operation. I'm really excited to be presenting there and will be talking about the keys for doing/attempting information literacy as a solo librarian. There's a bunch of other really good talks lined up as well which I'm pretty stoked to go learn from.
Here's the view from my chair. If I ever have to move back to a cubicle or smaller office space it's going to be really hard. Yes that is a vintage reel-to-reel player and a coffee pot.
Additional book shelves plus my window of library, reading and DFW related comics. Also, my notes. It's way fun to write on the glass. Try it.

Da' Web(s).

2011-05-12T05:39:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry) (Pub. 2011) while also concurrently reading Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web (Pub. 1999). This combination made for a interesting sort of Internet-as-past and the future-of-the-Web and where is it all going type of thoughts.

The vision that Tim Berners-Lee outlines toward the end of Weaving the Web directly connects and present an interesting backdrop to read in juxtaposition with the Googlization of everything that Siva Vaidhyanathan lays out. Equally compelling is Vaidhyanathan's vision for the Human Knowledge Project where he proposes an international group of involved and concerned citizens take responsibility for the judicial care and access to the world's information rather than leaving that assignment to corporate entities claiming benevolence. Not to sound all over the top about the corporate thing but seeing/reading where Berners-Lee suggests that the early beginnings of the Web should go and where Vaidhyanathan describes where the Web is presently and surmises where it might be heading, there is a certain quandary about who or what is actually driving the development of the Web now and what that means for our daily Internet use/access and other parts of living. Really the Internet/Web has not quite ended up the free place that Berners-Lee calls for. While there is still a good chunk of this there are corporate entities that one do it better Google or lock out those things which they view as detrimental to their bottom line. (Comcast started blocking PirateBay, again.) Berners-Lee writes that "the Web must allow equal access to those in different economic and political situations; those who have physical or congitive disabilities; those of different cultures; and those who use different languages with different characters that read in different directions across a page." (P. 165) And it seems we've has accomplished this through the use of and reliance on corporations such as Google whom serve "...as an embedded guide to navigating choices, associations, tastes, and the world around us." (Vaidhyanathan 200)
It is truly fascinating to read Berners-Lee's account of the beginning of building the web as different people put servers online and the slow burn that caught on, through much sweat and blood on Tim's part, to become this massive "network of networks" called the Web. While CERN gave the Internet a place to start, it wasn't corporations that took the initiative in pushing the Web. It was people who were interested and motivated to build something that allow for different kinds of communication then were previously available. While WC3 works(ed) to suggest protocols and standards for HTML/XML content was not their issue and the Web in the late 90's was an incredibly messy, weird place. As Vaidhyanathan very nicely illustrates, Google cleaned up the Web and provided clear and safe paths throughout the Web; Google became navigational instrument, like a watch, rather than a supporting technology, like a pacemaker, that we the users have found ourselves not to be able to live without.

Siva talks about his book, corporate responsibility and Google at the Strand and at Harvard.

Two Machines

2011-05-05T04:38:00.001-07:00

So I'm a huge fan, by proxy, of this bag making company out in Columbus OH, called Seagull Bags. While I don't actually own one, yet*, the designs are gorgeous with some absolutely impressive thread/embroidery work. Seriously, these bags look amazing (and waterproof).
Anyway, while trolling and drooling over bags came across a pretty fantastic effort/ministry that Rory and Nicole Taylor are spearheading, called Two Machines. "In the summer of 2010, Two Machines teamed up with Bittersweet Ministries to install two sewing machines in an impoverished canyon community outside of Tijuana, Mexico." The Taylors went back in January and the machines have really made a huge impact on the community. They are doing ongoing fundraising, and are working towards becoming a legit non-proft, so any support would be appreciated.

Peace.

*Because I do have a fantastic Chrome bag that has yet to fail me. It's like a second skin and we go everywhere together. The Seagull designs are just mouth-wateringly fantastic. It's hard not to covet. Extremely hard.

It's Record Store Day!!

2011-04-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

(Design by David Sizemore)

April 16th is Record Store Day for which my wife and I have driven to Voluntown, Connecticut which actually has multiple record stores near it as opposed to the dearth of record stores near Binghamton. Granted, the real reason we are here is to visit our new niece but the record store closeness is a nice perk.
Speaking of records my band, Cry of the Scapegoat has our first record out. If you'd like a physical copy, you can email me or go to Amazon or iTunes.

___________________________________________________________________
Update: If you're ever in Providence, RI definitely check out Armageddon Record Shop. Excellent collection of local indie/rock and a wide array of tape, CD and vinyl in the areas of metal, experimental/noise, hardcore/punk and some indie. One of the store owners said the shop has been there 10 years which is a pretty sweet run for an independent record store. Friendly guys who are super-knowledgeable and involved in the local process. It was cool to hang out on the fringes and listen to the banter between some of the customers and the owners.
Also check out Myopic Books in downtown Providence. It's a lovely shop with a wide floor plan, 8.5 shelves and an incredible selection of books in most subjects. The fiction and cultural studies sections were incredibly well-stocked for a used book store.
I failed to take a picture but the store also had a Jack Kerouac bobble-head doll for $175. It was a surprisingly good likeness.

Skimming the Surface

2011-04-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

So recently came across this article on freshman writing and failing to engage with sources.
Note that the group studied was first year composition classes emphasizing that 1) these kid are coming in not ready to write for college or engage their sources and 2) the writing classes are critical and 3) I think, continues to call for unified writing requirements across the curriculum to avoid frustration and continue development for the students as they move quote unquote upward.
One of the researchers uses the metaphor of “digesting the material” which is a process that takes time to do correctly. Ingest/eat/consume too fast and you get indigestion. When our bodies digest food it is a background thing because our bodies literally have been trained to do so. There’s a reason, other than teeth, that babies are fed increasingly varied types of food as they grow older/mature because their digestive systems are able to handle the intake and the processing. The question then becomes how do we help our students to 1) develop the necessary time to digest and 2) break the habit of bouncing from one screen/distraction to another which is not digesting but rather dipping and skipping from one informational source to another. And there’s not really a lot of time to do this because they are in it and need to get themselves up to speed as quickly as possible. It’s interesting to read the comments of this paper because some of the commentators lose it a bit. One of the commentators, though bathed in bitterness, hits upon another aspect of this issue and that is the required endurance on the part of the student to read/skim the necessary material. Either this is a timing issue, waiting until the last minute, or it’s a fatigue issue. From talking to student I think a large part of this stems from where the student genuinely feels exhausted by the unsuccessfulness of their search and blames the search engine, whether the library database(s) or the catalog because they haven’t immediately found what was wanted. When a mistake is made the assumption is that the technology is failing to do what is requested or is not able to be manipulated in the expected fashion. In some ways, as has been rehashed in many other places, this is a design issue with library databases/catalogs. On the other hand, they are different than Google and should not be expected to act in the same manner. A different frame of resource and thinking needs to be cultivated and applied to those sources.

We are all of us brothers

2011-04-08T05:10:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaIt's actually proving rather hard this past week or so to get any sort of work done during the day with the incredible amount of articles and whatnot issuing forth on the subject of David Foster Wallace and/or/also The Pale King. While Nick Mantias over at The Howling Fantods has it all collected, collated and curated I humbly wanted to draw your attention to three particular writings that I thought were rather moving and altogether excellent.

1) Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library
by Maria Bustillos
2) In Which We Explore the Archives of David Foster Wallace
3) How to be Happy Leland de la Durantaye

The Pale King is currently sitting on my bookshelf. I've hesitated to start it. I was so excited when the UPS guy dropped it off that I walked the apartment holding it triumphantly over my head like some sort of trophy. When David Lipsky's book came out, I devoured it and read many sections twice wanting that extra view into the road trip and Wallace's thinking. I've hunted down many of the audio clips from Wallace's appearance at the Lannan Foundation and other readings. I've even got a subscription to Harper's so I could download some of his essays to compare the different versions. The field of Wallace studies has barely been scratched. Starting with Hering's fantastic collection entitled Consider David Foster Wallace there is a tremendous amount to explore/connect/discuss/debate about what Wallace has written. Especially with the recent opening of the archives at the Ransome Center being made available, one can almost go straight to the source.
But the Pale King is different-it's the last novel. I started reading Wallace the summer of 2008 three months before he committed suicide. I had come into his work as many others through A Supposedly Fun Thing and Consider the Lobster and was hungry for more. I came across the aforementioned Howling Fantods while surfing the Web for info about him and in the midst of this fervor to one morning reading the NYTimes article that Wallace had indeed died. I'm grateful that he left what had come together of The Pale King for us to read. I'm looking forward to one last first time of starting a DFW novel.

