As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.

Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.

So I direct you all to read dive in to mark’s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:

Act VI: The act of learning If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was. Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

I have been considering it–when I came here I had a specific issue that I wanted to look at, but as I have been going through the classes I feel that whatever I was studying at the time caught my interest too strongly. However, as I got to the time to write the paper, it really didn’t motivate me.

In preparation for this research proposal I have been throwing myself in Information Science theory: Information Seeking, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Organization etc etc. Going through volumes and volumes of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

When I started this degree, I had it in my mind to study how Intellectual Property came about, how information was commodified, and how it was sold to the rest of us. Clearly, to me, oral culture is a free culture, where things ripped, mixed and “burned” with every performance (see the wonderful Singer of Tales by Albert Lord.)

Manuscript culture was equally unbashful about its “theft.” I don’t have the quote in front of me, but Seneca encouraged his readers to be like bees: to gather all of the best of from the finest flowers, and mix those words together into a sweet honey so no single source could be discerned from the rest. Students in medieval monasteries would be responsible for copying texts as their magisters read them out in class. To graduate one had to present all the books one had copied.

And we all know where the Internet is going. There is one simple fact on the Internet: to read, view, watch or listen to is to make a copy. That copy is perfect and in exact fidelity to the original. The on the Internet there are no auras.

So, my argument is that, along with all the other goodness that print brought, it also brought along a notion of intellectual “property.” I am not original in this, McLuhan said it long ago. Many of you will have read that my department is making the transition from an Information Science school to a school of Information Studies. And it is clear that this topic I have in mind falls in the realm of the latter.

Yet, being steeped in Information Science theory, I presented a proposal in the best of positivist traditions, studying the independent variable of information behaviors of various scholarly disciplines and its effects on the dependent variable of OA knowledge and uptake.

And I was basically told it was crap. Or that I could do better, judged from the work I had already done in the course. It was suggested that I look at Discourse Analysis and apply some of my humanities background on designing something to research.

Of course I missed the class discussing Discourse Analysis, so it didn’t really occur to me. And I was confused, because I felt that the Social Science methods we were learning in the class were closer to the science then the social–derived from psychology and other such experimental milieus. I am basically interested in media theory and its relation to political economies of information.

So, discourse analysis is a good choice, except I know nothing about it. It is somewhat antithetical to the way things are done in Philosophy–while it may treat the same ideas, the method is not exactly the same. Philosophy is more about logical consistency, discourse analysis more about what is said and what is unsaid in a text, and power structures. So I am teaching myself. I have just over a week to do it.

How does one present a research proposal saying that one is going to study a text? Why do they not just do it? How do I write about ethical considerations. Or validity and reliability? Watching some other master’s theses published on the Internet in LIS, they don’t even tough on these theoretical considerations.

Any help?

But, at least while alive, at any one time someone’s thoughts are never static. Particularly when engaged in a major ongoing investigation and inner debate, we often believe one side of an issue over another. Not just in one’s lifetime, but while walking down the street. In debating with others we are won over to their side in one debate, and maybe at a further time we keep our convictions.

We have this almost religious belief, however, that one’s books are one’s final thoughts on a subject. Who’s to assume that someone hadn’t changed their minds after their last book, died with a death bed conversion. Should we not say “Augustine’s thoughts” but only “Augustine’s writings”? And what about the possibilities of deception, irony or even self-deception, fighting a position we don’t want ourselves to believe. Do I even know my position in a self-conscious fashion?

Have been working on a take home exam for Information and its Social Contexts. There are three questions, each only two double spaced pages. Now, if I was writing this in class, I would look at this as something very easy–bang out a quick outline and just start writing. However, for some reason I can’t make it work. I have a file with three half finished introductions and no desire to finish anything else. This is not the first time this has happened since I started school, and I am beginning to question whether why that is.

i question sometimes whether I work best on the computer. In undergraduate I would often force myself to begin my essay by hand, at least the introduction. I couldn’t seem to get the flow of things when writing on the keyboard. I have a nice fountain pen, and writing on paper seems to allowed things to flow nicely from my head to my fingertips in a way the computer couldn’t.

