If you only know me from my blog, then I suspect it's not particular obvious to you that I am actually a person of the book.
Books have shaped me such a way that I'm unable to even imagine who I would be without them. On class trips to Toronto (during the eighties), when my classmates would disperse to record or clothing shops during our too-brief "free time", I would make my pilgrimage to Pages where I would stock up on books that our local bookstore, while admirable in its own way, would never carry. I bought graphic novels, Whole Earth Catalogs, zines, and books from RE/search.
Kids these days don't have to go to the Big City in order to experience thrilling and potentially dangerous ideas. They have the Internet. As David Bowie told Avi Lewis (in the nineties) during an interview: "The Internet is New York City."
Or, as Roger McNamee puts it: "The Internet is like Detroit. If you look hard there are really compelling things in there but if you're not careful, you'll get mugged."
The above quote is from his TED Talk, "Six Ways to Save the Internet" and I think it's worth watching if just for the point that he was making with that not nice thing he said about Detroit: the overwhelming popularity of the gated Apple app-iTunes experience exists because most people prefer safe licensed content from corporations than from the Weird Wild West of the Internet.
And I mention all this because I've been thinking a particular future of the library in which the Big Six media companies decide that they would rather not deal with libraries at all. Combine that future with our present when austerity budgets prompt politicians to challenge libraries on the matter of lending popular materials like magazines, video games, and first run movies and it looks like libraries of the future might have to operate at the edges of media, instead of from its centre.
I mention this all because I have realized that - for much of my reading life - I have felt most comfortable about the edges of our culture. I like the left-of-center and the fringes. I love the first-person weirdness of the Internet. And I don't want to be all hipster about it, but it's the local and "authentic" of the Web that moves me - as I know it moves many of us.
So, I just might be okay with this particular future of libraries.
To beat my metaphor to death: Maybe the library can become the New York City of the small town. Maybe it can be the place that brings forward the most interesting aspects of Detroit to all of us.
That is, if we don't get mugged first.
Showing posts with label TED. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TED. Show all posts
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Organizing is what librarians do
On Saturday, I gave a talk at TEDxLibrariansTO.
I feel I should add that the theme of the day's event was "Librarians as Thought Leaders" and this challenging theme was occasionally misunderstood. The speakers were not intended to be put forward or understood as "thought leaders". The idea behind the event was to explore the idea how librarians are thought leaders in our society.
This deliberate and shift of focus away from library to librarian is oddly rare in libraryland - and I hadn't even noticed it's absence until TEDxLibrarians organizers Shelley Archibald and Fiacre O’Duinn brought it to my attention. And because of their dedication to this pursuit, I was reminded of the importance of showing our public face as we do the public's work: as keepers and cultivators of the cultural commons, as loremasters, as defenders of intellectual freedom, providers of tools and ideas who protect a refuge of the slow and good that is being encroached by the corporate and consumer. Their work has has reframed our work.
The following is the text of the talk that I gave as I tried to respond to their challenge. I offer my profound thanks to all those involved in TEDxLibrarians who made it such a wonderful and meaningful day.
Organizing is what librarians do
The beginning of the Gulf War – the one in 1991 – coincided with the beginning of my first year of university. And what I remember most about my first undergraduate year was the constant feelings of fear and loathing – most of which was self-loathing as my miserableness was just the normal anxieties of the first year experience. But – looking back at it all – I was also affected by the backdrop of the war and this led to changes in me in ways that I didn’t appreciate until now.
I opposed the war. But no one knew that - because I found I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t really have the words, the arguments or even a borrowed voice to frame my discomfort with what was happening. Everyday I would pass the TV room of my co-ed residence, the guys who were very enthusiastic about the war would hold court as CNN played in the background. And I would say nothing. Talk of war was everywhere and none of it reflected the doubts and fears that I held.
I felt angry. I felt mute. And so I kept my head down and stuck to my calculus, my biology, my chemistry, and my physics.