Amazon Cloud Player/Drive

2011-04-06T05:14:00.000-07:00

It was pretty much inevitable but Amazon is now scrambling to figure out a way to placate the fistful of major record labels it apparently insulted by launching its Cloud Player and Cloud Drive last week. Wired has a really excellent summary of the situation available here.
I think this is going to be the defining copyright battle of the next 15-20 years that's going to define if we the user(s) really own our digital media and have the right or ability to store it where we want. The article's author sums this up nicely toward the end of the piece with the statement "As long as media companies think of file lockers as piracy devices, they will be at war with them". And as long as digital media is seen to be a threat to the media companies' profits, even if correctly purchased, any Internet storage options with the possibility of sharing are going to be strong and hotly contested. At some point these companies need to be convinced that users own the media that they buy. Hopefully this situation will help to push that resolution.

Doctorow and Google (loosely linked)

2011-04-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

Hava Siegelmann has described intelligence as "a kind of sensitivity to things". I've been giving a surface-level introduction to AI in the computer class I'm teaching and we talked about the Turing Test and the Loebner prize and some of the implications of talking about ourselves and talking about machines as those they think. And out of that ran into this several days old article on the quote unquote smarter Gmail ads and the continued push for the Priority Inbox seems to suggest that we're are not particularly interested in being that sensitive. If you're not familiar with the Priority Inbox for Gmail basically it is designed to floating the more important emails to the top of the inbox and the less important emails to the bottom. While this is built on user behavior the point is made that the technology is now deciding for the user what should be most important.
At the same time there's a certain amount of trust being built into this system so that the user is investing faith that the technology is going to consistently accurately estimate/sort emails properly and not actually cause more work if the program screws up and now I have to sort through missed emails based on a bad categorization. Are we that willing to rescind our/this sensitivity to changes in technology before sort of flipping of the auto pilot switch that indicates yes take care of me.
Obliquely related is a pretty intriguing video from Cory Doctorow* via TED discussing the protection of and exploraiton of social networking, privacy and kids. Doctorow connects Skinner's box and Facebook in a rather brilliant fashion. We no longer see our private lives as valuable or special because so many of what we do can be as possibly transparent or seemingly transparent as we choose. Doctorow also makes the point we are not thinking accurately about the future because it's too far away. In part because of how information is now available to us immediately to make both the past minute the present 10 seconds and the future 60 seconds to seem like the only/most important bits of time to have existed. This is not the "kind of sensitivity to things" Doctorow is at the very least challenging the viewer/listener with.

*Sidenote: Doctorow makes brief reference to the feedback loop between the item and the user. N. Katherine Hayles is well worth reading on this. My Mother was a Computer and How We Became Posthuman both have some good discussions of the implications of the feedback loop.

Things I've been reading

2011-03-17T08:32:00.001-07:00

1) The Force Acting on a Disparate Body by Christopher Rowe. This is a truly lovely story with a sort of trippy, state of consciousness, points of interest story. It's interesting how as the bodies of water get bigger the amount of detail about the riding also seems to get bigger or more abstract. The speed of the narration picks up as well with the largeness of the body of water. While the narrator begins his journey there are several minutes/paragraphs dedicated but the Pacific Ocean is crossed in a matter of about a sentence or two.
You can listen to the story being read by Miette as you lay your sleepy head down here.

2) Sven Birkerts has an essay in the new issue of Lapham's Quarterly on the prospects and importance of idleness. It's an all-encompassing essay with some definitively quotable sentences.

3) Rory Litwin over at Library Juice Press has some compelling and interesting thoughts on the use of library statistics in day to day decision making that are worth interacting with and thinking about.

Have sort of discovered Grooveshark which I knew about but the streaming capabilities of the local network, for a variety of reasons, were not really supporting Grooveshark's use. However, they are now. Have been really enjoying Fang Island, really big sound with a lot of different rhythms and mostly instrumental. When the vocals come in they are huge, at least a 100 to a 150 people that mostly consist of open vowels and handclaps. Davy Crockett and Daisy are really excellent.

For the love of books

2011-03-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

Dear Anonymous Generous Individual,

If you have 1) extra copies of the following or 2) an unfulfilled desire for philanthropy that you would like to satisfy or 3) need something else to write off of your taxes, I am really interested in the following list of books, in order of desire, and can't quite afford to purchase them all right now.

Please email me at jeremy(dot)mcginniss(at)gmail.com to get my shipping address and to let me know how many of the following titles you are willing to generously supply.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Jeremy

The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) - Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom - Evgeny Morozov

Here comes Everybody: Clay Shirky

The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

The New Media Reader - Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground - Kevin Poulsen

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood - James Gleick;

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other - Sherry Turkle

What the Best College Teachers Do - Ken Bain

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Howard Rheingold

Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling - Kembrew McLeod

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom - Yochai Benkler

Adz And It Shall Be Given Unto You: Sufjan Stevens Interviewed

2011-02-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

Interesting and intriguing interview with Sufjan Stevens over The Quietus
Besides a bunch of connections to someone like Glen Gould popping out in terms of the relation of the musician to the music and technology, I really like what Stevens has to say about value and investment. About halfway through the interview he drops the following statement in response to the perceived vs. actual value of (digital) music: "There’s an accountability to an object if there’s an investment in it. There’s a correlation between accountability and value and investment and now there’s absolutely no investment, or time or money or even attention." And this quote/idea has direct connection to learning or education. Living in an object-proliferated culture where objects are very easy to get (at) or to be replaced it does indeed lower the overall value and negates the necessity of accountability to a particular object or objects. Whether that object is simple as CD or as complex as a college degree value has become, or perhaps is becoming, transmorgified from the process of deriving value by interacting with that object in order to learn it. I think the same goes for church and spiritual life where I/we do not invest and therefore ignore or dodge the accountability that is generated by the type of investment required of us to live Christ-like lives.

Sell this!

2011-01-28T08:28:00.000-08:00

Have come across a couple of things over the past couple of days in thinking about the use of the Web/social networks and our relationship to them and each other.
First is this link as the article deals with self-perception, perception of others as sellers, the shift from being simply in relationships with others to having those relationships leveraged for numbers, as the writer of the article states, of LOL’s and likes that seem to determine some type of truth about individual as the poster or poseur as the case may be. Or at least the total number of clicks seem to grant some kind of meaning to us as users/people. I particularly like what this article says about the constant selling of ourselves. How does this effect our perception of ourselves or how does it cause us to want to generate other versions of ourselves which may or may not be actually true. Or we become so split managing our multiple “personalities” that any effort in deciding what is true gets subsumed to managing that personality/profile.
There's another way to talk about this which is captured nicely below via Sherry Turkle interview with Colbert. (While Colbert's style tends towards the aggressive, I think he's asking some of the right questions, it's not the right forum for Turkle to actually elucidate her thinking. But she gets in a couple of noteworthy points despite the chuckles.)
"We have lost respect that some argument do take the long form. Some arguments do take a book." And this idea of length and time is a grounding motif throughout the rest of her conversation with Colbert. In a somewhat serious question Colbert asks why not make this book about technology 140 characters long so people can absorb it. In particular Turkle suggest that in general people are "...begin[ing] to ask simpler questions so that they can give simpler answers because the volume and velocity [of the messages] ramps up..." More time is being spent on volume/speed than depth/marination. Turkle has a particularly resonant point with the article above toward the end of the interview in responding to Colbert's statement that aren't we all better connected and knowing each other because we are connected all the time through social media, like Facebook. Turkle nails it: "People are performing on their Facebook profile." And because we are constantly connected, Turkle suggests that there is actually performance exhaustion in needing to be constantly "on" in the several levels of meaning that word indicates. On= not missing. On=connected On=computer booted up On=that you are tweeting/facebook statusing interesting/likable items. On=stage. On=the constant public display of some true/false/half-true/half-false representation of ourselves as we desire to be seen and known. Not only do we have the opportunity to craft how others think about us but in crafting our online performance through a series of quotes there is the opportunity to craft how we think about ourselves which is probably not true.
Not only is there performance exhaustion but I wonder if there is not fear of being disconnected, of missing, of no longer being "on". Colbert, either purposefully or not, captures the standard response that any attempt to disconnect, albeit temporarily, or take a step back out of the information stream requires that individual to stop being on for a certain reflective period of time. If this performance idea is true, I think it is, then any attempt to reflect on this type of use also requires a break in performance or selling. There's the idea of having to selling a performance so that the dichotomy of sales and acting are not that far apart. If we are all simultaneously selling and acting towards each other, will we notice when actual communication and interaction stops? Or will we have committed so fully and so deeply to our own perceived roles to have sold ourselves to ourselves?

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Sherry Turkle

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

Makoto Fujimura

2011-01-20T16:40:00.000-08:00

Makoto Fujimura

I've watched this video about seven times now and did a short presentation on it for Eng. Comp II. The problem with the presentation was that I thought the students knew what their assignment (writing an outline of a version of a gospel out of the 4 gospels) was and they didn't. So the presentation was modified suddenly at the last minute but I wanted to throw up some of the better snippets. Mostly because Mako's (as he is referred to in the video) painting(s) are tremendous on every level and more people need to spend more time staring and thinking about his works.

