New Library Juice blogger Alan Mattlage has posted a review of John Miedema’s Slow Reading on his own blog, books, etc. While we’re on the topic of John’s book, I will note that he has a new book in the works, which he is writing as a series in web form first. It is about … Read more Alan Mattlage reviews Slow Reading
I spent the better part of Wednesday at VuStuff II, a small regional gathering hosted by Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library, which focused on the intersection of technology and scholarly communication in libraries. The attendees were an interesting mix of people from academic and special libraries, and included library directors, archivists, systems librarians, special collections … Read more Thoughts on VuStuff II
Do you love big words? Love your Theory words? Then you’ve probably noticed that MS Word likes to underline a lot of your prose in red. For some reason their dictionary is not as complete as it should be given the ubiquity of the software in academic settings. I wonder why that is? Here is … Read more 147 $20 words that MS Word does not know
We have often pointed out here that privacy in Facebook is not primarily a matter of controlling what you share with your friends, as Facebook likes to say it is, but what data Facebook has about you that it can sell or otherwise make available to its business partners. Here is a great link that … Read more Facebook’s Data Pool
Given Google’s dominance in search and the scope and integration of their Google Books product (hate to use the word product, but libraries have been converted into product here), we should be especially aware of their policies regarding what they will permit and what they will not permit in terms of inclusion in their full … Read more What Google permits and does not permit in Google eBooks
Not exactly a library issue, but one which rests on the same ideals. It seems urgent to me that we legalize making video recordings of on-duty police officers. (Only illegal in some states.)
You will probably be hearing more about Weibo, a Chinese social networking site that combines aspects of Twitter and Facebook and presently has, at a minimum, 140 million users, which is nearly three times the user base of Twitter. The interesting news at present is that the Chinese government, which shut down access to Twitter … Read more Tension over Weibo, the Chinese Twitter
Sue Halpern has a review essay in the new issue of the New York Review of Books titled “Mind Control & the Internet, in which she reviews You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, The Filter Bubble, by Eli Parser, and World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet, by … Read more Sue Halpern on People and Machines
Just sharing this link to a nice-sized collection of articles on media studies and media ecology, most with a Canadian-theory slant. These articles are not heavy reading, and provide a good intro to a number of topics that you may be curious about.
We have just posted Ron Day’s introduction to Philippe Breton’s book, The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies to the Litwin Books website. We posted translator David Bade’s introduction to the author’s work here back in April. I have come to realize what an important author on … Read more Ron Day’s introduction to The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult
I was in Cambridge, MA last weekend for MiT7: unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition. This conference is put on every two years jointly by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and the MIT Communication Forum. The conference is concerned with new media and new communication technologies and their broad implications. Presenters came to … Read more Thoughts on MiT7
An interesting library-related paper from MiT7, by a media studies scholar: Knowledge Experiments: Technology and the Library, Paulina Mickiewicz Abstract: In April of 2005, the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec opened in Montreal, a library project of unprecedented scale in the city. This paper seeks to focus on the programming and technologies of the Grande Bibliothèque. … Read more Paulina Mickiewicz on library architecture
MiT7 was a great conference – intimate, warm, stimulating, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge. There were some brilliant minds at work. I plan to post a few comments on the conference later. For now, here are links to podcasts from the three topical plenary sessions: Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms Archives and Cultural Memory Power and … Read more MiT7 podcasts
Media in Transition 7 (MiT 7), a small conference at MIT, is starting Friday and running ’till Sunday. I will be there; if you will be there too please say hello. Anyone wanting to follow the Twitter hash tag can look for #mit7.
Philippe Breton: a brief introduction …by David Bade, the translator of Breton’s book Le culte de l’Internet: Une menace pour le lien social?, which Litwin Books has published under the English title: The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies… I discovered the work of Philippe Breton when … Read more Philippe Breton
Here is a scary if unsurprising bit of news: a report in PC world on a recent study by Christopher Soghoian: “US Police Increasingly Peeping at E-mail, Instant Messages.” Soghoian’s paper is linked in the article, which begins: Law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such … Read more And our privacy quietly erodes as state power grows
Here is one of my favorite philosophers on one of my favorite problems: From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits and Dangers of Calculative Rationality (Hubert Dreyfus). This relates to Library Juice posts from 9/22/2010, 10/4/2009, 5/19/2009, 7/31/2008, and 4/25/2008.
The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies Author: Philippe Breton Translator: David Bade Price: $22.00 Published: March 2011 ISBN: 978-1-936117-41-3 Printed on acid-free paper French author Philippe Breton examines the Internet and the culture surrounding it through the lens of its philosophical and cultural background. Central in … Read more New book: The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies
I haven’t been posting much, but I do have some links to share: By Steve Coll, in the New York Review of Books: The Internet: For Better or for Worse, a review of two books skeptical of the idea of the internet as a force for liberation. By Richard Dorment, also in the NYRB: What … Read more Some links for you…
I am not personally diving into the discussion of Judge Chin’s decision on the Google Settlement, because I am too war-weary of fighting it out with other librarians on issues where I feel like a lone dissenter, but I will go as far as to say that I like this post on the topic by … Read more Smart commentary on Judge Chin’s decision