I was at university when the next invasion of Iraq took place – the one that started in 2003. Except this time I was on another campus and I wasn’t a student anymore - I was a science librarian. And while it has been 8 years now, I distinctly remember being in my office with fellow librarian Lisa Sloniowski and we were talking about this inevitable war, about the fraud of the 'weapons of mass destruction’ and about the shamefulness of the mass media that were beating the war drums instead of asking the difficult questions and who not giving a voice to those did not consent to war in their name.
And then Lisa said, 'we should do something – give me the phone'. I watched her as she called a couple professors to see if they'd be interested in speaking on a possible panel about Mass Media Coverage and the war. They said yes. And within five minutes, it was decided upon and an event was set in motion. Within hours we had space in the library secured and so we sent upon the work of promoting the panel discussion with a poster, fliers, a supplemental website dedicated to alternative and international news sources, more phone calls and email.
Days later we had 100 people show up in the Leddy Library staff lounge for our panel discussion- more people attended this even than for any talk or workshop we had held previously held at the library – and, beyond the numbers, we knew it was a success because after immediately after the thank yous and goodnights, the room filled with noise as neighbour turned to neighbour to talk amongst themselves of what they had seen and heard and they their carried conversations out of room.
And as they were filing out, one student came up to Lisa and told her that she had walking around all day on campus, feeling miserable and unable to find a way to act or react or speak to what was happening. But she didn’t feel that way anymore and she thanked us for hosting the talk.
I am standing here to extend an invitation to all of you. I believe that we - our profession, our community, our country, our planet - need more collaborative events to bring us together. We need more opportunities to host conversations. We need more opportunities to change the conversation. And so my invitation that I am extending is not to a particular event - but a personal invitation to all of you to organize an event for others.
Event organizing takes work - it can take a lot of work. And I will admit that inexperience might lead to mistakes that probably could be avoided - but I strongly believe that the act of organizing is within your ability.
In fact, it has never been easier to organize a gathering. With the Internet, we no longer have to rely on mass media outlets to decide if they are going to promote our event for us or not. Many of us are already connected, networked and linked to friends and friends of friends, and beyond. And with the Internet, you can host conversations before the event, during the event - way beyond the confines of the room. To be an organizer, all you need to do to have a concern that you know are shared with others. And if you host an event, those who attend will so grateful for a outlet where their voices can be heard and their questions be raised- that they will not ask for your credentials.
Really the biggest barrier to organizing is within ourselves. To be an organizer, and dare I say, an activist, all you have to do is to overcome your fear of speaking in front of other people.
Trust me – I know this fear very well. Very very well.
But I also know some of the ways how to overcome these inhibitions which is both the how and the why I am speaking to you today.
If you feel that you need a strategy to overcome your fear of public speaking, I would recommend sleep deprivation as a means to dull the parts of your brain that would normally talk yourself out of doing such things.
Sleep deprivation is the only reason I can give as to why, on a Thursday morning in May I sent an email to to a local blogger who I only kinda sorta knew - and asked him if he’d be interested in doing a Jane’s Walk with me on Saturday.
The Jane in Jane’s Walk is Jane Jacobs – the patron saint of live-able streets. A Jane’s Walk is a free neighbourhood walking tour that anyone can give about any aspect of a place that they care about. The idea behind the the Jane’s Walk is to get people more in touch with their environment and with each other. These walks can be held at anytime but since 2007, the first weekend in May is when most of the Jane’s Walks are held in many cities across the country and in other countries around the world.
Now the story of my Jane’s Walk takes place in 2009. I was on maternity leave - hence the sleep deprivation - and I had already been walking through my neighbourhood once and twice a day for months. And maybe I would have chickened out if I didn’t get a response from that first email I sent, but the blogger that I sent that email to was Chris Holt and he responded almost immediately - with a “it’s a little late but what the heck. Let’s do it. And hey, let’s invite Andrew too”
Now, I don’t suggest that you should organize an event in only two days but I will tell you that it is possible. It is especially possible if you decide to co-organize an event with established bloggers who already have a readership who share the same concerns as you do.