This video shows a different way of looking/interacting/reading/seeing (at) the Gospels
(This bit was pitched to the student when I thought they knew what the assignment was.) Anyone has access to the same materials as the artist’s/Mako’s raw materials and therefore could, w/ everything else being equal, theoretically/conceivably make these paintings or similar paintings. The materials are something that we all have access to. To a certain extent this is where words overlap where we all have access to the words/text and the method/how they are utilized/context is what gives their meaning or their truth. In this assignment you are taking prepared materials (the Gospels) and manipulating them into different shapes or lines based on what already exists in the text but that you are causing to realize or bring to the surface in a similar way as the possibility(ies) of the paint in a porcelain bowl is not realized until it meets the canvas as guided by the training/expertise/vision of the artist.

What's interesting about this video and illustrations of the text is that while these images are not necessarily direct portraits there are specific aspects/reasons that Mako states on why these paintings were rendered the way they were. Non-representational does not (have to) mean random or chaotic in the negative sense.
There is order and purpose, guidance and practice, hope and creativity even in non-representational works.
And where Alissa Wilkinson's comments come in about Christianity as the big capital C Christianity where we have historically avoided the education process of learning about art and its connection to truth and worship and belief. I do think we need to a better job at this.* NT Wright has some good stuff to say about this as well if you look him up in iTunes U-especially the Seattle-Pacific Univ. talks.

One of the things that I think is not necessarily overtly obvious but is implied is that Mako has spent a lot of time thinking about these texts and there is an informing relationship between the two entities. He states that Mark is/ when thinking about the texts, this painting is what is realized. One of the nice things about non-representational art is that if it is really quote unquote good it will resonate with you/your experience/your readings because of its abstract nature where abstract is not meaningless but in the idea of being “abstracted out” to a more universal sense or audience which is who the Gospel is for; that is, the world. Which I think is poignant because the Gospels themselves exist as abstracted items that are applicable to any human being regardless of background/experience/etc.

A language to bring people home.

"Art is always transgressive but done in love not just in images but in words."
The idea of being transgressive carries a bunch of weight with it. In the OED the first definition of transgressive is "Involving transgression; sinful" breaking a law. It's a very OT word a word of law; where there is lots of wrath and pain sort of implied in the breaking of it. However the second meaning is one that fits this video where transgressive is defined as "passing beyond some limit"(OED). That we are not bound simply by the history or routine of a text/thought process/method but are able to take that text and in our freedom as people bend/manipulate that text to do/say/show different things. There is the necessity to be careful with how we go about that because, and especially when dealing with something that is traditionally and rightly so, seen as sacred. But sacred doesn’t mean untouchable. Something can be both truly beautiful and beautifully true. Anyone could take the materials that Mako has at his disposal to create non-representational paintings. However it takes skill, practice and respect and deep respect and knowledge of the text to create a work like this.

*So I'm trying this out in the library this semester where a handful of students who are really creative and artist-based have their work displayed in the Library throughout the next semester. They are really excited about it and I'm pretty stoked as well. We've not really done anything with this before so it's going to be an interesting experience.

E-books and journalism

2011-01-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

1) Meredith Farkas of Information wants to be Free has a lengthy but apt/pointed post about E-Books and some issues related to them.
My favorite bit and my biggest beef thus far:
"Those books don’t disappear unless a patron loses them (in which case we usually recoup our costs) or we choose to remove the book from the collection. We can ILL those books, we can put them on reserve, and there are no further costs for that book (unless it requires rebinding) beyond the initial purchase. But take a look at our eBrary collection. We pay lots of money each year for access to tens of thousands of books but we don’t own anything. We cancel our subscription and those books are gone. Books get added and disappear from our eBrary collection depending on their current deals with publishers, meaning that something a student used for their research two months ago may not actually be in our collection when they are looking to cite something from it." (emphasis added)

2)Via Rory Litwin over at Library Juice, came across Michael Bugeja's article which discusses the recent massive changes in the role of journalism.
"Journalism used to focus on what citizens needed to know, whether they liked it or not. Now it focuses on what the audience wants, explaining the spike in celebrity and entertainment news . Social networks and search engines give away that news for free in return for personal information and then vend those data to companies whose cookies are as hidden as terms of service."

There's an interesting connection here between these two thoughts where the potential for access becomes more important than a responsible ownership both of objects and ideas. Is it possible that part of this turn toward(s) celebrity/entertainment news is pushed along by the fact that we are getting more and more used not to owning physical stuff (Netflix being a prime example) (where owning requires a commitment to care and development) that we have proclaimed trust in those who would simply provide access without considering the consequences. We become hung up on our ability to access different platforms (data plans are a good example) and believe that we need these things to function well and by doing so propagate the idea that we need these things to function well. I read something a while back that stated in terms of being a librarian it's more important to know where things are rather than simply being able to find them. I want to be able to lay my brain/hand on the exact section without looking at the catalog if a student asks a general question. I want my students to be able to own their ideas and defend them and while they are allowed to borrow/access others' idea(s) they need to be able to cull and cobble and frankenstein their thinking together so even if their initial creation is awkward and ugly there's at least something to work with. The assumption of access is an assumption of failure.

Not to brag but...

2011-01-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

So this sweet stack of books represents all the Christmas and birthday goodness visited upon me via relatives and family and the HTML Giant book exchange which I seriously made out on in terms of what was received. There are books from Anthology Used Books in Scranton PA as well as the Strand while Amazon also has an appearance.
My goal is to write up some more extensive book reviews but we'll see. Time is now a precious commodity with the semester starting.
Real quick-like:
1) The Orange Eats Creeps was one of the most far out, trippiest, mind-blowing language trips I've taken in a while.
2) DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was more hideous than I could have imagined. It's easy to get desensitised to this work if you only spend time listening to the available audio interviews or think about the movie. There's a significant icebergian amount of material underneath those stories that makes your brain start to do loops after a bit.
3) Fate Time and Language is really hard slogging. Really hard. First time I've read Taylor and my first thought after finishing the Fatalism essay was "I'm glad that was short because I'm going to have to go read that again a couple dozen more times." It's a good thing to work at knowing it's just a bit of work.
4) Here's a picture of my bonsai tree. It's currently in a state of rest.

Really good article

2011-01-03T04:52:00.000-08:00

Stephen Burn has an excellent article in the NYT's recent article series "Why Criticism Matters" entitled "Beyond the Critic as a Cultural Arbiter". The article strikes a good balance between the role of the masses as readers and the individual trying to steer public taste. I very much agree with his closing thoughts as I think they apply well to the role of the library especially for academic libraries where the goal is no longer gatekeeper or even perhaps sifter of information but to make sure that certain resources are easily available and in keeping with Mr. Burn's ending point to attempt to make more visible "... major works that are not always visible in mainstream networks." That is, highlighting those works that fall below the student's radar, in a variety of ways.

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Library Juice Press, for whom I do occasional volunteer copy-editing/indexing work for has a new book coming out that I worked on and am particularly excited about. The book is entitled Archival Anxiety and the Vocational Calling by Richard Cox. Dr. Cox teaches at UPitt's iSchool where I received my MLIS and I had the distinct privilege of taking several classes with him. He is an interesting and dynamic lecturer and that aspect extends to this book. Granted the title may indicate that if one is not interested in archives or libraries that one may want to steer clear but that would be a mistake. This book is composed of a series of essays by Dr. Cox and truthfully convey his passion and enthusiasm for archival work and the importance of correct and rigorous archival thinking especially in an age where most individuals creates many hundreds of thousands of records a year. In this book Dr. Cox not only details the history and development of his vocational calling but also examines the seeming lack of an calling across the archival discipline by examining some of the conflicts and interactions between the major bodies of the archival community. Again this may seem less than scintillating reading but please be assured that Dr. Cox manages to convey these stories with a sense of urgency and stage-like drama so as to make for fascinating reading.
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I recently got an iPhone 3. It's pretty sweet but won't let me easily post to Blogger. So I've been throwing up images to Tumblr which can be viewed here: http://anunconsumableobject.tumblr.com/.
Enjoy!

A Note on the Marginalia

2010-12-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

Via Alissa Wilkinson check out A Year in Marginalia: Sam Anderson. This site offers a snapshot view of the books Mr. Anderson has read this path year with his marginalia included. Since marginalia inhabits its own curious niche of book history this is a really enjoyable post except for the fact that this post is actually what deeply frightens me about any sort of extensive marginalia because in some moments where I think I really do need to write something profound/meaningful in the margins of a really good paragraph/sentence/thought only to find myself thinking "If anyone ever opens up this text and reads it, what are they going to think of my written thought?" which is a fairly crippling thing and keeps my pages cleaner than they really should be as an active marginaliast quote unquote should have a certain amount of disregard for the perceived sacredness of the printed page which presents a sort of double bind where the individual most likely to output really good marginalia is a book person who tends towards possessing an incredible amount of respect for the whole idea of the book in the first place.

