Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

I am always looking for progressively appropriate definitions of literacy. I recently read Howard Rheingold's chapter from J oi Ito's fabulous new release, Freesouls . HR's chapter is entitled Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies and, per usual, is helpful in formulating the impact and possibility of how "people do complicated things together". Rheingold's notion of literacy is foundational and seems better than a lot of what I've read from careerist academics; it's an encompassing and intelligent conceptualization that covers what society has done, is doing, and can do with technology when collaborating and communicating. Rheingold writes that literacy is: the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community. Literacy links technology and sociality . Rheingold continues: If the hum...

Embedded video from CNN Video In an effort to amplify its reinscription of the tired patriarchal status quo, Facebook has banned photos of breastfeeding. I continue to be amazed at the idiocy, sheer heavyhandness, and lack of social thought that goes on with this "social" app. The postmodern dinosaur metaphor still holds for these guys.

There's a recent article in the Raleigh News and Observer detailing what I perceive to be a nationwide occurrence. That occurrence is the new-found/renewed patronage of public libraries amidst near double digit unemployment and worsening economic conditions. Unfortunately, as the N&O article describes, libraries are handling this massive uptick in patrons at the same time funding is being cut and hiring frozen. Sure am glad the bailouts are working, I mean pessimism of the intellect with optimism of the will. Click here to read the N&O piece.

I am a fan of Slavoj Zizek and a fan of Powell's Books, so this video is a must view for me. Strongly recommended for a thinking through of how ideology functions and discursive consensus gets maintained. My good pal Aaron alerted me to this clip...he's a philosopher king in his own right. Enjoy.

My de - friending , Whopper-eating heyday has abruptly come to an end (and sadly too many old high school friends retain access to my profile). In a Big Brother type maneuver to protect us from ourselves, the hegemon at Facebook 86ed the Whopper Sacrifice App citing privacy issues. An article on InsideFacebook .com tells all. Arrington and the TechCrunch crew also comme nt . My two second take is that Facebook , already fatally flawed, continues to believe that that through its product/interface it can manipulate behavior on a complete structural level. Even if this were true, users (i.e., individuals and groups) will continue in a very deCerteau - ian way to author their own spaces vis -a- vis tactics to FB's strategy . Facebook---trite, boring, and Whopperless--lumbers along (postmodern dinosaur it is) right behind its benefactor in Redmond. Triglycerides in decline, I curse thee.

There's a new Facebook app that will reward folks for de-friending individuals from their friend list. The reward, you ask...a Burger King Whopper. You can read the CNET story here . Even though I haven't patronized the BK Lounge in years, this could prompt me to solve a couple of problems. Over the past few weeks it seems that my entire graduating class from high school has operationalized Facebook as a mechanism to "reconnect" with long lost "friends". Somehow I have gotten roped into this parade of broken dreams...oops, I mean virtual class reunion that won't end. It is really trashing my Facebook experience. At night, in the tiny hours, I often wake wondering why those in the humanities are paid so poorly and now I am also wondering how I am going to get out of this predicament with all my new old high school pals that I some how lost track of. Whoppers may be the answer...there seem to be several in my future.

I've been checking out the potential names for Powell's Books' squirrel. Pretty good suggestions. The original post (with background story) and potential names is here . It's a nice departure from holiday wackiness.

A lot of my projects at hand are focused on information literacy , and have consequently brought me to a lot of Library 2.0 resources. Here's one that I think is particularly useful. It is a wiki intended to "provide information about some of the new web-based tools (Web 2.0) and how they can be used and are being used by school library media specialists and their students and teachers." I think it is really useful. The link is above and HERE too.

The Boston Globe published a piece this week that profiled a study whose findings assert that "the boom in online research may actually have a "narrowing" effect on scholarship". The article can be accessed here. This seems like a pretty broad claim and, from my reading of the article, the study does not necessarily differentiate between research practices, expectation, and trends within different disciplines. One central point in the article was that serendipity had been extricated from the research process. Granted, I'm partial given my ties to an Information and Library Science School, but I do also teach in an English Department. One of the benefits, or curses, of my status as disciplinary interloper is that I'm on varied listservs. A recent post on one of my "English" listservs was the following: Libraries are also making serendipity difficult. They do this with online catalogues which make the casual viewing of records more difficult....

This Daily Show piece reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke 's three "laws" of prediction (namely #3): When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic indeed...check it out.

Google Reader now translates most any blog in most any language. Here's a story on TechCrunch about it. Critics are remarking that the translation is pretty tight...folks are impressed. I'm struck by this and what implications it will have for notions and practices of literacy. It's early on in the game, but without necessity what will be the motivation and utility of mastery of non-native languages? Obviously, I am not going to argue that such projects and literacies will become non-essential and a mere boutique fancy. However, with any technological advancement like this, the notion of what makes one "literate" (technically and philosophically) does shift a bit. One recent parallel might be that of GPS usage and literacy compared to old school expertise in cartography (of course GOOG is a key player here too). An argument could be made that such impressive technological developments and dissemination actually encourage literacy, albeit not literacy as it...

This video has been around for awhile, but it's still worth a (re)view. Richard Miller's imagining of the "New Humanities" hinges on the commitment that the real function of the humanities is to foster incisive creativity across disciplinary space...creativity that addresses the textures (and textualities) of our everyday life. Too many times humanities departments fail to do this and, in my opinion, ensure their accelerated path toward irrelevance. I like his exposition particularly because he insists on disciplinary heteroglosia shot through multimedia composition. Creative social practices anyone?

