Minding our own business

We need no special issue of Techne to tell us that digital technology comes bundled with a host of political implications. We know that we’re newly vulnerable to tracking, that Google is noting our every search; we know that hackers and spies skulk through networks; we know that access, permissions, and digital rights policy is set by administrators answerable to… well, not us.

Graham Longford’s contribution to the special issue of Techne, Pedagogies of Digital Citizenship and the Politics of Code, enumerates the ways technological citizenship (his words in italics) has devolved. Unsurprisingly, it’s the standard postlapsarian plot, the dark invasion. It’s a colonization of cyberspace by proprietary code and various legislative initiatives designed to protect it; it’s a major renegotiation of the terms and conditions of cybercitizenship as embodied in the design of the early Internet. What can redeem us and restore the early design? Pray for it: open source, with its reconfiguration of existing protocol technologies.

I was a bit surprised, though, to see rounded up among the usual compromisers of digital freedom — privacy and rights-eroding identifiers such as cookies, autofill, and DRM — a less obvious villain: customization. You’d think that self-managed customization of web services would put some power back into the hands of end-users, but Longford’s having none of it.

Why not? Here are ways, according to his essay, that the proliferation of web portals through which users gain access to information and services customized to their specific needs and interests … impinges on the nature of on-line citizenship:

• pseudo-personalizable tools: customization options available to users through processes that are far from neutral, such as menus that support only certain kinds of activities on the web (shopping, sports, MSM breaking news, shopping, horoscopes, weather, shopping…)

• the promotion of passivity, since users are encouraged to assume a posture of waiting for information to be brought to them

• the creation of a self-edited ‘Daily Me’ delivered to… electronic doorsteps; your choices wall off the infinitude that is life: web portals and customization tools enculturate [sic] users into certain kinds of habits, conduct and expectations that condition their use and experience of the web, with the potential for spillover into the off-line world.

• and, extending the last point, the inculcation of entitlement, the co-option of the web in favor of consumer empowerment and personal fulfillment rather than as a means to negotiate difference and overcome intolerance.

Longford and his sources [1] may have a point or two here, but these “impingements” seem tallied in a pre-RSS world. We’re no longer hostage to portal menus (though a Google toolbar might seduce you into surrendering); managing your own diet of feeds seems as much of a hunt, an active gathering and tending — and perhaps even a means of self-broadcasting — as it does a process of consumption.

Moreover, inveighing against customization — and defining the web, instead, as best used to confront difference — seems largely blind to the needs of actual, day-to-day work online. Who could get anything done with someone constantly tugging at one’s sleeve, like an unmanageable child, to look at something else, look at something else? There are times to cast one’s eye broadly over the world — to tear into a good international paper, or far-flung novel, or obscure recording, or whatever. But if one is seriously tracking developments in a field, one needs to be able to track. Maybe it’s time to use another term for this process, now that XML-based technology is allowing us to more efficiently harvest information for ourselves: not “customization,” but “cultivation.”

The application of such activity to an academic library environment is far from settled, or even defined. MyLibrary, an open source package allowing library users to configure their own resource lists, is a prominent first step, and as far as I can tell, the jury is out on its effectiveness. Lehigh deems its implementation successful, while NC State has issued a rather melancholy five-years-down-the-road report on the limits of MyLibrary — students, at least undergraduates, won’t use this tool much unless it’s tied into course requirements, ie a CMS.

Perhaps the specific problem with MyLibrary is that it was developed early, in the shadow of that first wave of menu-driven, static customization. Here’s a mock-up of its newest, 3.0 interface — not a whisper of RSS, not a hint of tagging here:

Helping patrons purposely chart their way through an ever-increasing universe of digital information is exactly what libraries should be doing, and ‘cultivation’ tools are the way to do it. Since it is open source, MyLibrary may well evolve into something more feed-based, more dynamic, more immediately useful; if not, another personalization tool will step into the breach.

Treating all patrons alike, enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach to the web, may correspond to a fantasy of global equality and universal dialogue. But in fact, if we are not to be bewildered or distracted by what’s out there — if we are to really apply the tradition of academic specialization to the web — we need to put these tools to work for our individually defined pursuits.

We may deplore, along with Rousseau, the unnatural fact of individualized labor; we may even agree with Wendell Berry (“The Unsettling of America”) that “the disease of modern culture is specialization… the abdication to specialists of various competencies and responsibilities that were once personal and universal.” The web’s ever-growing reach understandably feeds universalist fantasies.