Two really good sources on Wikileaks and its implications

2010-12-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

1) Twelve Theses on Wikileaks
Good summing up of some of the issues, both positive and negative, that are and might possibly be generated by the WikiLeaks. One of the more humorous parts of the article is the reference to Cablegate which is a nice term and sums up the whole mess nicely.
Lovink and Riemens together have valuable insight into how Assange/WikiLeaks is "...using IT to leave IT behind..." and some of the issues contained therein. What is interesting is that several of the observations made here about the way WikiLeaks has taken advantage of a networked world mirror closely those made by Galloway and Thwacker in their book The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.

2) From Jonathan Zittrain a FAQ about WikiLeaks is also a really excellent summation from a historical timeline perspective. What is particularly nice about this article is that it discusses how the four major news organs (The Guardian, Le Monde,and El Pais. The Guardian shared their cables with NYT.) got the cables, how many were received and a brief discussion of the implications of getting those cables.
The first link is a philosophical understanding of the implications of Wikileaks while the second is a historical summation and description of the ongoing process. These two links provide a good summation of the implications and history of how WikiLeaks got to capture so much media and global attention. If you don't really feel like wading through the seemingly infinite piles of media blitz and news bites, these two articles are your air-boat.

A digital Humement

2010-11-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

Tom Phillips now has an iPad and his landmark work A Humement is now available as an iPad app/reading experience. What's really interesting is that Phillips was a friend of John Cage's who got Phillips into the I-Ching and randomness which the iPad, as this interview/article demonstrates, actually helps generate. So that out of an extremely proprietary shop and technology comes a random dependent technology. As it were. Good article!

Metaphors on your Brain

2010-11-15T05:24:00.000-08:00

This is your Brain on Metaphor

This is an interesting article and well worth the read. It's always interesting when neuroscientists start talking about language as opposed to a philosopher talking about language because scientists want to track what chemicals the brain fires when you call for a pizza where as the philosopher is interested in how you actually phrased the question and how that expresses your opinion of the world. The studies that Sapolsky cites are interesting because it is always fascinating how our external stimuli affects, often without our realizing it, our responses to the world around us. I'm not sure if that is really metaphor because if you read Lakeoff and Johnson who suggest that metaphor is such a fundamental part of our thinking so that language, how we talk about the world, is the way we view the world and often without recognizing how deep the metaphors go. Where as Sapolsky, and the cited studies, argue the way we interpret the stimuli around us, aware or unaware, is how people view the world rather than the way we talk about it. Wittgenstein's idea that "language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is also the driver" has implications here as well. So what that you though a person was more intelligent because they handed you a heavier clipboard? What if they handed you a rabid badger? The limitations of what is calculated in these types of studies is not nearly as interesting .
I think the one aspect of talking about metaphor that is exceptionally hard to pin down is the discussion of where our knowledge of it comes from. Sapolsky suggests that it is evolutionary but I think that it is learned which very well might be a type of evolution. In the first cited study, when volunteers are asked to think of something immoral and were given the choice to wash hands, what if they had thought about being hungry and then given the choice to wash their hands? While the results are interesting, there is such a wide range of human responses to the world that while limiting the study is necessary to make it actually functional gauging the level of importance can be difficult. Because at a more fundamental level I don't think the brain is confusing literalness and metaphor but that what is understood as metaphor is literally true because language drives our thought processes. Perhaps a group of people are more likely to wash after recalling ethical failures because of a shared way of thinking/talking about an incident (guilt as uncleanliness,innocence as cleanliness) rather than a brain process. I think it depends on your view of what comes first. I would suggest with W. that language drives while Sapolsky would, as of this article, argue that the brain processes drives and there is not a hard and fast distinction, I don't think, that enables to know which is which.

2010-11-08T05:44:00.000-08:00

E. O. Wilson (from Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge)
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world
henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the
right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make
important choices wisely."

"It is not the finding of a thing, but the making of something out of it
after it is found that is of consequence."

James Russell Lowell in My Study Windows

The Idea of the Book

2010-11-02T11:16:00.001-07:00

A recent review in Books & Culture entitled "The Idea of the Book" by Alan Jacobs examines The Oxford Companion to the Book and the idea of the book in general. The article overall is interesting both as a review and an essay exploring what is the nature of a/the book. However I'm not sure that Jacob's focus on defining what a book is succeeds in its endeavor. Agreed that the formats of reading these entities we understand as books are changing both in format and design. The Kindle features location number rather than page numbers. I read this article on my computer rather than the physical copy. Jacob calls for a re-definition of the term 'book' but then continues to use it after sort of complaining about it. Jacobs suggests that the form of the book is under attack. And while that might be true I think it is dangerous to think of these changes as attacks rather than changes to be reckoned with in an intelligent fashion.
Besides the discussion of the definition of the book the review of the Companion to the Book is quite good. Jacobs makes an excellent point that as a reference work this dual-volume lacks the flexibility that has brought the issue of books to the recent forefront of the discussion of content delivery. Jacobs discusses toward the end of the essay a desire for better inter-textual connections within the Companion which raises an interesting point/question. Jacob's understanding of how the printed work ought to work (cross-references, indexes, images, editorial changes, etc.) is based upon his experience with other digital reference works and in fact "...it's hard not to see the digital version as constituting an improvement in many ways." Where 'improvement' is defined really as 1) lack of errors and 2) updatability. And for a reference work these are the defining bits that really matter. But it is the fixed nature of a work that I think speaks to Jacob's desire for a proper definition of the book. What is the benefit of being able to constantly and forever being able to fix or update or upgrade a piece of text? The logical conclusion of such an idea may well turn into a Borgesian work that strives to provide a complete map of the world. The physical book allows for the work to stop. For those words to be declared enough and complete, sent out into the world and allowed to flourish. This is the benefit of the book, the measured "sense of an ending" that provides a sense of history and knowing, of boundaries and lines, clear topography and elevations before everything is leveled by simply being information.

Here's an fairly interesting article on student apathy in the classroom.

Order

2010-10-15T05:38:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while. Life has been happening. Some really good things and some fairly tough ones as well. God is good and continues to demonstrate it consistently each day.
Part of that goodness was revealed this past Saturday at the Friends of Tompkins County Library Book Sale. This is not just another library book sale. They have their own warehouse. The warehouse has its own map of the stacks. The stacks all have signs on them indicating their holdings. The books are in fairly good shape and a good variety. It would have been really easy to get way more than the 10 books at $3.50.

The list:
Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses
Sartre Existentialism
Susan Sontag AIDs and its Metaphors
William Gass The World and the Word
Documentation of the O.E.D. (compares the amount of quotations of Shakespare vs. Nashe. Nerd fest? I think so.)
Danielwski House of Leaves
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Nietzche Thus Spake Zarathustra
Franz Kafka The Trial
Flannery O’Connor Wise Blood

Also recently received via the mail :
David Markson Wittgestein’s Mistress (currently reading.Quite weirdly amazing. There’s a bunch of similarities to Bartheleme/ Brautigan in the way the dialogue-as-story.)

Edmund White Flaneur (Waste of money. I was expecting something entirely different and closer to something in Benjamin’s/Baudelaire’s tradition about the flaneur and what I got was a short selected history of Paris. It wasn't uninteresting just not what I thought it was going to be.)

Moore, Lara Jennifer Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organizaiton of Arhcives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (currently reading. It is fascinating and quite a good/interesting read.)
Rory Litwin, ed. Library Daylight (collection of essays on librarianship from 1874-1922

Starting subscribing to Artifice Magazine this year. It's a bi-annual publication of original works of poetry and fiction. It is really very good and enjoyably odd. Check them out.

2010-08-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

"All I know is that I love reading books, and when I write I want my books to be like the books I love: solid, thoughtful, cliché-less, and both mindful of the ugliness of the world and also the beauty of being alive."
~David Mitchell@The Rumpus

RIP: Frank Kermode

2010-08-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

Frank Kermode passed away yesterday. (1919 -2010)

From the London Review of Books obit:
"Frank Kermode, who died on 17 August at the age of 90, was the author of many books, including Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of an Ending (1967) and Shakespeare’s Language (2000). He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. He inspired the founding of the London Review in 1979, and wrote more than 200 pieces for the paper."

My knowledge, as it were, to Kermode would be through his work The Sense of an Ending which is a truly great work.

