November 2006 Archives

Another month has come and gone on this blue globe. The annual marks of mortality have left another ring and my weblog has been mostly silent. It's not because I don't like you, all half dozen of you who have subscribed to my feed, it's because I pretend to myself that I'm busy, that there are other demands on my time. It's a poor excuse my friend.

In “real life” I'm nearing the end of my third semester as a master's student at the School of Information at UMich. I think this may be the best academic semester I've had so far, at least as far as the asymptotic union between my own interests and the classes I've taken. The professors have been top-notch. The topics just as good. Information Ethics took a decidedly psychological turn, but in a very interesting way. Information Culture nicely balanced history and sociology. Intellectual Property felt a bit disperse but still grounded in important questions. The next two weeks will be the big push to finish up all the papers and finals.

The Thanksgiving holidays were enjoyable. I went out for dinner and a movie on Thanksgiving with my friend Josh and stopped by his house for turkey dinner on Friday. It would've been nice to travel back to Minneapolis for the annual get together but neither money nor the time were available.

Looking back on the month there's not much to report on my writings here at Eccentric Eclectica.

• In arguments by nostalgia, I expressed my frustration with the critics of information overload and the all-too-human tendency to think that our time on this world is unique, that no one ever dealt with changes as immense as the ones we experience today.
• I reviewed my social bookmarking practices just as a way to remind myself of how I manage my own information today. The whole process of bookmarking content on the web has changed a lot in the last 6 years since I was first using Backflip and failing.
• Teaching and Emotion offered a few anecdotes about teachers I've learned from in the past and the importance of enthusiasm for teaching. There's nothing worse than taking a course from someone who doesn't care about the material.
• In a list will make it so I mentioned three interesting lists I found on the web about being interesting, being efficient, and what to learn.
• Finally I tried to find a difference between information and media ethics. I'm not sure if I succeeded but what I suggested was a difference between mass communication and directed communication. The media rarely treats the individual as a thou, instead we are treated as a consumer, definitely not as an end.

Many of the discussions about information ethics I've had this semester have conflated information ethics with media ethics. Is there a difference between the two or is the conflation natural?

When I use the term media I usually think of television, radio, and print, especially magazines or newspapers. Some properties of media are ephemerality, and political or cultural content. Most of all its mass communication.

I associate information with high technology such as computers or the internet. Information technology seems to be less about politics, less about mass culture, more about business, process, and management.

The difference feels like a difference between mass and everything else. Information technology can be used for mass communication but that use is not inevitable. Radio, television, even newspaper, could be used for individual communication but historically they have ended up being used for communication from one to the many.

The ethical difference may be linked to the many-to-many, one-to-many difference between information technology and media.

I'm frustrated by the common discussion that uses media technology to judge or predict the behavior of information technology. For example, those who condemn television because it decreases our attention span and then go onto condemn computer games or instant messaging for the same reason. The move from media to IT is much more complicated than this.

In one of my classes we recently discussed Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I like Postman's critique and I think there have been disappointing changes in our public discourse over the last fifty years. I'm even willing to blame television for a lot of the changes.

So what does television tell us about the internet? To me it doesn't tell us much. The internet is so much more diverse than television ever was that the comparison between the two seems daft. Perhaps this is the problem I have with internet critics such as David Schenk or Sven Birkerts.

There's no guarantee that the internet will continue to be a countervailing force to the mass media. At the end of our class discussion the instructor asked what we can do as a culture to improve the future. My response was simple: avoid reducing everything on the internet to a market, and don't fall into the same hierarchical games that plagued us in the past.

Here are a couple of lists that caught my eye:

• Russell Davies on How to be Interesting via lifehack.org. Stimulate your creativity by keeping a scrapbook, interviewing different people once a month (that's an idea I had a few years ago, but have yet to do anything about), collect something, etc.
• Stephen Downes on the Things you really need to know via McGee's Musings. Key suggestions for what we really should be teaching people in school and life: how to be creative, how to learn to read, to tell truth from fiction, to empathize, and more.
• The Art of Efficiency from pingmag. A good roundup of ideas, from paper to software, for improving your organization.

One of the greatest pleasures of being a student is taking a class from someone who clearly has an enthusiastic love for his or her subject. I was speaking with Jack Barnard about his information property class a few days ago and he asked me how I felt the class was going. I complimented him for the enthusiasm he brings to the class. It's so much easier and more fun to study with someone who cares about their subject.

When I look back on the many teachers I've encountered to date there are some that stand out from the rest because of their passion and intensity. In high school I had two teachers, Phil Abalan and Roman Borgerding, for history and English respectively, who changed my academic career more than I realized at the time. Before taking their courses I probably would've told people who asked that I intended to become an astronomer or physicist. Mr. Abalan and Mr. Borgerding changed that by sheer force of enthusiasm and engagement with their subjects.

