I, a person of uniformly little faith, have confidence nonetheless that, someday soon, there will come another "20 Things" assignment that will not make my skin crawl to consider. Until such a day as that arrives, however, allow me to blog my thoughts on Second Life...
My first exposure to anything like Second Life came from Snow Crash, which I read as a senior in college for my linguistics class. The class was "Babel to the Brain: The Origin of Language in Western Thought," and I think we were looking at it to project a future evolution of language and the agency of language (through the virus manifest, etc.), and I remember being creeped out by the idea of the Metaverse. I knew about RPGs--heck, my campus even had an active group of LARPers who held weapon-making workshops!--but I could not imagine a physical world in which such a virtual world existed. Oh, don't think me completely naïve: I puttered around The Palace for quite a while when I was new on the Internet and got myself into situations I shouldn't have been in at fourteen... but a completely made-up world patterned after our own? Ridiculous.
Or so I thought in 2005. The summer of 2006 introduced me to another aspect of Second Life when I met a man who encouraged me to check out Second Life--visit his shop there, chat. He was working for me at Kings Dominion and was about to start a messy divorce that he didn't talk much about. As his tenure at the park wore on, he felt increasingly more comfortable around me and eventually divulged that his wife didn't know he was leaving her, but he was in love with another woman and was moving to Texas at the end of the season to live with her. He would not be returning to North Carolina, where he attended school, and would not be reuniting with his wife and two children. No, he was giving it all up for the girl in Texas. When I asked if his wife knew about her, he said no. I asked where he had met her, if she was in school in Texas and he in NC. "Second Life," he said so quickly that the words just breezed past my ear. "Where?" I asked, thinking I had missed the name of a town or a university or a 4H conference. He told me again (and again and again until I finally caught what he was saying) and then revealed the kicker: he'd never met her in person. He was excited about his flight to Texas because he would finally be meeting her. That man threw away everything in his physical life to make his virtual one become a reality. To me, that went beyond creepy.
I am reminded of the Law & Order: SVU episode "Avatar" which is based on the premise of Second Life. Although that episode is generally lauded as one of the worst and least realistic (no puns intended) of the series (some even claim that's when SVU jumped the shark, if it has yet), it put a great big spotlight on problems similar to the one I mentioned above--the virtual world seeping into the physical. And I'll admit, watching the episode alone in the house where I was house-sitting, cut off from my friends and most of the outside world, there was a weak little part of me that thought, "Yeah... I'll just go online and create a personality for myself--the ultimate me. The person I should have been born but could never become!" But by the time I went to bed that night, that delusion had mercifully faded. There are some things that just shouldn't happen, and that's why they don't in the physical world. Give someone the ability to make it happen in a metauniverse, and you've just opened a can of flesh-eating worms--because no one's patrolling those things, no one is monitoring the RL users, there's no Jiminy Cricket standing by the users' monitors going, "Ah-ah-ah... you're about to log off this computer and re-enter your real life! Time to start thinking rationally again!"
I loved the videos I watched on YouTube. I watched some of the joke ones, of course, and I also watched the intro vid that sounds like it's being narrated by Thomas Sangster circa 2003. Cute stuff. Knew about the product placement in Second Life, didn't know about the things like Harvard lectures.
Does Second Life have a place in libraries? I feel like it has to, otherwise the question wouldn't be asked, and we wouldn't be exploring it as an exercise. Of course, I imagine that a library could set itself up as its own business in Second Life and serve the users who were interested. But... since I don't see the point of using Second Life in the first place, I'm not sure I see the point of libraries doing the same.
środa, 30 stycznia 2008
piątek, 25 stycznia 2008
wtorek, 22 stycznia 2008
Is the Library an insect incapacitated by a Web? Or is the Library the spider?
I tried to be judicious and read the entire OCLC Next Space Newsletter. A few of the perspectives were more intelligible than the others, and some were more interesting and readable.