And yet if you’re going to get work done in this environment, if you’re living among practical limitations of time and attention and self-cultivation, a platonic digital citizenship seems more viable: “‘This, then,’ I said, ‘my friend, if taken in a certain sense appears to be justice, this principle of doing one’s own business.’” (Republic, 433b)

[1] Lifted from Longford’s bibliography – some critics of customization:

Luke, Robert. 2002. “Habit@online: Web Portals as Purchasing Ideology.” Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 8: (Fall), 61-89.

Nakamura, Lisa. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Patelis, Korinna. 2000. “E-Mediation by America Online.” In Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web, ed. Richard Rogers. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Editions, 49-63.

Sunstein, Cass. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Teen creators

The latest Pew Internet & American Life study of teenagers and their online habits (“Teen Content Creators and Consumers”) has been out since November, so in our speedy echosphere it qualifies as old news. But I see that this report is getting cited at ALA Midwinter, particularly during the OCLC-sponsored meditation on library “extreme makeovers.” And in its blunt, schematic fashion, based on interviews with over 1,000 kids, the Pew report makes some claims that are well worth keeping in mind.

The study’s headline finding is that 57% of teens online (that is, over half of all kids aged 12-17 in the continental U.S. living in a household with a telephone) have actually created content in some way for the internet. What entails creation?

• creating & maintaining a blog (19%)
• creating a personal webpages (22%)
• creating a webpage for others (32%)
• sharing their creations online (33%)
• remixing content online into new creation (19%)

This is moving and intriguing information, of course, and so is this particular chart from the Pew report:

The desire to share self-created media seems to be remarkably universal here: note how gender, age, and income differentials don’t make much of a difference. The only real distinction is in locale. You might think that more isolated teenagers (in the country, in the suburbs) might want to interact online all the more, but actually creative content generation depends on broadband access to the “highly wired” environments that highly wired teens respond to.

The question that I’m sure is been being pondered in San Antonio: how do libraries, highly wired as they are, respond to all this burbling creativity? When academic libraries confront this netgen 2.0 digicultivated fill-in-your-tagline-here generation, how is that meeting of the worlds handled?

If sternly, if pedantically, if methodically: get ready for slack jaws (“With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, / Agape they heard me call…”). If there is no personal space designated, no playpen, no peer to peer connection, no manipulation of digital objects: get ready for glazed eyes. Your most careful demonstration of how to search a database, your most elaborately crafted pathfinder for a course, your most heartfelt testimony to the conveniences of unlimited access to a universe of resources: none of this will tap into the interactive instincts charted by Pew.

Case in point: suppose you’re a library and you ‘get it’ and you set up a blog — latest happenings in your library, any comments? Not enough. Though a good third of teens read blogs regularly (and remember that a fifth of them are actually writing them), don’t think that just publishing a library blog is enough: “for teens,” Pew finds, “blogs are much more about the maintenance and extension of personal relationships.” If it’s too hard to think about an academic library coming into “personal relationship” with its users, perhaps one might consider hosting and featuring personal blogs, integrating with the college’s file-sharing networks, encouraging personal collections of assets, becoming the space identified with creative and personally-motivated digital work.

I’ve heard much heralding of tech-savvy teens, a rising generation weaned on IM and blogs and cellphones and music ripped from everywhere. So I’ve always been amused by the hesitancy and sometimes outright consternation that can greet the introduction of something like a wiki at a univeristy. It’s not that kids don’t find an interactive tool like that easy to use after a while, even second nature. It’s that they don’t expect it there.

We’re at an awkward stage, when the sophisticated interactive techniques and attitudes cultivated in a kid’s ‘real’ life are somehow supposed to get checked at the academic door. On the other side of that door: directed attention … traditional communication … passivity. I’m painting in broad strokes of course, but I think it’s nonetheless broadly true — if you want kids to make something of the educational resources through which they swim, if you want them to energize their study with the habits charted by Pew, rework the class to require interactivity, and rebrand the library as the place to create.

s.tag.gering towards

If the idea of faceless hoards organizing the web’s pro/con/fusion in absolutely uncontrolled fashion gets you hot, or bothered, or both, this article on folksonomy by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin in the latest issue of D-Lib is worth a look. It’s a nice rundown of behavior on those 900-pound gorillas of social tagging sites, del.icio.us and Flickr.