This is how we organized the first Jane’s Walk in Windsor, Ontario. On Thursday afternoon, we met at our local cafe to create a possible route and hash out the stories that we wanted to share. That night we wrote about the upcoming walk on our respective blogs. On Friday, I test-walked our proposed route, put up some posters, and sent out some more promotional email. On Saturday we all met again at the same neighbourhood cafe but this time there were about 30 other people there to join us. And then we all had a beautiful walk through our neighbourhood.
A Jane’s Walk has many of the qualities of what I consider a perfect collaborative event.
These particular events give an opportunity for individuals - regardless of their day job- to step forward as an educator, an advocate, an artist, or an entertainer. Speakers can learn the finer the points of public speaking from each other and through ubiquity of online video, they can also learn from the best speeches from other events held earlier and elsewhere. And these events are also a learning opportunity for the volunteer organizers too because they are able to host an event that comes with a built-in support network able to answer questions and provide encouragement - as well as setting the guidelines.
Like a franchise, these events set a certain set of expectations for the audience – and by doing so this reduces the fear of the unknown that can scare off the less adventurous around us.
But franchise isn’t the right word to describe it. Fractal is better. Small local events don’t feel so small when you know that they are the same shape of something larger - and that they are a fundamental part of something larger.
That’s what I think ChangeCamp was for me. I had heard Mark Kuznicki - the originator of ChangeCamp on the radio talk about this particular unconference and how various cities across Canada were hosting their own ChangeCamps to bring people together to answer a particular question. The question was “how can we re-imagine government in the age of participation?”
That question personally resounded with me and I was very interested in this odd thing called an unconference. At that point, I hadn’t been to one myself but I had been dong some reading about them and I was really curious. Could it be true? With a minimal agenda, rules, technology, and facilitation, why were so many people writing about how much more they enjoyed an unconference than to the real thing?
Well, after attending three unconferences and after organizing the Windsor-Essex ChangeCamp with three others, I think I can tell you why. Unconferences - otherwise known as camps - have no audience - they only have participants. The event is designed so that any question or discussion on the subject at hand can be raised and those willing to talk about that issue can find each other. And because the day’s conversations generally occur in small groups, sitting in a circle, even the shiest among us can find a safe place to speak. And in essence, that’s all an unconference is: a given time to submit topic ideas, the creation of the schedule that assigns a place and time dedicated to those ideas, and then people sitting in a circle taking those ideas on.
As an unconference only requires space, chairs, a blank wall, post-it notes and pens - they can be set up quickly. In fact, they are now taking place as soon as a crisis hits - literally. CrisisCamps are now an established practice that bring volunteers together to help NGOs in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. But don’t wait for a disaster to host an unconference. If your community is home to those who have voices but no place to be heard, then you already have your reason to host one.
Because this is TEDxLibrarians, let me add this: librarians are positioned as perfect hosts of an unconference. We have access to public space. We serve all sectors of our communities : small businesses, the arts community, service organizations and we strive to serve all residents. As Barbara Fister has said, unconferences are cheap, accessible, and open and as such they are are lot like libraries. Libraries are a gathering of people and ideas mixed together. Democratic dialog cannot and should not reduced and relegated to the comment wars on newspaper websites. The public needs a public space to come together..
OK. So now I have told you my harrowing stories of survival. How I survived a panel discussion, a walking tour and an unconference. But I would be remiss if I did not warn you of some of the possible consequences that were unforeseen due to my actions.
In my experience, I have found that you host an event for your community, you will find that people will want you to do it again. People will see that you are willing to take responsibility for your and they will reward you with more responsibility. They will want the conversation that you help start, to continue.
No other aspect of my work has had the evoked same demand from my community.
In April I was told at a party that there was a friend of a friend who really wanted to give a Jane’s Walk, but wouldn't because no one had asked him to do it. I regret that I didn't get his contact information, call him up immediately and put forward the invitation myself. But I didn't think it should work that way. I didn’t think it was my responsibility.