Don DeLillo writes on a manual typewriter (I have one as well) because he feels that the rhythm is all wrong at the keyboard. It is wonderfully hard to work at a manual typewriter–your finger joints begin to hurt after a while. You have to force things to work.

I find the greatest benefits to writing with pen and typewriter is that it is impossible to write faster than you can think. It is characteristic of contemporary writing for it to be overly wordy, which I think is a function of the computer.

Although I question why I was able to write this post, but not finish even two pages of work.

The uniqueness of Wikipedia is that, unlike the traditional models of creation, dissent is included in the presentation. That is, unlike a traditional encyclopedia which might frame a debate as entirely or mostly one-sided, the collaborative nature of Wikipedia illustrates how ideas work in the real world. Most topics, especially as you move away from the purely abstract to the purely concrete, don’t exist in a state of total one-sided consensus. If there is a heated debate surrounding a topic or issue, is that not in itself worthy of being known by the end user, by the very fact that it allows the reader to make an educated choice for his- or herself? Is it not information, part of the truth of the issue that such a debate exists?

While Britannica might make a note of the fact that “A certain minority of scientists disagree with the mating habits of the chimpanzee, and believe X opposed to Y,” a well-written Wikipedia article (and I don’t think this even approaches a majority) will have the same debate going on on a microcosmic scale right in the article and talk pages. A well-sourced article will have the sources for the debate right in the talk pages and the footnotes.

Again, I think at times Wikipedia is very bad, but when it is good, it is good in an entirely different way than the traditional model: not for its writing quality, but for its ability to allow dissent, not just with a single passing note, but within its very structure, within the structure of the article itself.

Bob writes:

The Wikipedia is a quite different sort of publication, which frankly needs to be read in a new way. Jaron focuses on the “finished piece”, ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic’s many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the “truth” is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide.

I agree to an extent, but I would frame it this way: it is not just that truth is found in the collision, in the “interstices” of the collision, but that the truth necessarily includes the collisions, as wholly part of itself, without assimilation, synthesis or aufgehoben.

I think this is somewhat of an enlightening notion, that we can go beyond the childishness of the debate to include the debate itself in our worldview

A few months ago my 11-year-old daughter was researching a paper on Jesse Owens for social studies. She didn’t go to the library, pull down reference books and fill up 3×5 index cards. She went onto Google. She found plenty of materials. But when I asked to read her completed paper, it was nothing but a cut-and-paste job from various web sites on Owens; she even included, quite randomly, part of a press release about some recent celebration in his honor. My daughter’s work ethic may not always be what I’d like it to be, but she’s bright and can write more than sufficiently for a 5th grade social studies class. Yet she seemed flat-out baffled when I explained to her that the paper wasn’t acceptable. “Is the information wrong?” she asked. “Did I leave something out?” No to both. But she hadn’t written her own paper, and more importantly, she hadn’t learned anything, as was clear when I began to quiz her about the content in her own “paper.” Hard to transfer knowledge in the two seconds it takes to select and move.

Could it be that his daughter has bad teachers? Maybe our education system has going to produce little worker drones opposed to men and women who can write properly?

When my daughter thinks of the library, it’s a place where she and her brother used to check out picture books and now check out chapter books. It’s not a place of research. That lack of appreciation falls on my shoulders. I need to do a better job as a parent of explaining that while the Internet can be a powerful research tool, it’s meant to assist one in doing one’s own learning, not just as a source to parrot somebody else’s words.

This is nothing different then what we all do as children. I distinctly remember totally ripping off the text book and any other book I could find when I was elementary school. I am glad that Ross is the kind of father who would looking into his children’s work, and the stray time that my father caught me cutting corners and doing a substandard job, knew to start ducking (metaphorically most of the time).

This is the way we all begin to think. Now, hopefully, we can learn that putting one’s own thoughts together is not only the proper thing to do, but can actually be enjoyable. But it is not the fault of the internet: I’m almost sure that if we found student notes from the literate class of any time or location, we could find the same kind of hack job.

Nicholas Carr: “The issue isn’t plagiarism. The issue is the meaning of “understanding” and how it’s changing.”