Cell Phone Plans and Libraries

2010-08-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

(Sidenote: This is my 500th post* and it's pretty long. For all 2 people who read this blog, I am grateful. )

In our efforts to participate in what I am sure is becoming an American tradition from the sheer amount of people that we encountered, my wife and I recently went to our cell phone carrier’s local storefront to renew (our) cell phone plan and to pick out new phones. Both of our phones were starting to decay where my wife’s phone’s front screen no longer displayed information and my phone’s right hinge was cracking, so that when then phone is flipped open an unenviable popping sound is resultant followed by a shift, not unlike popping shoulder back into joint of the screen into its proper place. We were due for an upgrade. I don’t pay particular attention to the cell phone industry during the two year interval that your plans other than to things like the iPhone or some of the discussions around reading e-books on cellular devices. I don’t track changes like rate plans adjustments or other related items. Thus, I was singularly unprepared for what is become more and more standard with any but the most basic cell phone/plans; the data plan. It’s not my problem is with the fact that the data plan is designed to engross the users deeply in their portable screens or allow a constant stream of entertainment to be transmuted from the ether into images/words/video/et al. It’s the model of expectation that is built into the use of these devices. This model has at least two different levels/aspects. 1) There’s the really nice phones, the smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone, PalmPre) that require the really big expensive data plans ($25 minimum up to $40). However you can tether your phone to your computer to surf the Web, get constant email and tweet out the wazoo. Then there’s the middle of the road phones, the standard messaging phones, that are designed for day to day use without needing to be plugged into business applications but still require a very basic data plan ($10 a month) or an unlimited messaging plan. Then there’s the third group, the go phones, that require no commitment or contract as well as no data plan.
Thus the carrier is building the expectation that to get a decent phone is to require a certain monthly data plan. I understand paying for a phone plan that allows me to communicate directly with friends/family. I have a much harder time with the idea of being required to pay for the privilege to stream data to my phone. Right now you can block the data aspect for the middle of the road phones so as to not have to use the phone. But, as the salesperson said to my wife, you can’t use 6 of the 12 apps on the phone. Which is fine for us. I’m wondering though when the point is going to be reached when the carrier pushes the data plan up to $20 and consumer will continue to pay it because of their level of expectation to access. Us as consumers are oddly comfortable paying a pretty solid amount of money per year for data we may not use and if we do stream data can’t save in any sort of permanent way. My fear is being tied into this model without the flexibility to have a decent phone and not have to pay for a data plan.
This situation has a direct correlation to the world within which I work, that of libraries and paying for electronic databases. The majority of the subscriptions to electronic databases and journals are on a rental basis because 1) for the company to sell access would be a great loss in profits and 2) selling that access would be incredibly expensive for the libraries to afford in one shot. So we rent. We rent the possibility of data trying to pick the databases students might/should use to get the best possible information to them. However if the price of that database goes too high or the library consortium fails to stay solvent the thousands of dollars that were invested into that subscription are gone with nothing tangible to show for the money spent. Perhaps one could argue students could not have accessed the information they did without this particular database and therefore would have failed to pass their class and not graduated on time but this is a difficult scenario for which to successfully argue. I think at the end of day the library is really left with nothing after how many years of renting this space. But this is the main model in which we operate. Granted there are some databases that have made themselves freely available or available for purchase at feasible prices but these are well in the minority. As library’s budgets continue to migrate towards supporting the electronic aspect and as ubiquitous access is both expected demanded, the physical items that provide a physical return on investment are abandoned. My difficulty is signing the PO and receiving a physical box of books that I can then catalog, label shelve and recommend to students as applicable. This versus signing the PO for a url that generates an interface that accepts Boolean phrase or keyword and generates more links that I can save and print in some cases and recommend to students but how many students using the databases does it take to make the payment worth it. How does the library measure the investment return on what it is paying for its databases especially for small schools that do not turn out, or at least expect to manufacture, especially rich students? Is this model of existence tenable? Since we have allowed this “culture of dominance” to determine our rules of existence it is now seemingly impossible to wrest control back into our own hands as we lack either the unified voice or the mass of power or even the desire to make this change.

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*That number is slightly inflated because a bunch of posts from two years ago were just links to nyt articles. Which was very lame in retrospect.

Good news for travel plans and DFW

2010-08-06T12:30:00.001-07:00

From a very recent email by the incomparable Matt Bucher via wallace-l:

"Just wanted to let you know that if you can't make it to Austin for
the September 14 opening of the DFW rchive, the event will be
streamed live to the web:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/events/#091410

Also, there will likely be another event at the Ransom Center next
spring in Austin to celebrate the publication of The Pale King. I
don't know much about the details of it yet, but it will mostly likely
be a multi-day symposium. Next year is also the 15-year anniversary of
the publication of Infinite Jest and the founding of wallace-l. I am
thinking of having an additional event in Austin at that time to
celebrate the anniversary of the list. More to come on the details of
that over the next few months, but if you've ever thought about a trip
to Austin, spring 2011 might be a good time."

Not going to lie, my first thought reading the end of this email was "yes, yes I have thought about going to Austin and spring 2011 sounds like a great time." We'll see what happens.

stuff

2010-08-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

1) Check out my post over at Cinfolit (cinema+information literacy). It's short but sweet. Hopefully Cinfolit is going to be an excellent source of info-lit/video ideas in the coming future.
2) Was at the Newport Folk Festival this weekend. Highlights include meeting/getting CD signed by four out of five members of O'Death whom had everyone was out of their seats, standing in the aisle for their last song of an amazing set, shaking Bob Boilen's hand (2nd year in a row), saw Steven Thompson of NPR fame at the April Smith set, fairly certain we saw Ben Sollee leaving Saturday night sitting on a park bench playing gorgeous cello music for the harbor evening, briefly met Jeff Prystowsky of The Low Anthem (where briefly met means tapping him on the shoulder as we hurried past yelling great set man. It may not count as meeting but it still counts as awesome.), and fairly certain we saw Joe Kwon (cellist for The Avett Brothers) as we left Sunday night. Edward Sharpe threw it down and you can catch their set her e via NPR to stream or download. What you don't hear is the ten minutes it took the people to get pulled out of the front and center aisle which were supposed to be cleared for fire code by the combined forces of muscled security personnel and flat-brimmed state troopers (Images 32/33 here)
So much musical goodness. It was awesome.

Reading

2010-07-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

Was reading snippets of the interesting Wayfaring Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant by Alan Jacobs via Amazon during which the name of Ann Blair came up in regards to coping with information overload during the 1550's through the 1700's. Lo and behold Ms. Blair is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard. Harvard has taken the kind steps of providing many of the articles that Harvard's scholars are writing/publishing in the plethora of available journals also available through its DASH program (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard).
Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700 and Note Taking as an Art of Transmission are two really exemplary essays contributing to the scholarship, imho, of the history books. Also the former article does a really excellent job providing data demonstrating that humans have historically struggled with how to best navigate the sheer breadth of information that is made available to them in any particular epoch based upon how the medium of publishing/presentation has changed. In browsing around Ms. Blair's home page found this event Why Books? taking place on Oct. 29 exploring different aspects of book history as well discussions of the future of publishing. Robert Darnton will be speaking and it is free to the public which means that a road trip is being planned for late October.
Ann Blair has also kindly posted her History of the book and of reading exam field reading list. Please note that this is a 22 page list of sources. Awesome!
In doing reading for info literacy stuff also found and read Tara Brabazon's Thinking pop literacies and Robert Detmering's Exploring the Political Dimensions of Information Literacy through Popular Film. Both are quite good. Detmering offers insight into the highly politicized aspect of information with encouragement not to ignore this aspect when teaching information literacy courses. Brabazon while focusing more locally (Australia) does present ideas that extrapolate out really well. "Pop is a medium and method to manage classroom diversity and facilitate a critical interpretation of texts and contexts. There is a need to find a stregy to assist sudnets who are not prepared for higher-level writing, reading and research skills. The firs step is to transform consuming pop into thinking pop." (p. 300 Brabazon) Thus we will be trying out stuff from ImprovEverywhere, The Office and Laurie Anderson in class this fall.
This is a conversation I've been having with my colleagues in trying to figure out how to better reach/impact/ interact with students. What avenues are available that will help to spark the understanding for the need and desire to want to "pose significant questions" of the self and the surrounding world? If I can start/connect with the thinking/questioning process with familiar avenues then perhaps we can then apply that same process in unfamiliar avenues because we've seen it work for us. The connecting process not only of concepts but also of methods of questioning that will equip the students with a broad imagination and a verbose information literacy.

Also currently reading Gaddis's The Recognitions. My head is very full.

If we can carry our entertainment with us why should we ever leave the house?