Library usage is on the rise...check out this KIRO 7 video at Seattle Public Library.

As I was surfing the web this a.m. I ran across a story about a recent study at the University of California, Los Angeles. The study set out to measure brain activity of older adults as they search the Web. The findings were interesting and operate as a nice antagonism to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" published last summer in The Atlantic . The link to CNN's coverage of this study is here . The study was paid for by the Parvin Foundation and was published by Gary Small and Susan Bookheimer , both UCLA professors, and Teena Moody, a senior research associate at UCLA's Semel Institute. The paper was published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry . But I really was drawn to this piece, which I've only skimmed, because it seems to touch on how new practices of literacies do enable, sustain, and maybe even sharpen minds of all ages. Often the popular press argues for the legitimacy of digital natives' critical thinking skills tha...

Ok , here's a hard sell. TechDirt recently ran a story, " Rejected From College Because of Your Facebook Profile ", in which anecdotal evidence shows what has been rumored for much time...that admissions folks gander more than occasionally at applicants' online social network profiles. The author, Mike Masnick , gives a pretty fair accounting though ultimately concludes that applicants shouldn't expect their profiles to exist in a vacuum and that as much as applicants strive to "put their best foot forward" they should include their Facebook profiles in such efforts. Yeah, yeah, yeah...I think most individuals get this. Sure, there will be those that claim this is out of bounds and not appropriate use of admissions staff time. That aside, I'd like to argue that such snooping and censure is simply out of step with with what we need to be critical of in our cyberculture present and future. If our young digital native scholars are as much the p...

This week is ALA's Banned Books Week and it's pretty exciting on a lot of fronts. Hopefully everyone can locate and attend an event in your area . Maybe because I'm around a lot of young people and academics, and I take such open mindedness and progressivism for granted, but at first thought I was rather blase about this year's celebration of Banned Books. What I mean here is that I was looking forward to it but thought that "Hey, we've all moved past this crazy McCarthy-esque fear of change and critique and difference". I thought that maybe these books could be celebrated on a literary level and, while they're always already political, I could let political and cultural critique reside in the background. But, alas and alack, the blogosphere delivers. One of my favorite bloggers, Jessamyn West, posted an expositio n that touches on Sarah Palin's purported inclination to stricture thought via banning books at her local library. Of course, the...

The following may be of interest to many of you out there. The Fourth Annual iConference 2009 February 8-11, 2009 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill iSociety: Research, Education, Engagement CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The Fourth Annual iSchools Conference brings together scholars and professionals who come from diverse backgrounds and share interests in working at the nexus of people, information, and technology. With invited speakers, paper sessions, a poster session, roundtables, "wildcard" sessions and ample opportunities for conversations and connections, the conference celebrates and engages our multidisciplinary efforts to understand the scholarly, educational and engagement dimensions of the iSchool movement. This Call for Participation solicits contributions that reflect on the core activities of the iSchools community as we move more fully into the iSociety. These would include reflections on: research topics, practices, methods and epistemologies appropriat...

I recently embarked upon the characteristically academic task of doing a citation analysis on a few articles I’m using for a research project. Google Scholar and ISI’s Web of Science were the two search engines/databases that I used. Of course, I’ve got some thoughts here…especially as libraries are concerned. I was particularly struck by the stark differences in results that Google Scholar yielded and the results found when using ISI’s Web of Science. At first glance this may seem like stating the obvious, however this experience with citation analysis crystallized a point that I have been ruminating upon for awhile. Libraries are not disappearing, nor are librarians. They still matter, though they matter differently, and the key features of libraries exist as facilitation to access information and the expertise to curate and consult. Without the radical juxtaposition of this citation analysis it would be easy to believe that Google results are significant enough and that using a libr...

Jim Goldman, of CNBC , has a recent post where he takes former Fake Steve Jobs blogger, Dan Lyons , to task. The piece is here . In short, Lyons claims that Apple has become increasingly hegemonic in its own right, no longer the upstart ( jeesh , I guess I can't use "maverick" now). Lyons even makes the stale way-past played out comparison of Apple as Microsoft. On a side note, such rhetorical maneuvers are so tired and preposterous. It's kind of like when someone is "describing" a band and they say: "Oh, they're alternative/folk-punk/ emo /whatever and they sound like REM/The Deadly Syndrome/Bright Eyes/blah". Or, do you ever get tired of the claims when basketball season rolls around and there's that guy who always says that so-and-so is the next Jordan. Even if band, ballers , companies are similar or analogous to other earlier instances and contexts, is this really the best and most incisive way to describe commonalities? Maybe, ...

Last week my vintage 20GB iPod bricked...died, dead, for good. As much of a techno-enthusiast as I am, lusting after the newest in small tech, I continued to use this older version of the iPod even though I have a newer model. Maybe it was because it was the first iPod I owned, or that it worked fine for what I needed, or maybe I was just proving that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Regardless, my 20 GB is done. Maybe fortuitously Apple announced that it will be unveiling upgraded iPods next week (9/9/08 to be exact). I have been seriously considering becoming current, or au courant , even. But I digress, since my iPod bricked I have been riding around listening to CDs (instead of uploading my library to the newer iPod). This experience has proven to be a really weird meditation of sorts. I have become accustomed to certain characteristics of portability and management when it comes to music. This is stating the obvious to most (and prior to a...