As they sift through the ways taggers converge or fail to converge, Guy and Tonkin emphasize a core debate: to control or not to control – or, as they put it, “whether it is preferable to have popular (but perhaps not intuitively obvious) tags, or to have a larger spread of relatively uncommon tags, possibly representing more accurate reflections or a wider spread of points of view.”

And here I’m swaying in the breeze. I’m convinced by Clay Shirky when he defends variation in a large-scale tagging environment -

[Varying] terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there’s no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches…. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.

Sure, “film” is not “movie,” “gay” differs from “homosexual,” and God is in the details. But then I look at the stupid ways that tags can differ (misspellings, differing cases, different ways of connecting two words together, various transcoding of alphabets) and, well, you get the picture….

The new D-Lib article makes several interesting observations about tagging behavior that ameliorates Babylonian handwringing, though, such as

• only 10 to 15 percent of the tags they sampled were single-use tags: taggers do tend to play together

• social tagging services can and do foster ‘best practices,’ such as listing tags used by others, suggesting synonyms and plural constructions, designating an underscore as the best way to group words

• ‘tag bundling’ has emerged as a way to create hierarchical folksonomies, a natural extension of compound tags

• Unicode adoption will tighten up character standardization

Guy & Tonkin strike a nice balance — recognizing the benefit of a natural evolution of tagging, rather than ordained proscription, yet tracking the dangers of incoherency. They underscore that tagging serves two very different functions: personal organization, and collective interchange. The tension between these two functions is what gives this activity its kick.

When I think about how I use these social tagging sites, it seems to me that self-definition and outward discovery are very much at work, sometimes against each other: here is my portfolio of tags (my ‘narrative’, as the alchemical muser might put it), my unique collection: who coincides with me? what are the portfolios of those who share tags with me, anyway? where might they lead me? We read to identify (become more ourselves) even as we’re exploring (losing ourselves). Tagging, along with much networked activity, extends this familiar double-impulse into the social sphere of publication, scrambling the old divisions between authoring and reading.

Understanding optimal conditions for metadata ecologies will take time. Are tags, in the end, most powerful when they’re created by heterogeneous masses? Or are they more useful to a pre-defined group — one that shares a language, an interest, a project, a field of study? And what kind of prompts or suggestions or rules (if any) might further nurture this sudden, populist upsurge of categorizing? Open-ended publication of tags is a great beginning — just do it and see what happens — but, inevitably, harnessing all this new activity is what will help us better read ourselves.

Monocles, manacles, and yes, The New Yorker

When I unwrapped The Complete New Yorker this Christmas, I was so grateful to my sister. Here was a complete, 80-year archive of one of the few magazines I’ve subscribed to and avidly read down through the years. There is something so irrationally satisfying in knowing that you have full access to a treasure-trove like that — in believing that any half-remembered story, any quirky illustration, any lumbering old ad, any suburban-sophisticate take on a given 20th-century phenomenon is now all yours, just a few keystrokes away.

I couldn’t quite square this possessive exultation with the knowledge that any decent library offers its patrons access to an infinitely wider array of human expression and documentation, also just a few keystrokes away. I ended up chalking it up to the unique aura of The New Yorker — the illusions it has so longed sustained of subjectivity, possession, discrimination, privilege — an aura that had me maintaining my subscription even through the Tina years. Somehow, it seemed right that this content would be walled off from Proquestian aggregation, left a world unto itself and thus bestowed.

That said… The Complete New Yorker has proven to be one difficult world to navigate. Others have elaborately deplored its software: it inflicts an uncustomizable user interface, and seems hellbent on preventing you from doing anything with these files besides flipping through indifferently scanned pages. Thinking about extracting that poem by Louis Gluck? Think again: it’s forever pinned to that Peugeot ad. Wanting to finally read that long Rachel Carson essay? Quit hunting for a ‘printer-friendly’ version: there ain’t none. Hoping to play with a Charles Addams cartoon? Well, print out its page and color it in with crayons, because that’s about all you’re allowed to do. This lock-down of content into its original context might seem like an endorsement of situationalism, and might stoke some cultural studies, but it’s really about copyright law, and it severely limits the possibilities of this archive in a digital environment.