But now I understand that I was wrong and for some people, they do need an invitation to step forward. In order to see this important work through, it's not enough for me to stand in front of you and tell you how fulfilling this work is, how much you can learn, how much it’s appreciated and how much this work is needed by your community. An invitation must be given before it can be received.
And as for myself, the next time I organize an event, I’m going to bring along someone who has never done it before. Because this is how we start a movement, this is how we build and maintain community - this is how we keep the conversations going - one invitation at a time.
I feel I should add that the theme of the day's event was "Librarians as Thought Leaders" and this challenging theme was occasionally misunderstood. The speakers were not intended to be put forward or understood as "thought leaders". The idea behind the event was to explore the idea how librarians are thought leaders in our society.
This deliberate and shift of focus away from library to librarian is oddly rare in libraryland - and I hadn't even noticed it's absence until TEDxLibrarians organizers Shelley Archibald and Fiacre O’Duinn brought it to my attention. And because of their dedication to this pursuit, I was reminded of the importance of showing our public face as we do the public's work: as keepers and cultivators of the cultural commons, as loremasters, as defenders of intellectual freedom, providers of tools and ideas who protect a refuge of the slow and good that is being encroached by the corporate and consumer. Their work has has reframed our work.
The following is the text of the talk that I gave as I tried to respond to their challenge. I offer my profound thanks to all those involved in TEDxLibrarians who made it such a wonderful and meaningful day.
Organizing is what librarians do
The beginning of the Gulf War – the one in 1991 – coincided with the beginning of my first year of university. And what I remember most about my first undergraduate year was the constant feelings of fear and loathing – most of which was self-loathing as my miserableness was just the normal anxieties of the first year experience. But – looking back at it all – I was also affected by the backdrop of the war and this led to changes in me in ways that I didn’t appreciate until now.
I opposed the war. But no one knew that - because I found I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t really have the words, the arguments or even a borrowed voice to frame my discomfort with what was happening. Everyday I would pass the TV room of my co-ed residence, the guys who were very enthusiastic about the war would hold court as CNN played in the background. And I would say nothing. Talk of war was everywhere and none of it reflected the doubts and fears that I held.
I felt angry. I felt mute. And so I kept my head down and stuck to my calculus, my biology, my chemistry, and my physics.
I was at university when the next invasion of Iraq took place – the one that started in 2003. Except this time I was on another campus and I wasn’t a student anymore - I was a science librarian. And while it has been 8 years now, I distinctly remember being in my office with fellow librarian Lisa Sloniowski and we were talking about this inevitable war, about the fraud of the 'weapons of mass destruction’ and about the shamefulness of the mass media that were beating the war drums instead of asking the difficult questions and who not giving a voice to those did not consent to war in their name.
And then Lisa said, 'we should do something – give me the phone'. I watched her as she called a couple professors to see if they'd be interested in speaking on a possible panel about Mass Media Coverage and the war. They said yes. And within five minutes, it was decided upon and an event was set in motion. Within hours we had space in the library secured and so we sent upon the work of promoting the panel discussion with a poster, fliers, a supplemental website dedicated to alternative and international news sources, more phone calls and email.
Days later we had 100 people show up in the Leddy Library staff lounge for our panel discussion- more people attended this even than for any talk or workshop we had held previously held at the library – and, beyond the numbers, we knew it was a success because after immediately after the thank yous and goodnights, the room filled with noise as neighbour turned to neighbour to talk amongst themselves of what they had seen and heard and they their carried conversations out of room.
And as they were filing out, one student came up to Lisa and told her that she had walking around all day on campus, feeling miserable and unable to find a way to act or react or speak to what was happening. But she didn’t feel that way anymore and she thanked us for hosting the talk.
I am standing here to extend an invitation to all of you. I believe that we - our profession, our community, our country, our planet - need more collaborative events to bring us together. We need more opportunities to host conversations. We need more opportunities to change the conversation. And so my invitation that I am extending is not to a particular event - but a personal invitation to all of you to organize an event for others.