Rick Anderson writes: "[...] If our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." I like this sentiment. I agree with it. I consider Pamunkey's typically helpful and well-intentioned classes for the public on all sorts of topics--and even Pamunkey's own staff training--and am left wondering how far over we need to bend to serve our patrons. Libraries are supposed to provide access to information, and if we can't provide straight-forward, self-explanatory online resources and databases for our patrons, what does that say about us? Fortunately, I think most of the electronic resources that PRL uses are very easy to understand and manipulate. At times, I wonder why we put forth such a massive effort to teach people how to use them. (Psst... Go to the site: follow the directions. The end.) But then, I also worry about the people who can't even use a computer. How are these people supposed to keep up with Library 2.0? These are the people who come to the library looking for books and books alone--or who never come to the library, because they feel daunted by the presence of so much technology. And these aren't just the elderly. Are we supposed to believe that further alienating them is fine, as long as it's in the name of progress? I'm not hesitant about the future just because it's the future; I'm hesitant because I think we're going to lose a lot of people along the way if we keep going at our current unyielding pace.
Dr. Wendy Schultz writes: "[...] As more information becomes more accessible, people will still need experienced tour guides—Amazon’s customer recommendations are notoriously open to manipulation; tagclouds offer diverse connections, not focussed expertise." This sheds light on one of the main problems I see with the libraries venturing into a future world mandated by the web, connected by common people with PCs and Internet connections and, with that, the self-delusion of authority--that online resources are not always reliable. That's not to say that books are entirely trustworthy--consider the works of any medieval court historian, and even the recent hullabaloo over A Million Little Pieces. But I've always believed in the value of the printed word and have grown up in the age that saw Wikipedia stumble at the hands of practical jokers, and yet you'll still get Wikipedia entries among the first ten results of almost any Google search. There's some reassurance of truth when you pick up a book that has been written, selected for publication by a third party, edited by someone, reviewed publicly by other established authors, and then carried by a vendor. There's even more of such reassurance when people who have been trained to gather and evaluate information (i.e., librarians) have deemed the book worthy of their collections. Readers are conditioned to be wary of self-publishing authors, but why does everyone willingly believe in the Great Truth of the Internet?! I trust books that come from libraries far more than I trust things I find on the Internet. Maybe this is naïve and too 1950s of me, but that's the way I feel. I think Schultz recognizes this problem and is challenging tomorrow's librarians to steer the public in the right direction, electronically. I think we have tried to do this--that we are doing this--but even our noblest efforts can't stop the flow of all the other crap that's out there.
And so I don't know about the place of libraries in a world becoming increasingly digital. If human society survives for another two hundred years, what will people say when they look back at our ideas of what libraries should be? "Books! Think of all that wasted paper!" will they scoff? "They had computers, and networks, and the know-how to do it, but they still opted to print and mass-produce their prosaic novels and travelogues and cookbooks and bind the pages together? What a waste of technology! Did they think books would last forever?" Sadly, I fear I can hear my descendants chiding me already.
Rick Anderson writes: "[...] If our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." I like this sentiment. I agree with it. I consider Pamunkey's typically helpful and well-intentioned classes for the public on all sorts of topics--and even Pamunkey's own staff training--and am left wondering how far over we need to bend to serve our patrons. Libraries are supposed to provide access to information, and if we can't provide straight-forward, self-explanatory online resources and databases for our patrons, what does that say about us? Fortunately, I think most of the electronic resources that PRL uses are very easy to understand and manipulate. At times, I wonder why we put forth such a massive effort to teach people how to use them. (Psst... Go to the site: follow the directions. The end.) But then, I also worry about the people who can't even use a computer. How are these people supposed to keep up with Library 2.0? These are the people who come to the library looking for books and books alone--or who never come to the library, because they feel daunted by the presence of so much technology. And these aren't just the elderly. Are we supposed to believe that further alienating them is fine, as long as it's in the name of progress? I'm not hesitant about the future just because it's the future; I'm hesitant because I think we're going to lose a lot of people along the way if we keep going at our current unyielding pace.