I was reminded of this emotional connection to teaching while reading a blog entry by Bryan Alexander at Infocult. via Stephen Downes at OLDaily.

Networked learning, in all its informatic splendor and complexity, is certainly a dire threat to the deeply- and extensively rooted pedagogical practices of higher education. For instance, the Carthaginian professor didn't defend his wrath by describing his knowledge of or passion for the subject; instead, he simply described his credentials, which we were expected to read as standing in for them. (emphasis mine)

Further, it's a threat that's partly irrational. I don't mean to dismiss the anxieties - far from it - but to emphasize that Web 2.0, networked learning, etc. are simply not treated seriously in academic discourse, usually. Most faculty aren't aware of many of these tools; moreover, their awareness rarely goes beyond the instrumental. Forces beyond the professorite conspire to keep the discussions rare and poor, from the Chronicle's classic “internet: threat or menace?” approach to mainstream media's clumsy grappling with this stuff, to the sometimes marginalization of librarians and technologists who should be prime participants in conversation.

I don't remember Mr. Borgerding or Mr. Abalan ever using their credentials to justify their knowledge. In fact I don't even know how much education they had. I'm sure they both had a bachelor's degree, but beyond that it's a mystery. The topic just never came up.

For one thing they were too good at their job for credentials to matter. But an equally important part was high school. It felt like credentials didn't matter as much for secondary school teachers. As I climb the ladder of academia the credentials and the source of those credentials, a good school or something on a lower tier, become more important. But do they really tell us anything at all about the quality of someone's knowledge about a subject or their ability to convey that knowledge to others through teaching.

There are more social bookmarking sites today then anyone is really able to keep track of. For me the best sites are:

• Furl - I use this as an archive to search the text of things I've seen in the past. The best part about this site is building an archive up over time. I've been using it for two plus years and have collected a fair amount of stuff. Searching is really convenient when I bind it to a Firefox shortcut.
• del.icio.us - best at social filtering. This is the site for finding interesting stuff that's been tagged by other people. It's the only one where I pay attention to other people's content through the inbox.
• Listmixer - the best temporary storage for ephemeral stuff. For some reason I don't like using delicious to store stuff that I'm never going to look at again. Mostly this contains blog entries I've read in my aggregator and might someday write about, although the number I do actually write about is probably less than five percent.
• Diigo - the new tool on the block. Great for highlighting stuff on pages that have been saved and for creating sticky notes to overlay highlights. I just started using this to track some web sites for my school classes and it's been wicked cool so far. The Firefox toolbar has options to save ad Diigo and other sites all at the same time.
• Onlywire - is a useful bookmarklet and site that will submit items to multiple sites. Very interesting but still not part of my regular habit.

I'm broadly sympathetic to arguments questioning technology in modern society. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked about our over-reliance on technology and the effect it has on our social and cognitive development.

I recently reread Shenk's book The End of Patience for class and was struck by how much of it is just proper common sense. The list of principles at technorealism.org seem jaw-droppingly obvious to me: technologies aren't neutral, the Internet is not utopian, government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier, etc.

Maybe I find this stuff so obvious because I've been working and studying as an information professional for so long. But I remember reading similar points during the heyday of the internet boom and nodding my head then just as much as I do now.

So one part of me wants to encourage Shenk and others to keep their critiques of the electronic frontier coming, but another part is annoyed by the implicit arguments made about the amount of information we have today versus what we had in the past.

So it goes with technology. As we speed it up, we also speed up our expectations. As long as you are psychologically running in the technology rat race, you will never, ever be winning that race - you will always be losing it. And as long as the pace of change is as blistering as it is today, many of us are stuck with the feeling of falling behind even as we stand still. (from the End of Patience, p. 41)

A key argument here is that technology is speeding things up more than it did in the past. But the missing question is what is getting sped up. Is it the presentation of information to us, is it our access to information, is it our human perceptions?

In order to answer that question we need to rely on argument by nostalgia. We need to believe that life was slower, gentler, and much more pleasant at some time in the past. But this knowledge about the past is, I believe, beyond our capabilities. Too much of the actual experience of the past has disappeared for us to know whether living in 1850 would feel very different than living today.

Sure there are a lot of surface differences between then and now. We can travel much faster than before, know more about the world faster, and communicate with other people faster. But the leap from those changes to psychological changes about patience seems suspect to me.

Surfing the web today and finding an endless series of diversions seems to me akin to walking into a library in 1900 and feeling that there was never going to be enough time to read all the books I'd like to. Those with any modest realization of the human condition have always known that the boundaries of the individual are too small to encompass the wonders of the world. We've always known we're limited. It's just a matter of how you respond to that fact. Do you react with patience or anxiety?