Event organizing takes work - it can take a lot of work. And I will admit that inexperience might lead to mistakes that probably could be avoided - but I strongly believe that the act of organizing is within your ability.
In fact, it has never been easier to organize a gathering. With the Internet, we no longer have to rely on mass media outlets to decide if they are going to promote our event for us or not. Many of us are already connected, networked and linked to friends and friends of friends, and beyond. And with the Internet, you can host conversations before the event, during the event - way beyond the confines of the room. To be an organizer, all you need to do to have a concern that you know are shared with others. And if you host an event, those who attend will so grateful for a outlet where their voices can be heard and their questions be raised- that they will not ask for your credentials.
Really the biggest barrier to organizing is within ourselves. To be an organizer, and dare I say, an activist, all you have to do is to overcome your fear of speaking in front of other people.
Trust me – I know this fear very well. Very very well.
But I also know some of the ways how to overcome these inhibitions which is both the how and the why I am speaking to you today.
If you feel that you need a strategy to overcome your fear of public speaking, I would recommend sleep deprivation as a means to dull the parts of your brain that would normally talk yourself out of doing such things.
Sleep deprivation is the only reason I can give as to why, on a Thursday morning in May I sent an email to to a local blogger who I only kinda sorta knew - and asked him if he’d be interested in doing a Jane’s Walk with me on Saturday.
The Jane in Jane’s Walk is Jane Jacobs – the patron saint of live-able streets. A Jane’s Walk is a free neighbourhood walking tour that anyone can give about any aspect of a place that they care about. The idea behind the the Jane’s Walk is to get people more in touch with their environment and with each other. These walks can be held at anytime but since 2007, the first weekend in May is when most of the Jane’s Walks are held in many cities across the country and in other countries around the world.
Now the story of my Jane’s Walk takes place in 2009. I was on maternity leave - hence the sleep deprivation - and I had already been walking through my neighbourhood once and twice a day for months. And maybe I would have chickened out if I didn’t get a response from that first email I sent, but the blogger that I sent that email to was Chris Holt and he responded almost immediately - with a “it’s a little late but what the heck. Let’s do it. And hey, let’s invite Andrew too”
Now, I don’t suggest that you should organize an event in only two days but I will tell you that it is possible. It is especially possible if you decide to co-organize an event with established bloggers who already have a readership who share the same concerns as you do.
This is how we organized the first Jane’s Walk in Windsor, Ontario. On Thursday afternoon, we met at our local cafe to create a possible route and hash out the stories that we wanted to share. That night we wrote about the upcoming walk on our respective blogs. On Friday, I test-walked our proposed route, put up some posters, and sent out some more promotional email. On Saturday we all met again at the same neighbourhood cafe but this time there were about 30 other people there to join us. And then we all had a beautiful walk through our neighbourhood.
A Jane’s Walk has many of the qualities of what I consider a perfect collaborative event.
- The barriers of participation are next to none. There is no cost to walk in your neighbourhood.
- You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to care about something enough that you want to share with others
- The walk is on your home turf - so you are speaking from a place where you already feel comfortable
- giving a tour requires no expensive technology - it requires no special skills
- The event is scalable - you can give a tour to one other interested person to up to 50 people - maybe even more
- And the walk provides ample opportunities to those in the group to effortlessly talk to each other about what they are seeing and what you are saying. You aren’t just having one conversation - you are hosting a moving salon
These particular events give an opportunity for individuals - regardless of their day job- to step forward as an educator, an advocate, an artist, or an entertainer. Speakers can learn the finer the points of public speaking from each other and through ubiquity of online video, they can also learn from the best speeches from other events held earlier and elsewhere. And these events are also a learning opportunity for the volunteer organizers too because they are able to host an event that comes with a built-in support network able to answer questions and provide encouragement - as well as setting the guidelines.
Like a franchise, these events set a certain set of expectations for the audience – and by doing so this reduces the fear of the unknown that can scare off the less adventurous around us.