Worse yet, you can’t even load the whole thing onto your computer; the files cannot be copied to your hard drive — they’re stuck, instead, on eight DVDs. That means that if you wish to jump around chronologically, the search screen will constantly command you to insert a different disk. Put one into your trusty Powerbook, and sit back for a spirited little tune I like to call the Eustace Shuffle. You might wish to pour yourself a scotch while you wait. Roaming through The Complete New Yorker is indeed evocative of a bygone era, but that era is the one when you had to load several floppies sequentially to install a program, and who misses those days? It’s no wonder that information has started appear on how to disable this crippleware and actually get the files you bought (or, in my case, your sister bought you) onto your computer and freely accessible.

My biggest quarrel, though, is with the sad, sad search functionality. Let’s take a look at some of the “search tips,” shall we?

The search does not search the complete text of articles. I see. Really? Wow. That’s why my search for “Shelley Winters” today turned up exactly zero snarky Pauline Kael references. It did direct me (shuffle shuffle shuffle) to a long Renata Adler piece on Martin Luther King (and having glanced through that piece, I still have no idea why). And it did point me to a Talk of the Town about Yoo-Hoo, that sublime chocolate drink…. RIP, Shelley. You deserved better.

The New Yorker has been consistent in its keywording over the years, even as vocabulary has evolved. Therefore, articles about cars are filed under “Automobiles,” boxers under “Prizefighters,” and World War II under “Second World War.” Each article abstract will display the list of matching keywords as well. Use these exact words to search for related articles. You may copy these words from the abstracts and paste them into the search bar. Ok! Got it! I’m ready to punch my way through keywords like a prizefighter – so where is the thesaurus? I guess I should be assembling it bit by bit, noting matching keywords and painstakingly collecting them, like automobile rations during the Second World War.

The search finds all matching terms in an item’s abstract, keywords, and titles, and caption. It will not, however, search authors, departments, years, or issue date. Those may be selected in the windows above. Well, I’ll be hogtied and googled. Am I in the wrong field? Have I always been in the wrong field? Is an author name not a key word? Is that old hunt for Martin Amis screwing up my results down here? And about those abstracts — why do some items have them, some don’t? Why are they so, well, various? Some seem to be the first few paragraphs of a piece, others seem to be garrulous summations.

Search terms like “or” and “and” will be ignored. Quotation marks will be also be ignored. I see. So my query

“very” and “lame” or “incredibly” and “lame”

is out of the question. That’s fine — ignore it. Boolean’s so very … Atlantic Monthly ….

Yes, well, perhaps, and evidently: searching is destined to be a felicitous capricious fluttering business in the rich little world of The Complete New Yorker. Still and all, I’m glad I own it. You just never know what might flutter by.

Patronage 2.0

My attention shifted today to a site guaranteed to warm — nay, torch — a librarian’s heart: Superpatron.

This is a blog written by Edward Vielmetti, an energetic and tech-savvy patron of the forward-thinking Ann Arbor District Library. As outlined on Superpatron, the courtship went this way: he suggested that the library build RSS feeds into its catalog, whoever responded from the library knew about Vielmetti’s interesting personal blog and complimented him on it, Vielmetti joined the library’s technology advisory board, and now here’s Superpatron.

Let’s sample a few of the notions recently blogged there:

1/4 – I was wondering the other day whether libraries shouldn’t start to keep special collections of books meant to be written in. There would be a special shelf for them, when you checked them out there would be a nice pencil or pen to go with, and maybe if you were lavish you’d bind in a few extra blank pages between chapters for extra notes or a pocket in the back to keep note cards.

1/3 – I’ve experimented at various times with posting lists of the books I’m interested in out of the catalog at the Ann Arbor District Library and into my blog. My latest effort is below. It uses a combination of Feedburner and its RSS-to-Javascript publishing services to take data from the AADL’s records for my hold list and format it nicely.

12/30 – I wrote a half dozen lines of not very pretty code and turned the Ann Arbor District Library‘s new holding lists into a wall of books display for non-fiction and for fiction.

The AADL is naturally moved to comment publicly on many of Superpatron‘s fine ideas. Best of all, a climate of creative use is being fostered: a library opens its resources up through blogs and feeds, and Web 2.0 mavens run with it.

A note about the word patron. It’s my sense, having just completed library school, that this word is out of fashion – one hears and sees user much more frequently, and even, from time to time, customer. Presumably, some notions about banishing old stereotypes and (patronizing?) approaches is behind this trend. But I’m against it; I like patron, and maybe power users of library services like Superpatron will help to revive this fine old term.