Dr. Wendy Schultz writes: "[...] As more information becomes more accessible, people will still need experienced tour guides—Amazon’s customer recommendations are notoriously open to manipulation; tagclouds offer diverse connections, not focussed expertise." This sheds light on one of the main problems I see with the libraries venturing into a future world mandated by the web, connected by common people with PCs and Internet connections and, with that, the self-delusion of authority--that online resources are not always reliable. That's not to say that books are entirely trustworthy--consider the works of any medieval court historian, and even the recent hullabaloo over A Million Little Pieces. But I've always believed in the value of the printed word and have grown up in the age that saw Wikipedia stumble at the hands of practical jokers, and yet you'll still get Wikipedia entries among the first ten results of almost any Google search. There's some reassurance of truth when you pick up a book that has been written, selected for publication by a third party, edited by someone, reviewed publicly by other established authors, and then carried by a vendor. There's even more of such reassurance when people who have been trained to gather and evaluate information (i.e., librarians) have deemed the book worthy of their collections. Readers are conditioned to be wary of self-publishing authors, but why does everyone willingly believe in the Great Truth of the Internet?! I trust books that come from libraries far more than I trust things I find on the Internet. Maybe this is naïve and too 1950s of me, but that's the way I feel. I think Schultz recognizes this problem and is challenging tomorrow's librarians to steer the public in the right direction, electronically. I think we have tried to do this--that we are doing this--but even our noblest efforts can't stop the flow of all the other crap that's out there.
And so I don't know about the place of libraries in a world becoming increasingly digital. If human society survives for another two hundred years, what will people say when they look back at our ideas of what libraries should be? "Books! Think of all that wasted paper!" will they scoff? "They had computers, and networks, and the know-how to do it, but they still opted to print and mass-produce their prosaic novels and travelogues and cookbooks and bind the pages together? What a waste of technology! Did they think books would last forever?" Sadly, I fear I can hear my descendants chiding me already.
wtorek, 8 stycznia 2008
Perhaps I'm just not cut out for the future, because I really like my privacy.
I can see why businesses and self-important attention whores would want to tag their sites or blogs for others to find and read them, but why would the average person want such a thing? I like my privacy, or at least the illusion that I have of it (as in, what I don't know they know about me can't bother me), so the idea of someone being able to search for something I've thought, written, or posted to the Internet really creeps me out. That's part of why I don't use my real name on myspace and why I keep my privacy settings the way they are on Facebook.
I actually searched on Technorati for the common tag I've given my "20 Things" entries--and I got several hits from my own blog! I couldn't believe it. I felt so violated. (Which I realize is dumb, because anytime you put anything onto this vast web it becomes public by default... but still. I didn't tell Technorati that I wanted it to find me. I was using my tags for my own benefit, so I could organize my blog and view just library assignments when necessary.)
Over the holidays I reconnected with an old friend who became a Master of Entertainment Technology in 2006 and now works as a programmer for a government contractor outside of DC. He was talking about "Web 2.0" and the hundred-dollar laptop (which he bought so he could hack and create new software and give it away for free) and the chumby, which one of his friends helped develop, and also about the future of the world with free Internet access everywhere for everyone. We went out with another friend of his who has an iPhone, and Charlie said he was planning to get one himself because he had created some sort of widget with Flickr and embedded it in his blog to provide instantaneous feeding updates. He explained how, with an iPhone, he could take a photo of me while we were having coffee and then update his blog with "Having coffee with Devon," and the picture he had taken would automatically appear with the post. To me, that makes the Internet too immediate.
I also recently had a conversation with an English teacher at my old high school, a gentleman whose tenure at the school was interrupted for six years, spanning the four during which I attended, and so whose official acquaintance I had never really made before yesterday, and who also happens to be the alumni coordinator for the school. We were talking about the quality and character of the students--he wondering if I thought it had changed, and I elaborating on how disturbing it was to walk into a classroom and find three students using their personal laptops without asking permission or if anyone minded--and eventually got onto the topic of the future of technology. He has set up a Facebook account for himself to help track alumni, and he asked if I could show him a few features on the site, since I knew my way around it better. Somehow we got onto the issue of photos, and I showed him the "untag" feature on Facebook, which he had not previously known about. After untagging himself in a particularly unflattering picture, he made the offhand comment, "Of course, this will only be help until they market the technology to run facial recognition on all public photos." When I looked at him like he was crazy, he explained, "I have a very paranoid friend who's into government conspiracies and cover-ups and all that. He also believes that, one day, as soon as a digital photograph is taken, it will transmit the data to a satellite so that if there were, say, hit-and-run out on Leigh and Lombardy, the authorities could search satellite hits to see if anyone happened to be taking a picture at the time of the accident." And though I know it's possible, the idea blew my mind. I'm just hoping I'll be dead before all of that starts to happen.