2010-07-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

Kara and I went out to dinner on Friday because of the unbearable combination of 89 degrees F and 83% humidity and lacking air conditioning in our apartment thus rendering any cooking or dining experience frankly impossible to even comprehend.
The restaurant, as it was a chain and doesn’t really need the name-drop advertising, and I don’t think the following described behavior would change that much from where we were which was sitting in the waiting area of said restaurant watching the board for our number, chatting through the blasting Americana while also people-watching.
All told there was about 20-30 people that were filtered through the seating area. We were seated toward the far end of the waiting area so that the hostess area was to our right and the end of the waiting area to our left with the outside windows directly in front of us. There was one couple to our immediate left and a father and daughter diagonally across from us with all other stomach-led transients filling in respectively. Since this is a chain restaurant there was a ceiling mounted TV in the left hand corner of the room which was mercifully muted so as not to compete with the thumping speakers.
It was interesting to watch people in this context because this couple to our immediate left were, as far as we could tell, interacting with their cell phones for pretty much the entire time Kara and I sat there.
Even when the guy had gotten up to try to win a stuffed animal from the claw machine under the TV and succeeded in only very quickly losing two dollars which not only failed to elicit any sort of laughter from his female counterpart but also failed to elicit her interest from the poker game she was playing which we could see because the screen was titled in our direction. Other than the claw playing, this couple was not that engrossing except by what seemed to be an intense lack of interest in the other. Eventually my attention was drawn away in other directions to the father and daughter sitting on the other side of the waiting hallway directly across from the cell couple and the father had his phone out and was hunched over the screen the entire 10-15 minutes that they were waiting for a table. And the daughter, who lacked her own portable screen is slouched watching the TV because well, what else is there to do since her father is finding her presence not nearly as fascinating as the 3”x8” screen between his palms. And granted this was not the norm in the waiting room as there were rowdy conversations and family conversations and other couple conversations and our own conversations and seatmate conversations but these people stuck out because they were so absorbed in their own little worlds and the father and his daughter left to and were replaced by a mother and son whom, immediately upon sitting down, the son whipped out his cell phone.

Earlier that day I had read this quotefrom Gary Shteyngart and it seemed/still seems frighteningly apt.
“ We can’t keep up with the technology we’ve created, and it’s like we were invaded by a barbarian horde and we don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think that the iPhone and everything else that is now a major part of my life is a punishment that I’ve inflicted on myself for sins that I can’t quantify. This is maybe—I don’t know—going back to Hebrew school, but since the iPhone came out, my life has gotten progressively worse. I land on a plane and I get nervous if my iPhone—my äppärät—can’t connect. It’s like I’m running a Fortune 500 company. “

What communication or connection are we so afraid of missing?
If we can carry our entertainment with us why should we ever leave the house?

2010-07-21T06:23:00.000-07:00

"I like the word believe. In general, when one says "I know" one doesn't know, one believes."
~Marcel Duchamp (1975)

Bags

2010-07-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

Portable containers (language). Or that snails embody the idea of "Omnia mea mecum porto". Therefore, like the snail, to have bags that can carry the necessary stuff, usually books/pens/passport/gum/etc. A Dickies bag served this purpose throughout college which was often loaded with way more stuff than was possible to carry comfortably or safely. That spot is currently filled with a very sweet Chrome Citizen bag. It is super and carries all the necessary things easily from work to home to KY to PA to ME to NJ to NY to IL.
If you are looking for a bag would recommend Chrome.
Recently came across this company:
Seagull Bags.
If said Chrome bag ever breaks definitely would look for the next bag at the 'gull. Check out their stuff in action on Flikr. Really dig the artwork.

Like this:

Only Disconnect

2010-07-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

Do you know who Gary Shteyngart is? I did not. However in this week's NYRB there's an article by Gary Shteyngart titled "Only Disconnect". It's brilliant. It is a prose poem. It is one of the best examples of writing about personal inte(dist)raction with the constantly transportable screen that guides the living steps of people. For example: " The device (iPhone) came out of the box and my world was transformed. I walked outside my book-ridden apartment. The first thing that happened was that New York fell away around me. It disappeared."
Let us take a quick look at the idea of space: de Certeau defines "...space as a practiced place." Place is understood as "...elements distributed in relationships of coexistence." (p. 117 Practice of Everyday Life) What Shteyngart discovers is that he is no longer practicing (in) space. He describes himself as being in a "techno-fugue state" in which he "...nearly knock[s] down toddlers and the elderly..." de Certeau's definition of place includes the idea that two separate and distinct elements cannot occupy the same spot at the same time. However by removing Shteyngart's attention from his surroundings causes him to attempt to inhabit the same places as other individuals moving his walk from a reading of the city (and carefulness of other individuals) to a blind following of the iPhone's touring map. What is interesting is that as people we prefer the type of directions the map gives us (turn here, travel this far, turn here, travel this far, turn here...) The given map is not concerned with what is to the left or the right but the getting from here to there to get, in Shteyngart's case, a taco.
But there is leaving, loss of signal a rediscovery of space that causes Shteyngart to"wake up from the techno-fugue state and remember who I am."By the end of the essay Shteyngart's friends have arrived to " roast an animal and some veggies". Due to the lack of a mobile network, due to location that the iPhone can no longer delineate, the connecting of the iPhone has been replaced by the personal connections with people. Granted, this is a generally romantic view that non-technologists like to advance against the technologists that screens are responsible for the destruction of inter-personal skills and relationships. However it should not be surprising that at the lapse of connective signal we return to previous types of connection. To return to de Certeau "it is the partition of space that structures it...there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers."(p. 123) Shteyngart discovers that his frontiers are determined by his cell phone reception. If individuals are reliant on the map to organize their interactions with space, and that map is delivered via satellite, one's perspective is immediately determined by the connection to that data source. This then determines the partitioning (defining) of the space that the individual is able to inhabit. One cannot practice something that is not known; though we can repeat motions without understanding. This is merely repetition. Machines can repeat. People should know and be known. Thus to follow maps, of any sort, without allowing for our own wandering and practicing of place is to repeat actions without the understanding of how the structure of chosen steps affects our own reading/discourse with the space of the world around us in determining the practice of everyday life. Failure to practice results in an eventual loss of space because the reason for the space's existence (reading a book, walking without a screen, etc.) is forgotten or at least subsumed to the insistence of daily routine which is not the practice of everyday life. Rather we should end everyday "as we commune in some ancient way, laughing and groaning...in the fading...light." Indeed, Mr. Shteyngart, indeed.

____________________________________________________________________
And then there is also this: "American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read i t. "

Interesting essay from an interesting to-be-published book

2010-07-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

1) Interesting essay on the future of the book by Benjamin Kunkel from a forthcoming book entitled The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books from Soft Skull Pres s in March 2011.
2) Dr. Alana Kumbier is co-editor of a really excellent book exploring critical theories and pedagogical methods in application to teaching information literacy entitled Critical Library Instruction has a gnarly podcast/interview over on The Newbie Dispatches.
Critical Library Instruction was published in 2009 by Library Juice Press which is a stellar press.

Mondays

2010-07-12T10:08:00.001-07:00

Mondays used to be much less meaningful and enjoyable for me. The start of a new work week. Pulling oneself out of the typically joyous lethargy of a Sunday afternoon. All the issues/tasks that have piled up over the weekend. Then I got a new job and in this instance of being a librarian for a small college in upstate NY during the summer causes Monday to be much less frightening. This is quite enjoyable. There's another aspect of Mondays that I've not only come to greatly enjoy but to also anticipate with some degree of relish.
Two of my favorite podcasts drop on Monday mornings. I always, every single time, listen to them in the exact same order. Every Monday-without fail. There have a couple times where I will rearrange my to-do list so that I can have work at hand that allows me to listen and still get stuff done just so that I can enjoy this particular serving of Monday morning.
The first podcast is the NPR news quiz Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. I have laughed out loud in my office and have used bits from the podcasts in the class that I teach. I hope one day to have Carl Cassel's voice on my cell phone voice-mail.
The second podcast is This American Life with Ira Glass. This podcast caries from a short story/essay format to spending the entire hour digging into and thoroughly exploring a complex issue throughout the full spectrum of human emotion and experience. Sometimes the program is simply funny or sad while also being deeply journalistic or simply just quirky. Like when the producers/writers put together a program based entirely off of ideas pitched by their parents for the show that the readers/listeners then voted for their favorites of that list. The other defintively endearing aspect of this podcast is what I think is a distinct lack of snarkiness. Rather, at least this is how I think they present their subject/material, the philosophies of the podcast attempt to communicate the stories in their own context with a desire for freshness/authenticity. So the interviewers will go spend time in the Mexican desert with those individuals attempting to assist the Border Patrol or visiting summer camp to talk about the impact of growing up through a camp or talk to Senators about the books they've written and how the book seems not to be born out of any real experience.(Glass mentions this in the interivew, referenced belwo) This whole enterprise is driven by Ira Glass's narration. His voice, which is quite distinctive and finely constructed, insinuates itself deep into my brain stem where it often, just as DFW's voice does, takes over for my brain voice.
Recently Ira Glass sat down for an interview over at Slate entitled On Air and On Error: This American Life's Ira Glass on Being Wrong. This interview is a lengthy and enjoyable read especially in the exploration of the growth through learning of mistakes and the flexibility of our identities as people seem to be tied much more into our abilities to fail and learn from those instances rather simply striving to be right ach and every single time.* Glass, by his own admission, spent about 9 years being hands-down terrible at the radio interview/performance before he was successful.
The other enjoyable aspect of htis interview is that is shifts about 3/4 of the way through into a dialogue where Glass actually asks the interviewer (Kathryn Shulz) a question and the text shifts very much like something out of Barthelme's short story dialogues where the conversation happens without names and identities are blurred by the switching of the call-and-response process. This is what Glass and the show are really good at. This is what makes going to work on Mondays that much better.