But franchise isn’t the right word to describe it. Fractal is better. Small local events don’t feel so small when you know that they are the same shape of something larger - and that they are a fundamental part of something larger.
That’s what I think ChangeCamp was for me. I had heard Mark Kuznicki - the originator of ChangeCamp on the radio talk about this particular unconference and how various cities across Canada were hosting their own ChangeCamps to bring people together to answer a particular question. The question was “how can we re-imagine government in the age of participation?”
That question personally resounded with me and I was very interested in this odd thing called an unconference. At that point, I hadn’t been to one myself but I had been dong some reading about them and I was really curious. Could it be true? With a minimal agenda, rules, technology, and facilitation, why were so many people writing about how much more they enjoyed an unconference than to the real thing?
Well, after attending three unconferences and after organizing the Windsor-Essex ChangeCamp with three others, I think I can tell you why. Unconferences - otherwise known as camps - have no audience - they only have participants. The event is designed so that any question or discussion on the subject at hand can be raised and those willing to talk about that issue can find each other. And because the day’s conversations generally occur in small groups, sitting in a circle, even the shiest among us can find a safe place to speak. And in essence, that’s all an unconference is: a given time to submit topic ideas, the creation of the schedule that assigns a place and time dedicated to those ideas, and then people sitting in a circle taking those ideas on.
As an unconference only requires space, chairs, a blank wall, post-it notes and pens - they can be set up quickly. In fact, they are now taking place as soon as a crisis hits - literally. CrisisCamps are now an established practice that bring volunteers together to help NGOs in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. But don’t wait for a disaster to host an unconference. If your community is home to those who have voices but no place to be heard, then you already have your reason to host one.
Because this is TEDxLibrarians, let me add this: librarians are positioned as perfect hosts of an unconference. We have access to public space. We serve all sectors of our communities : small businesses, the arts community, service organizations and we strive to serve all residents. As Barbara Fister has said, unconferences are cheap, accessible, and open and as such they are are lot like libraries. Libraries are a gathering of people and ideas mixed together. Democratic dialog cannot and should not reduced and relegated to the comment wars on newspaper websites. The public needs a public space to come together..
OK. So now I have told you my harrowing stories of survival. How I survived a panel discussion, a walking tour and an unconference. But I would be remiss if I did not warn you of some of the possible consequences that were unforeseen due to my actions.
In my experience, I have found that you host an event for your community, you will find that people will want you to do it again. People will see that you are willing to take responsibility for your and they will reward you with more responsibility. They will want the conversation that you help start, to continue.
No other aspect of my work has had the evoked same demand from my community.
In April I was told at a party that there was a friend of a friend who really wanted to give a Jane’s Walk, but wouldn't because no one had asked him to do it. I regret that I didn't get his contact information, call him up immediately and put forward the invitation myself. But I didn't think it should work that way. I didn’t think it was my responsibility.
But now I understand that I was wrong and for some people, they do need an invitation to step forward. In order to see this important work through, it's not enough for me to stand in front of you and tell you how fulfilling this work is, how much you can learn, how much it’s appreciated and how much this work is needed by your community. An invitation must be given before it can be received.
And as for myself, the next time I organize an event, I’m going to bring along someone who has never done it before. Because this is how we start a movement, this is how we build and maintain community - this is how we keep the conversations going - one invitation at a time.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Poetry has left the building. Have books gone too?
Ever since I've watched it this past Sunday afternoon, I’ve been thinking about Darren Wershler’s talk about modernist avant-guard poetry, Marshall McLuhan and Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment. I keep coming back to Darren’s post-mortem of poetry and his description that poetry is currently on the same scale, in terms of economics and impact, with making doilies for the church rummage fair.
When you compare the cultural force of film to poetry... well there’s really no comparison anymore, is there?
Now, are we ready to make a similar comparison between books and YouTube, videogames, Facebook, and text messaging and the rest of the digital realm?