But now for the exercise:
1. I assume that individual blog post search results are returned under "Posts" tab, and that blogs in the "Blog Directory" are found under the "Blogs" tab... but I can't figure out a way just to search for tags. Guess I'm just stupid like that. Maybe the Internet is not for me. I got about 3000 returns under "Posts" and only about 1000 under "Blogs." You know, my friend Finale is an engineering PhD candidate at Trinity/Cambridge right now, having graduated from MIT some years ago, and she works a lot with AI. She was able to come home briefly after coming back stateside for a conference in Florida, and we got together this past weekend. There was a time, she said, when she used to get excited about technology and new advancements and whenever a friend was able to hack a new device and manipulate the software to improve it, but now that she does that all the time as part of her job, it's not fun anymore. She has been inundated with technology--with all of its massive leaps and exponential bounds in the last few years--and it just isn't the same. That's sort of the way I feel with the "Web 2.0" phenomenon, I guess. Parts of it are cool, and then the rest is just... too much, too fast. Seriously, it's not even very fun to be on the Internet any more--not with everyone spying and watching your every move, all in the name of community. I had a theory several years ago--long before everyone over the age of nine had a cell phone and laptop--that our humanity peaked around the Industrial Revolution, and we've been on a rapid downhill course since then towards destruction. Think about the boom of technology that happened in the twentieth century alone: the first viable aircraft in 1903, stealth planes by 1989; the first commercial electronic calculator in 1961, the first graphing one in 1985 (and now a standard requirement for any high school math class); the first commercial televisions in the 1930s, and flat-screen HDTVs within seventy years; computers the sizes of full rooms in the 1950s, the IMB PC in 1981, and the BlackBerry introduced in 1999. It's frightening to realize how far we've come in such a short time when you consider that mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. And consider the "progress" we've made in this new century: iPhones, 2G flash drives the size of an eraser, HDTV becoming standard broadcasting by 2009--that cathode ray tube TV you bought two years ago won't pick up anything at all with that ol' antenna anymore! And look at this invasion of privacy that everyone encourages and watches (exhibitionist reality TV is an entirely separate beast!), now picking up momentum on the Internet. We're all snowballs in an avalanche, folks. Hope you're ready for the crash at the end of the slope.
2. I explored some of the "popular" things. I should make it known that I've never read Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code for the very reason that they were "popular." I typically avoid "popular" things. These are pretty much no exception. None of them were very interesting. Most of them were technology sites. And you know how hot the prospect of new technology gets me...
3. Ta-da!
Look, I'm sorry to be so negative all the time. Really, I am. I'm not against new things; I'm not against learning. There are just some things that I don't like giving up--like my right to privacy (which I know isn't really guaranteed anywhere). I am a private citizen in this country, and I expect to be afforded some privileges as such. I'm not a convicted criminal, I'm not even a suspected criminal, and so my own honest privacy should be something I can be trusted to maintain until such a time as I no longer spend my life as a decent, law-abiding citizen. To everyone on the Internet right now: stop caring about what everyone around you is thinking and doing! You guys are the collective Gladys Kravitz of the twenty-first century! And I refuse to play into those manicured hands of yours!
I actually searched on Technorati for the common tag I've given my "20 Things" entries--and I got several hits from my own blog! I couldn't believe it. I felt so violated. (Which I realize is dumb, because anytime you put anything onto this vast web it becomes public by default... but still. I didn't tell Technorati that I wanted it to find me. I was using my tags for my own benefit, so I could organize my blog and view just library assignments when necessary.)
Over the holidays I reconnected with an old friend who became a Master of Entertainment Technology in 2006 and now works as a programmer for a government contractor outside of DC. He was talking about "Web 2.0" and the hundred-dollar laptop (which he bought so he could hack and create new software and give it away for free) and the chumby, which one of his friends helped develop, and also about the future of the world with free Internet access everywhere for everyone. We went out with another friend of his who has an iPhone, and Charlie said he was planning to get one himself because he had created some sort of widget with Flickr and embedded it in his blog to provide instantaneous feeding updates. He explained how, with an iPhone, he could take a photo of me while we were having coffee and then update his blog with "Having coffee with Devon," and the picture he had taken would automatically appear with the post. To me, that makes the Internet too immediate.