The OED’s definition of patron stresses “defender, protector” at the core of the term — it derives from padro/father & is inflected with religious use. User is so very dry and generic — equally applicable to dishwashers, screwdrivers, highways, and drugs. Patron actually restores the deference to a “user community” that libraries so often profess — and surely we can say the word without taking on the full baggage of patriarchy or ecclesiastical intervention or starving artist exploitation or what have you. Patron is compact and it correctly assigns ultimate responsibility for the life of a library.

As for customer — stop it, just please stop it.

It’s about time

Something about the enormous endless novel … I can’t quite figure out its spell. There’s the comfort of inhabiting (or being inhabited) across seasons and locations. There’s the marvel at Sisyphean endeavor. There’s the irrational exuberance of pushing through to four-digit pages. Whatever the causes, I rarely get through a short story, but give me a Clarissa, a J.R., a Ulysses, a Golden Bowl, a Tristram Shandy, a Remembrance of Times Past, a Dead Souls, even a Ship of Fools … and I’m caught.

A passage from my most recent ensnarement, The Magic Mountain:

A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes… could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filling up those five minutes, last a thousand times as long — and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling. On the other hand, it is possible for a narrative’s content-time to exceed its own duration immeasurably. This is accomplished by diminishment — and we use this term to describe an illusory, or to be quite explicit, diseased element, that is obviously pertinent here: diminishment occurs to some extent whenever a narrative makes use of hermetic magic and a temporal hyper-perspective reminiscent of certain anomalous experiences of reality that imply that the senses have been transcended.

And so MM, an epic of disintegration, pursues a push-pull with time — inflating into vast meditations and then pondering its own rot. It’s a hypochondriac’s nightmare. It’s intoxicating, and of course that’s often different from comfortable. It’s also very funny. Towards the end of its degeneration (and we can only think of the book as an inexorably metastasizing disease — even its author can’t seem to wrest free of it), MM holds up a fun-house mirror to itself. This mirror is a drunken Dutchman named Mynheer Peeperkorn, of all things: a shambling “personality” who holds mysterious sway, deploying

a series of exquisite gestures that riveted his listeners’ interst — the subly nuanced, well-chosan, precise, tidy, cultured gestures of an orchestra conductor — a forefinger bent to form a circle with a thumb or a palm held out wide, but with tapering nails, to caution, to subdue, to demand attention, only to disappoint his now smiling, attentive listeners with one of his very robustly prepared, but incomprehensible phrases; or rather, he did not so much disappoint people as transform smiles into looks of delighted amazement, because the robustness, subtlety, and significance of the preparation largely compensated, even after the fact, for what he failed to say and produced a satisfying, amusing, and enriching effect all its own.

We’re getting very close here to defining the spell of these monster books. As I was reading a recent rueful meditation on David Foster Wallace in Poets & Writers, and thinking back on Infinite Jest — that great & purposeless three-tent circus of tennis, addiction, and popped U.S. culture — Mynheer Peeperkorn kept coming to my mind. He is, indeed, a riviting personality, even if his words trail off into nothing. You have to keep attending such a force, and wondering at its monumental incapacities.  You have to keep biding its time.

Looming clouds

Last summer (yes it was once summer) I wrote a bit about TagCloud — a nifty folksonomy visualization tool. When the MetaMuser mentioned this app recently, I took another look and decided to see how websites I visit might cloud together.

Which is a convoluted way of announcing ClayfoxClouds – wherein three groups of RSS feeds (library-related feeds, news feeds, and blogs-I-like feeds) converge into 75 tags each. Here’s a picture of tonight’s harvest:

The library-related and news-related tags (top, middle) do tend to group up a bit, while the blogs-I-like tags (on the bottom) tend to straggle individually — a reflection of the scattered nature of my recreational surfing, perhaps. In any case, automated harvesting is hardly a science; since TagCloud is not drawing from any standardized metadata, the occurrence of certain terms can seem arbitrary or trivial. Or unnecessary … pizza queen, anyone?

I’ll add more feeds into the mix as I run across them, who knows what tags will emerge — or, once clicked, where they will lead. If they lead nowhere, keep in mind that TagCloud is beta.

So go ahead, head into the clouds.