Now there’s been lots of hand-wringing over the future of the book. Heck, at this point there is an entire genre of books dedicated to the death of the book out there. But I don’t think we in the world of 26 character combinations has really come to grips that it’s not just poetry that has left the building.
Look at your own Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and email inbox. Count the number of references to videos, blog posts, and online newspaper and magazine articles. Now count the references to passages of books. I work in academia... hell, I work in a library.. and the former dwarfs the latter by an order of magnitude. Or two.
Unless we are able to read, store and share books effortlessly online, books will die.
That is, unless they are already dead.
Possibly related:
I've overhead university kids talk about Pokemon as if it was the lingua franca of their childhood.
I've played an ARG called Snow Town in which the readers of the story became characters within the story and in doing so, changed the story's outcome. This and the real-time unfolding and telling of its unfiction, made Snow Town much more engaging and enjoyable than the remaining texts belie.
TED Talks. The TED speaking series is probably the best example that I can point to as a form of cultural idea transmission that might have surpassed books in terms of impact. And speaking of which...
Immediately after I saw Darren’s talk, I decided to catch up on some TED Talks and, having two preschoolers in the in the house, decided to watch Deb Roy's Birth of a Word:
Most of the talk is dedicated to an absurdly ambitious project to capture, using digital video, every interaction and sound within Roy's house in order to understand how his newborn son learns to speak. How a child learns to speak is fascinating unto itself but then, near the end of the talk, there is a brief description of a related project that hit me like a hammer.
Using the same parsing technology used to analyze the information captured in his house, his lab team processed thousands of hours of TV footage along with thousands and thousands of comment streams (from sources such as Twitter, one assumes) and then looked for assocations between one and another.
(It's hard to explain the visualization. You should see it.)
Just a like a small child who learns to associate the sounds of ‘WAH-TER’ with the sight of water, it appears that we are becoming something larger than our individual selves and this something is learning to speak to itself about the images it sees.
And we are not talking about books.
The situation has been a little more than century in the making and has everything to do with media theory. To cite Friedrich Kittler again, whose thinking on the subject is heavily indebted to both McLuhan and Innis, before the second half of the 19th century, literature, especially romantic poetry, had a monopoly on the delivery of vivid cultural experiences. That changed in the mid-19th century when virtually every form of electro-mechanical media reached a mass audience within a few decades. For Kittler, from the era of silent cinema onward, film establishes immediate connections between technology and the body, which make imaginary connections unnecessary. Film exhibits its figures in such detail that the realistic is raised into the realm of the fantastic which sucks up every theme of imaginative literature.
When you compare the cultural force of film to poetry... well there’s really no comparison anymore, is there?
Now, are we ready to make a similar comparison between books and YouTube, videogames, Facebook, and text messaging and the rest of the digital realm?
No matter how relevant u THINK ebooks & ipads are to the community, video games are even MORE important to them http://bit.ly/hu8rTF #hcod
Now there’s been lots of hand-wringing over the future of the book. Heck, at this point there is an entire genre of books dedicated to the death of the book out there. But I don’t think we in the world of 26 character combinations has really come to grips that it’s not just poetry that has left the building.
Look at your own Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and email inbox. Count the number of references to videos, blog posts, and online newspaper and magazine articles. Now count the references to passages of books. I work in academia... hell, I work in a library.. and the former dwarfs the latter by an order of magnitude. Or two.
Unless we are able to read, store and share books effortlessly online, books will die.
That is, unless they are already dead.
Possibly related:
I've overhead university kids talk about Pokemon as if it was the lingua franca of their childhood.
I've played an ARG called Snow Town in which the readers of the story became characters within the story and in doing so, changed the story's outcome. This and the real-time unfolding and telling of its unfiction, made Snow Town much more engaging and enjoyable than the remaining texts belie.
TED Talks. The TED speaking series is probably the best example that I can point to as a form of cultural idea transmission that might have surpassed books in terms of impact. And speaking of which...
