Litwin Books will soon be publishing an English translation of Philippe Breton’s 2000 book, Le culte de l’Internet: Une menace pour le lien social?, under the English title: The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies. Here is a bit from Chapter Four that comes to mind for … Read more Selection from Philippe Breton, relating to Wikileaks
Adam Gopnik, frequent contributor to the New Yorker, has an article in the new issue called, “The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us.” It’s actually a really good bibliographic essay to recommend to someone wanting an overview of this literature. The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to … Read more Adam Gopnik on books about the internet age
“The HMC announces an open call for entries to exhibit at Raday Konyveshaz & Gallery, Budapest, exhibition opening on August 24, 2011. … Submission deadline is March 15.” How influenced the digitalized area the traditional reading culture? Is it finished the Gutenberg area? We are waiting artist books, artworks on or of paper may be … Read more Call for entries (artwork) – Library Thoughts – Gondolatok a könyvtárban
Jason Epstein has a review of John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century in the current New York Review of Books: “Books: Onward to the Digital Revolution.” The book is published by Polity Press and seems to be an important snapshot of the publishing industry in its current (but … Read more Jason Epstein reviews Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century
As I have announced, all of our books are available in ebook form, from Powells.com and Google. We are now offering a few of our books on Amazon for the Kindle platform: Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship So You Want To Be … Read more Some Kindle ebooks from LJP
If you want to buy ebooks from Google Ebooks, you can now find our publications there. Library Juice Press and Litwin Books…
Google has added a feature to its advanced search form that allows you to filter results by reading level or add information about a page’s reading level to the information in the results. Reading level is indicated as “basic,” “intermediate,” or “advanced.” Like most of what goes on underneath the Google hood, we aren’t given … Read more Google’s new “reading level” filtering
Christian Caryl has an insightful post on the NYRB blog, “WikiLeaks in the Moral Void.” As he astutely says about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t … Read more NYRB blog: WikiLeaks in the Moral Void
MiT7 unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition CALL FOR PAPERS Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 4, 2011. Conference dates: May 13-15, 2011 at MIT. Conference website: web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/ Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? … Read more Call for Papers: MiT7 – unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition
From Philippe Breton’s The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies, forthcoming from Litwin Books: One may distinguish three positions grosso modo: first the “Internet-for-everything” militants, proselytes (sometimes unknowingly) of a new cult. Then there are the technophobes, hostile to all technology. Finally, there are those who think … Read more Three attitudes toward the Internet
Many large institutions, such as universities, are beginning to contract their email services out to Google. At the university where I work, we are in the process of switching our accounts over to Google now. All of our students, faculty, and staff will access their university email accounts through a Google interface. In order to … Read more Institutions are switching to Gmail, but are they discussing the fine print?
McAfee Site Advisor is red-flagging ebsco.com and ebscohost.com. Something to do with detecting malware. Does anybody know what that is about? Ebsco’s response so far is that they are “working to resolve it.” No explanation forthcoming and no denial. I’m concerned and wondering what they are putting onto our computers, however it ends up being … Read more McAfee Site Advisor Red-Flagging Ebscohost
Our full list of books is now available in e-book form, in the Adobe Digital Editions format. We have links from our site to the Powells.com page for each e-book. We recommend Powell’s as a retailer, as they are a union shop and an amazing brick-and-mortar Portland landmark as well. Adobe Digital Editions e-books can … Read more LJP e-books: Proof that we don’t hate change
I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to point out an inaccuracy in an article on the Adbuster’s website (and maybe in the magazine as well, I can’t tell) titled, “Google’s Flaw,” written by Micah White. I’m not unsympathetic with White’s point about Google, but I have … Read more Inaccuracy in Adbusters article
I have commented on problems stemming from automated reasoning as capitalism shifts to an AI foundation. Here is a juicy example of what I am talking about.
Increasing use of AI means smarter-than-average searchers constantly need to learn tricks in order to counteract the AI that assumes a user base of average consumers. Here is one for Google: Presently, if you search german modernist collage, the search results will be full of hits that assume you meant to type “college” rather than … Read more A Google trick for staying ahead of AI
From an early pamphlet advertising a bibliographic database, found among the ephemera saved at the University of Virginia Libraries: “Why use a computer search? Consider the time it takes to search manually through the many issues of printed indexes. The computer searches these indexes in seconds; the search is faster, more comprehensive, and often … Read more Ephemera from UVa Library’s computing past
I blog about tech stuff only very rarely, but this is something I really want to share. If you’re at all concerned about online privacy, you will want to know about the Network Advertising Initiative’s “Behavioral Advertising Opt Out Tool.” Go to it, and it will show you which advertising networks have installed tracking cookies … Read more Tracking Cookie Opt-Out (Behavioral Advertising)
More and more, I find that the library profession’s efforts to stay relevant in the age of information technology are in fact eroding our relevance. As a result of these efforts, it is becoming less and less clear what we offer that is different from what everybody else offers in the information economy. The reason … Read more Our niche and how to get back into it