*There's this fantastic essay on dialogue from Stringfellow Barr, of St. John's College which deserves way more than a footnote. Barr gives several suggested tenets for successful dialogue, which he calls thumb-rules, and the second should be mentioned here. That in successful dialogue "the will of self-insistence give way to the will to learn." I think that one of the main, if not the, thing is the will to be right.

Bacon

2010-07-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

"Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own. It's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it."
~John Waters
from Role Models

Traveling by Sea

2010-07-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

Dan Lyon of that famous band Pomengrates has a small bunch of songs under the album name Light up for download over at http://travelingbysea.bandcamp.com/. These songs are art. The tracks stand as constellations to each other- well-crafted and gut-wrenchingly profound. I know this though I haven't listened to them yet.
Simply judging by the cover art/jpg seems to indicate the music will be as good as formerly described.

Grinning like an english cheshire

2010-07-06T09:57:00.001-07:00

This lovely, lovey comic from over there at XKCD made my day. Hands down.
Also watched Alice in Wonderland this weekend. The new one. There's a couple of ways to read this plot with the following being one of those options. There is a scroll that depicts all the main events that are going to happen in a particular world which everybody knows about and are collectively anticipating, with various levels of dread/excitement as well as various levels of positive/negative participation (though it seems not to matter in the end since all participation leads to foretold day regardless), the occurrence of these particular days. There is a scourge/plague/curse upon the land with an expected individual descending/falling from above to restore order. There is consistent faith demonstrated expecting that one, those things written down will come true and two, those who are depicted within the scroll are expected and desired that their part in the drama should be fully played out. This drama marches on relentlessly regardless of those who choose to participate or attempt to change their roles, perceived or otherwise, in regard to the approaching day. There are consistent, if not quite constant reminders by messengers that the day is approaching. At the denouement there is the battle royale/apocalypse where the dragon, created of the earth, who must be slain by the sent one, from above the earth, wielding a sword who guides its user. Interesting, no?
Is it a simile, analogy or allegory?

Pottery

2010-07-02T12:26:00.001-07:00

I was trolling for images for a presentation and this site R Honey Pots came up. While this mug is my particular favorite (along the lines of Goethe's urpflanze) the entire site features really imaginative and creative thinking and design. It is peculiarly beautiful pottery work, especially the use of animal motifs and the blue/black colors. Check them out!

up is good down is bad but they both need each other in the end

2010-06-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

Being very interested in the way we talk about our lives and how that effects our perception of interacting with reality, the project sad hat | happy hat struck me as really interesting on an awesome metaphorical level as well as neat way to mess with our familiar ways of seeing.
The authors of this project have this to say about it: "...we have a tendency to look up when we are happy and down when we are sad. We want to bring emphasis on the ground and the sky, amplifying one’s mood. The “sad hat | happy hat” can be worn in two different ways, happy (looking up) or sad (looking down). The reflective surface inside multiplies the perception of either the sky or the ground."
Also emphasized is the fact that the individual wearing one hat is prone to injury; the second individual is necessary to help provide the additional perspective that will allow both individuals to successfully navigate their journey.
Not only do we tend to look down when we are sad or up when we are happy but our language also mirrors this tendency. The English language uses up as a direct correlation to happy, and the same with down in relation to sad. A formerly common phrase as obvious stating unhappiness would be to describe a person as "down in the dumps". In contrast if things are going well a indidvidual might respond that "things are looking up" from their previous lower position inferring that life/circumstances/etc are getting progressively better. (Tangentially wrapped up into this idea of up=happy is related to forward as good. Moving up and/or forward are closely tied in our discussion of technology, among other things.)
In biblical language the psalmist discusses "going down to Sheol" (Psalms or in Proverbs where the son is warned to chose wisdom because to choose otherwise one will find themselves in the company of those whose "steps go down to the pit." (Proverbs )
Down has been a traditionally bad direction i.e. Dante and his circles of Hell. Death is down. We bury our dead "six-feet under" and we "put our animals down" while the economy gets "flushed down the toilet.".
Living is traditional understand as an upwar movement. Kids "grow up", adult aged humans are referred to as "grown-ups". Often paradise/heaven/eternal life is considered to exist above us in a transcendent place that in order to access we ascend from our current location aka Jacob's Ladder, Babel or even
"When I die and they lay me to rest,
I'm gonna go to the place that's the best.
When they lay me down to die,
I'm going up to the spirit in the sky." (Norman Greenbaum

We say "don't look down" which invariably we do in direct defiance while calling out the warning "heads up" to pay attention to whatever is coming falling out of the sky. We call people who are constantly looking up optimists or those who are constantly looking down pessimists. (This view of language is not unique to me-definitively indebted to Lakoff and Johnson's work in More than Cool Reason and Metaphors We Live By.)
All this to say that there is a necessary dialectical relationship between these two terms and between the two hats. Each individual wearing his hat in this performance piece, if you will, could take off their respective hat and navigate perfectly well. however the exercise of only looking in one particular direction accomplishes two things.
1) Since what is familiar tends to be transparent, focusing on one direction for a set amount of time allows the viewer to marinate deeply in what has been not been focused on because of the necessity in having to deal with looking in both directions.
2) As cliched as this will sound, the formation of community by allowing one's perspective to be informed by the knowledge of the other. The nice thing about these hats is that they are so obviously blinding. You know that you can't see. Note that the inside of the hat is reflective so trying to look down/up, depending on your hat, reflects back your face rather than the desired direction forcing the viewer to rely upon the other [individual] to communicate directions.
It's a great physical example of our need for one another as well as demonstrating our dependence on metaphorical language to perceive reality.
Besides being great epistemological tools they would probably be a great therapy tool, for families, for engaged couples, for anyone.

Article round up

2010-06-11T05:21:00.001-07:00

There's been a veritable storm of articles/writing recently about the effect and use of technology on our brains.
My friend Carl over at PondererPorter shared an article from CNN by Nicholas Carr and after reading his posting, there have come across my screen all manner of writings across the 'Net. (Maybe not really across the 'Net. I read a lot of the NYT as evidenced below.)

1) Is the Internet making us quick but shallow? (CNN)
2) The Uses of Half-True Alarms (review of Nicholas Carr's recent book The Shallows)
3) First Steps to Digital Detox (NYT)
4) Hooked on Gadgets and paying a Mental Price (NYT-great article, really interesting read.)
5) Op-Ed Response to Hooked on Gadgets (NYT)
6) Mind over Media: Op-Ed Response (NYT)
7) Poverty of Privacy (IDIOM) (Not so much brain effects but thought processes about self affected.)
*8*) Freegan living as a response to technology (This article raises some fascinating questions about what it means to live in a society and an appropriate level of response to consumer waste. I think its interesting that we seem as humans to trade one thing for another. Either we live very close-to-the-earth which requires an extraordinary amount of time and energy as a job or, it seems, that we live as work-people using currency to purchase the needful things. While there are people that do live in the overlap between the two views I think there is an ongoing tension between what we buy and use and don't use that the freegan movement attempts to sort out. )

The Bauhaus for your house

2010-06-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Bauhaus as an institution has had a fairly profound affect on my reading and intellectual development even though I've never been there. Thus when references to it pop up-I'm keenly interested. Enter the lovely NYRB essay: The Powerhouse of the New listing 11 publications and exhibitions about the institution and people of the Bauhaus. Enjoy!

Question.

2010-05-28T12:17:00.001-07:00

Is there a connection between the move of humans to pan/post humanity (obsession with being plugged in/removing physical limitations towards constant networkability) and the the move toward electronic books/e-readers (also being plugged in/removing physical restricitons)
The Matrix demonstrates humans enmeshed in the tangles of the machinery both fighting/resigned.
The terminator demonstrates the embrace by technology of the human body to fit in and destroy while operating at a higher level of efficiency and possibility. (How humanity actually wins still doesn't make total sense.)
Presently humans are attempting to embrace technology with their bodies for better, fuller use of time/money/resources.
Why are we so obsessed with being constantly available? Is it importance/status?