Andrew Keen: “”We have created technology that is encouraging a culture of intellectual kleptocracy and all anyone wants to talk about is rights.”

Please. There is nothing about digital culture which praises plagiarism. The best written blogs do engage in dialogue by quoting others, but at the same time we praise them for their original contribution. Despite Wikipedia, the author is still alive and kicking–just look at the ego-filled talk pages. The aesthetic beauty of Open Source software is not just in the copying, but in the original contribution made by each modifier. The cut in paste culture is more appropriately the “remix” culture, because it praises highly the derivative work. One of the hallmarks of the copyfight itself is its emphasis on cultures essential connection to derivation.

Hopefully Patrick Ross’s daughter has learned her lesson. Hopefully we can bring the education system to a point where we can teach children to take pride in their original creations (and digital technology makes that dead easy). But don’t fault the Internet or “Web 2.0″ for the fact that these Fifth Graders are students and we have to look at them as unfinished in their development.

Dialogue, handwriting, print, photography, cinema, radio, television, digital: all these things still exist, yet each of them in turn has become the defining media of an era, longer or shorter, only to have their dominance overtaken by the next big thing. None of them have wholly been superseded, because each has its particular communication that it is not only well suited for, but such communication is almost impossible in any other form.

Debate might still be best done in person–at least the nature of debate changes through blogs and comments. It might be that books were not well suited for handwriting, but notes to myself are, and writing in a personal journal. Philosophy and other extended treatise work well in the printed book but as Neil Postman writes, extended discourse just doesn’t work on television.

The average time a reader spends on a blog post is 96 seconds. I am a fast reader, but the average is something like 200 words a minute. It is clear that this prohibits some forms of communication. It is explains why blogs are filled with such bad writing.

It is also clear that novelty is not happening in the world of books–but books will be in print long after we’ve gone beyond the keyboard-and-screen model of computing, on to the next big phase.

Today I listened to Fred Kent on CBC radio (welcome back CBC, we missed you). He is a member of the Project for Public Spaces, a group into urban revitalization and the building of communities. I encourage everyone to look at their website, which is very interesting as well as informative, and not dry at all: it is filled with lists of great and horrible spaces, as well as pictures of cities and their wonderful city life not only here in North America, but world wide.

Their idea is that cities, specially car-driven North American ones, should return to this livable and public life of town squares, markets and urban diversity (as exemplified by Kensington Market:

The areaÕs mixed uses have the streets occupied at all times of the day. Murals on shops and local stores, layers of posters, low-rise buildings and a central park space create an oasis within the city. The mixed diversity of living spaces, independent restaurants, bars, clubs, grocery shops, coffee shops give the place a real local feel. There is a high level of neighbourhood involvement in issues surrounding Kensington market and have worked to maintain the local identity of the neighbourhood.

However, what if this applies not only to our physical space, but our mental or media based space as well. This struck me because I realized that I was listening to the radio, a medium which is slowly being eradicated (like market places or local shops): wiped out all together, or replaced with large, corporate, bland replacements of top-40 hits and sports stations (think the local mall).

I hate the term “Virtual Reality”–it reminds me of too many bad mid-90’s movies. However, our life in the media is somewhat of a “virtual space”. Small, independent booksellers are like little markets or stores, fighting against the large corporations for survival, and they give you some thing extra in that fight: a different perspective, where you can get thing you can’t get in the mainstream places. The web, originally a dynamic and bustling place, like a market place, which the PPS calls “the original meeting place”, is being dominated by government and corporate control, which is as we speak turning the web into a mall.

However, I think that the web will fare much better than the destruction of urban centres, or even of more traditional media like the radio. That is it costs nothing, or next to nothing, to start a website. And now, with the prices of hardware coming down, it costs nothing to start a web radio show–a podcast–and get it out to your listeners. Right now, it is just becoming cheap enough to produce video content, although I don’t think that video content is completely compatible with the way we interact with the internet, which is a whole other topic.

We can have this lively debate between healthy and organic spaces of information very easily: how much easier is it to make an socialist and anarchist website, then go through the rigour to make a physical anarchist bookstore, especially when it is the bank granting you a loan, the same bank you are looking to do away with.