Immediately after I saw Darren’s talk, I decided to catch up on some TED Talks and, having two preschoolers in the in the house, decided to watch Deb Roy's Birth of a Word:
Most of the talk is dedicated to an absurdly ambitious project to capture, using digital video, every interaction and sound within Roy's house in order to understand how his newborn son learns to speak. How a child learns to speak is fascinating unto itself but then, near the end of the talk, there is a brief description of a related project that hit me like a hammer.
Using the same parsing technology used to analyze the information captured in his house, his lab team processed thousands of hours of TV footage along with thousands and thousands of comment streams (from sources such as Twitter, one assumes) and then looked for assocations between one and another.
(It's hard to explain the visualization. You should see it.)
Just a like a small child who learns to associate the sounds of ‘WAH-TER’ with the sight of water, it appears that we are becoming something larger than our individual selves and this something is learning to speak to itself about the images it sees.
And we are not talking about books.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Wisdom is knowing when to break the rules
Barry Schwartz's TED lecture "The real crisis? We stopped being wise " to libraryland for a couple reasons. The first reason is actually minor: Schwarz deftly illustrates how ill-framed incentives can backfire and actually demotivate individuals (library administrators, please take note).
The second and real reason why I think lecture is worth viewing is to listen to Schwartz tell two compelling stories why we have to give individuals the leeway to break from rules, scripts, and standardized operating procedures of their work when one sees an opportunity to act, shall we say, humanely.
The talk reminded me of a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job? While it begins with football, the core of the article is about what makes a good teacher and why its so important:
I won't spoil the piece's ending by giving away the quality that has been identified as what separates good teachers from bad, but I will say that this quality can only be exercised in an environment when teachers are able to deviate from the curriculum in order to better teach their students. (This This American Life episode also comes to the same conclusion.)
Schwarz, if memory serves, ends his talk with a very small story teaching and how, in the pursuit of consistency we have lost the opportunity to excel and, more tragically, to act with kindness and wisdom.
The second and real reason why I think lecture is worth viewing is to listen to Schwartz tell two compelling stories why we have to give individuals the leeway to break from rules, scripts, and standardized operating procedures of their work when one sees an opportunity to act, shall we say, humanely.
The talk reminded me of a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job? While it begins with football, the core of the article is about what makes a good teacher and why its so important:
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
I won't spoil the piece's ending by giving away the quality that has been identified as what separates good teachers from bad, but I will say that this quality can only be exercised in an environment when teachers are able to deviate from the curriculum in order to better teach their students. (This This American Life episode also comes to the same conclusion.)
Schwarz, if memory serves, ends his talk with a very small story teaching and how, in the pursuit of consistency we have lost the opportunity to excel and, more tragically, to act with kindness and wisdom.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Data is not enough
So Richard Wurman is the guy who wrote Information Anxiety and is also responsible for the TED conference. Once only available to the 1000 audience members at each TED, some of the TEDtalks are now being made available online.
The first TEDTalk I checked out was by Hans Rosling - "a public health expert, director of Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life". I was really impressed. First, it only took a matter of moments to change the way that I look at what is happening in the "third world".
Secondly, it struck a nerve in my librarian self. Hans makes a quiet but strong case for the need to make publicly available data interesting and useful to the public. And they aren't using libraries to get the data out: they are using software and the internet. Its another example that drives the point that it is no longer enough just to make public information available in a library somewhere. Public information needs public software to make the information work for the public.
Let's put it another way. Which would you rather use: this or this?
The first TEDTalk I checked out was by Hans Rosling - "a public health expert, director of Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life". I was really impressed. First, it only took a matter of moments to change the way that I look at what is happening in the "third world".
Secondly, it struck a nerve in my librarian self. Hans makes a quiet but strong case for the need to make publicly available data interesting and useful to the public. And they aren't using libraries to get the data out: they are using software and the internet. Its another example that drives the point that it is no longer enough just to make public information available in a library somewhere. Public information needs public software to make the information work for the public.
Let's put it another way. Which would you rather use: this or this?
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