Pt. 1 of 2 What we talk about when we talk about (using) computers

2010-05-25T05:30:00.000-07:00

There are a bunch of ways that we talk about using tech stuff especially computers that I think influences the way we think about it or at least describes how we interact iwth it base on the metaphors that are used. At a fundamental level there's the idea of technological determinism which is defined as "technology as the central force behind progress and social development".
A really good example of this currently is Apple's iPad. The iPad isn't an example so much in and of itself, but rather Apple demonstrates its own belief in technological determinism in its methods of marketing the product. This is a link to Apple's latest TV ad for the iPad.

Take the approx. 45 seconds to watch it-I'll wait for you to come back.

"..."

Ok, we're back. What did you think? What stood out?
There's a couple of things that stand/stood out to me almost immediately upon watching this.
1)The first three sentences. "What is iPad? iPad is thin, iPad is beautiful." Whoa. Really? Granted, thin/beautiful is a standard, commercial construct for selling pretty much everything so maybe this blatant statement should not be entirely surprising. Throughout this commercial you do indeed have thin/beautiful parts of people, no actual whole individual is displayed.
2) "iPad" is used as a proper name instead of a thing. Which is odd. You would expect that hipster voice over to state "The iPad is thin, the iPad is beautiful" but instead the device is referred to as a proper name. I could actually insert your name into this sentence. This is progress, right? Such a state of technological development has been achieved through this device it no longer needs an article of speech to delineate it. It stands on its own celebrity power as an equitable name to a celebrity person being used in a commercial. If someone is holding this device out in the world, it is not yet standard speech to ask them "Is that iPad?"(vs."Is that an iPad?") in the same vein we ask about a retreating/approaching individual to confirm their identity "Is that Jeff?".
3) Moving along in the commercial we come to my favorite part. Here's the context/transcription from the beginning.
" What is ipad? iPad is thin. iPad is beautiful. iPad goes anywhere and lasts all day. There's no right way or wrong way. It's crazy powerful. It's magical. You already know how to use it. It's 200,000 apps and counting. All the world's websites in your hands. It's video, photos, more books than you could read in a lifetime. It's already a revolution and its only just begun."

Out of the context of the image-the right way/wrong way statement sets all moral absolutes aside. But my favorite part of this whole paragraph is the statement-It's magical. I'm not actually sure what that means in terms of reality. The iPad is a computer that receives input and produces output. When did processing data become magical? It is definitely a different of processing data but there's no magic here kids. Hopefully iPad puts a disclaimer on the box that users should not expect any Gandalf-like powers with purchase.

4) The last thing about this commercial is that there is nothing about the iPad's functionality that is really shared with the viewer/user. Sure you see different aspects of the iPad being demonstrated but as much as the commercial might say the viewer/user knows how to use it, the viewer/user has no clue until they buy it.

I am aware that this is a bit of a rant and that there are commercials that are far worse. This one just struck me as interesting/frightening/an excellent example of pretending to talk about technology but actually talking about how the user/viewer is going to feel about purchasing.
Part two to follow shortly.

Sitting with the Artist's Image: Links and Thoughts

2010-05-24T06:06:00.000-07:00

Link to NYT article Sitting with Marina Abramovic

MOMA Live video link of the performance

MOM Link to images of those who have sat with Abramovic

MOMA Interview with Abramovic: (I would highly recommend this interview. It is fairly short but gives some excellent framework for thinking about the previous links.)

The author of the NYT article, Arthur C. Danto, describes Abramovic's face achieving a state of luminosity as he sits in front of her. Just like in viewing an image, each of the quote unquote sitter(s) are having a dialogue that is one-sided, guessing at intentions/purpose/composition. (I.e. many of these images show very deep emotion or blankness. Why weep? What is being thought about/remembered/connected that draws out that particular response?)

To me, the really interesting aspect of this site is the link to the images. Take a couple of minutes and click through the images of the people staring/gazing/______ back at Abramovic. One of the really nice things the MOMA did in setting up this slider was to insert different images of Abramovic at different points. (i'm guessing these different iterations represent different days). This helps the viewer of the images to reengage with the slightly changing 'who', 'other' the people are looking at.
However I would suggest that while this experience of sitting and wordlessly gazing/staring/_______ has the two individuals observing each other as well as those who are waiting observing the two sitting, there is also the level of us as Internet observers seeing a moment frozen as a static pov as though we were/are Abramovic. (There's also the video link as well which allows a quote unquote live view.) The computer screen viewer bc of the camera angle takes the artist's spot via the screen and stares back. The installation, which demonstrates a certain discourse in antithesis to traditional paint/photography/etc., between and being observed by two living people + crowd within a museum is turned back into a static encounter as photograph. Thus the archive of this event, even while it is happening, via photographs, causes the installation to make a complete circle back to the beginning of what it was attempting to subvert/question. Not to abuse Benjamin but the aura of the event, the one-timeness of it is severely undercut by the taking/existence of photographs. The images are even called portraits on the image page. If the point that the Artist is Present, why are those who are sitting documented (MOMA's word). Does the web site provide an additional layer of complexity or is it only marketing?
Conceivably the individual can return home pull up this site and stare back at themselves.Not that this is necessarily more narcissistic or even more solipsistic than normal self-viewing (mirror, digital camera) but it removes the puts the individual into the place where Abramovic was. Is the MOMA simply using the images as advertising to pull people to come 'experience it' for themselves?

Abramovic states in the interview linked at the top that she sees performance as being able to directly link with the public preferring this to not being secluded in the studio. But the idea of what quote unquote public is in this instance is radically changed because I can privately view a public event without physically attending so that even though the Artist may be present in that location the viewer is not. It could be conceivable that none of us would have to physically attend and could simply stare back from our computers leaving the artist with nothing to see or be present to.

Are you listening?

2010-05-20T07:54:00.001-07:00

Recently discovered that Amazon, besides selling all the books in the world, also hosts free mp3 sampler downloads. Here's what I've been listening to the past couple of days. They are somewhat similar in genre but still really good. Since the library is an empty, quiet place the music in my office gets pretty loud. These fall nicely into the whole summer/spring time listening section.

worn & grazed a park the van sampler
Paper Bag Records Fall 09 Sampler
Merge Records 2010 Digital Sampler
Digital Bang: 2010 Sub Pop Sampler
CMJ 2009: Vol 3
Deep Elm Sampler No. 9 "We Dream Alone"

Roasted coffee last night. Think it went well. No pics this time.

Vacation travel blog (of sorts) 1

2010-05-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

Currently sitting in a Ramada Inn in Manning, South Carolina about 7 hours and/or 420 miles from Orlando Florida which is our final destination for our week of vacation. We took the laptop with us for GPS-like work. So that if we need to figure out where places are we map it out from the hotel and then head out. Once we are out Kara's ingenuity and map reading skills coupled with my peerless ability to listen to her ingenuity and map reading skills allow us to navigate with aplomb. A vacation travel blog would be way better with pictures, which we are taking, but I forgot to grab the camera-to-USB cord. bah.
We packed up the car and left NY this morning around 7am. It was snowing when we left which made the fact we are headed for Florida that much better. The driving was really uneventful. Kara took over for several hours in the middle of the day, around WAshington, D.C.. Note to ourselves-any place that has issues with volume on a Sunday at noon is not a place we want to live. Today we drove-that was it. However we did have a delicious cheap dinner at the Waffle House. People also are allowed to smoke in restaurants, apparently. Didn't know that and don't miss it.

Reading in a Digital Age

2010-05-07T10:19:00.001-07:00

Reading in a Digital Age

Posted using ShareThis

super-quick

2010-05-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

Got Koha 3.00.00 installed and running on the localhost this afternoon! Linux is making more sense this time around which is helpful and the install instructions are/were just spot-on. Thanks to Blazing Moon!! The Koha 3.0 interface is so much nicer than the one we are currently running (2.2.5). This interface will display book covers and other such niceties. Created the first user and using those credentials was able to easily access the user account information, complete with tagging. The user section of the current setup is woefully lacking-like comparing a yurt to a palace. Was able to begin to set the parameters for patrons/users, itemtypes and some of the other global functions. Tomorrow is going to present some unique challenges:
0. Finding instruction to configure Zebra
1. Configuring Zebra (the search functionality)
2. Figuring out why I can't save the Library that I set in the admin interface.
3. Set Up MARC21 framework
4. Successfully porting the info from the old system into the new system. (This is one of the places where massive intellectual/technological bottlenecking happened last time I tried this so hoping that this goes way smoother this time.
Good times!
Listened to this a bunch today: The Classroom is Sacred Siva Vaidhyanathan (The mp3 you can download doesn't always play nice with iTunes (i.e. you can't pause or it completely throws off any sort of timing the file had which is the main reason I listened to it a bunch) but Vaidhyanathan raises some good/interesting/provoking points.)