I also recently had a conversation with an English teacher at my old high school, a gentleman whose tenure at the school was interrupted for six years, spanning the four during which I attended, and so whose official acquaintance I had never really made before yesterday, and who also happens to be the alumni coordinator for the school. We were talking about the quality and character of the students--he wondering if I thought it had changed, and I elaborating on how disturbing it was to walk into a classroom and find three students using their personal laptops without asking permission or if anyone minded--and eventually got onto the topic of the future of technology. He has set up a Facebook account for himself to help track alumni, and he asked if I could show him a few features on the site, since I knew my way around it better. Somehow we got onto the issue of photos, and I showed him the "untag" feature on Facebook, which he had not previously known about. After untagging himself in a particularly unflattering picture, he made the offhand comment, "Of course, this will only be help until they market the technology to run facial recognition on all public photos." When I looked at him like he was crazy, he explained, "I have a very paranoid friend who's into government conspiracies and cover-ups and all that. He also believes that, one day, as soon as a digital photograph is taken, it will transmit the data to a satellite so that if there were, say, hit-and-run out on Leigh and Lombardy, the authorities could search satellite hits to see if anyone happened to be taking a picture at the time of the accident." And though I know it's possible, the idea blew my mind. I'm just hoping I'll be dead before all of that starts to happen.
But now for the exercise:
1. I assume that individual blog post search results are returned under "Posts" tab, and that blogs in the "Blog Directory" are found under the "Blogs" tab... but I can't figure out a way just to search for tags. Guess I'm just stupid like that. Maybe the Internet is not for me. I got about 3000 returns under "Posts" and only about 1000 under "Blogs." You know, my friend Finale is an engineering PhD candidate at Trinity/Cambridge right now, having graduated from MIT some years ago, and she works a lot with AI. She was able to come home briefly after coming back stateside for a conference in Florida, and we got together this past weekend. There was a time, she said, when she used to get excited about technology and new advancements and whenever a friend was able to hack a new device and manipulate the software to improve it, but now that she does that all the time as part of her job, it's not fun anymore. She has been inundated with technology--with all of its massive leaps and exponential bounds in the last few years--and it just isn't the same. That's sort of the way I feel with the "Web 2.0" phenomenon, I guess. Parts of it are cool, and then the rest is just... too much, too fast. Seriously, it's not even very fun to be on the Internet any more--not with everyone spying and watching your every move, all in the name of community. I had a theory several years ago--long before everyone over the age of nine had a cell phone and laptop--that our humanity peaked around the Industrial Revolution, and we've been on a rapid downhill course since then towards destruction. Think about the boom of technology that happened in the twentieth century alone: the first viable aircraft in 1903, stealth planes by 1989; the first commercial electronic calculator in 1961, the first graphing one in 1985 (and now a standard requirement for any high school math class); the first commercial televisions in the 1930s, and flat-screen HDTVs within seventy years; computers the sizes of full rooms in the 1950s, the IMB PC in 1981, and the BlackBerry introduced in 1999. It's frightening to realize how far we've come in such a short time when you consider that mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. And consider the "progress" we've made in this new century: iPhones, 2G flash drives the size of an eraser, HDTV becoming standard broadcasting by 2009--that cathode ray tube TV you bought two years ago won't pick up anything at all with that ol' antenna anymore! And look at this invasion of privacy that everyone encourages and watches (exhibitionist reality TV is an entirely separate beast!), now picking up momentum on the Internet. We're all snowballs in an avalanche, folks. Hope you're ready for the crash at the end of the slope.
2. I explored some of the "popular" things. I should make it known that I've never read Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code for the very reason that they were "popular." I typically avoid "popular" things. These are pretty much no exception. None of them were very interesting. Most of them were technology sites. And you know how hot the prospect of new technology gets me...
3. Ta-da!
Look, I'm sorry to be so negative all the time. Really, I am. I'm not against new things; I'm not against learning. There are just some things that I don't like giving up--like my right to privacy (which I know isn't really guaranteed anywhere). I am a private citizen in this country, and I expect to be afforded some privileges as such. I'm not a convicted criminal, I'm not even a suspected criminal, and so my own honest privacy should be something I can be trusted to maintain until such a time as I no longer spend my life as a decent, law-abiding citizen. To everyone on the Internet right now: stop caring about what everyone around you is thinking and doing! You guys are the collective Gladys Kravitz of the twenty-first century! And I refuse to play into those manicured hands of yours!
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