Category Archives: Culture

My thoughts on #savelibraries

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Ever since I met the guys behind Voices for the Library at Barcamp Canterbury, I’ve been thinking about libraries. I walk by my local library twice daily and always struggle to actually spot people using it.

I have a simple conclusion. Libraries need to evolve.

Digital copies of texts are treated just the same as the physical paper copy – the number available on loan is limited, and those wishing to borrow / access the content must wait for it to become available. Is that sustainable? Piracy of music and film has come about in part due to there not being sufficiently easy and free access to content. Would books too become something that suffers.

What about Google Books and the blatant and deliberate move to scan books and ignore the copyright on each? And how do libraries expect to survive when Amazon is forever eating into their core activities?

A school librarian I spoke to raised concerns over pandering to the needs of the masses – why on earth does a library need to stock music CDs and movie titles on DVD? These are now so cheap to buy, rent or stream that it seems unnecessary for a library to commit time, money and resources to stocking them.

From this piece in the LA Times titled Librarian’s words are binding:

Libraries, my son says, “Organize, preserve, and provide access to the human record. I’m talking clay tablets, medieval manuscripts in unknown languages, and Nietzsche’s laundry list, not to mention ‘Meet the Fockers’ and tons of other popular and not-so-popular materials of all sorts. They are increasingly one of the last free spaces for people to meet and do homework, hang out and read, attend a free lecture or a reading, or look for a job, and to get assistance along the way.”

Some libraries have made moves into new business activities, such as launching coffee shops or shared workspace. Many co-locate with other public services. What will happen if / when those activities become top priority as they constitute the greatest amount of revenue generation?

I believe that libraries should be hiring and training librarians to become online content curators. Human filters who find quality information online and curate it. A good librarian is widely read and able to guide you to great resources. I’m suggesting they should be digesting online content and packaging related topics into volumes that we can archive.

Google, Facebook, Twitter et al – all provide us with a real-time stream of news and information. Vast quantities of data are created every second that gets forgotten a day later. The Library of Congress is archiving every tweet, so why can’t all libraries play their part globally in archiving the history we’re creating online?

How would this be implemented? With the bookshelf manifesto for guidance, I have some ideas:

- Local libraries could scour the web for data related to their immediate geographic proximity, i.e. generated in the area or written about the area.
- Information should be stored in a format that is open and accessible to other libraries, although perhaps not in a centralised repository, and that will stand the test of time.
- Free from censorship or influence.
- All information stored must be as it was created with attribution to its creator.
- Tagging each item of information with keywords would allow for related information to be easily accessed.
- No priority should be given to any specific topic and the library should have no set agenda. Librarians could become expert curators of topics or areas – just as you’d expect with journalists or historians.

What would this mean? In essence libraries become museums for the knowledge and information we publish online. The back office becomes the focus of library operations and there’s less concern about visitor numbers.

There is a lot that needs to be established and my biggest unanswered question is how would this be funded? I believe that curated content holds a huge amount of value that I don’t doubt private industry would wish to pay for, but would that compromise the freedom (both meanings) of the service?

Interface Bilinguality

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Source: AttentionIndustry
Good points. At some stage, I’m going to have to try an Apple product.

I’ve been using an iPhone nearly exclusively for 3 years, first a 3G, then an iPhone 4. I own an iPad, and a MacBook for my home computing.

After losing my iPhone and needing to replace it, I realized I was becoming interface monolingual, and it was probably hurting my thinking.

One of my biggest regrets is that I don’t speak anything other than english – I’m convinced this limits my ability to think outside of my ‘cultural box’.

I think that, as much as I love Apple products, doing all of my personal, and much of my professional, computing in OSX and derivatives, has disconnected me from a realm of possibility.

I use a windows machine at work, and have for the 4.5+ years I’ve been a Mac owner, so I still have some idea as to the desktop reality of non-Mac users.

But only owning Apple smartphones is a dangerous thing for someone who needs to think in terms of different user experiences and expectations. I might like the simplicity and user interface of iOS, but that doesn’t mean I can get away with being ignorant to the behaviours and options open to an Android user.

So, I replaced my lost iPhone with a samsung galaxy s2. It’s a great phone, totally different, and yet very similar (at least, similar enough to incite a lawsuit for copying apple’s industrial design). And I’m enjoying the feeling of learning a new user experience ‘language’, and seeing what assumptions and metaphors I’ve been ignoring completely, because I didn’t have the gestural or behavioural breadth to really understand that there were optional at all.

The underlying suggestion, of course, is that people working with technology and communication should intentionally avoid letting a set preference, or a belief in what is ‘best’ limit them from being fluent in different OSes, different hardware configurations, and different software choices.

You never appreciate the decisions that have been made, or not made, until you can see what happens when you head down other paths.

Designing systems for transparency robustness

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Source: Joi.ito

I’ve had some interesting conversations about the role of transparency and privacy and I have an opinion about this. I think that we have a world where those in power have secrecy and citizen are forced to be transparent. I think that modern technology has made this increasingly so. I think that fundamentally, it should be the opposite. Public figures and institutions in power should be forced to be transparent and private citizen should have privacy and the right to speak without fear of retribution or persecution. I think this is essential for democracy and open society and we need to push for and enable this to happen.

As we work on this process of making the powerful transparent, we run into some difficulties because most institutions, even those that are for the most part well-meaning and good, are not robust against transparency because they haven’t been designed to be transparent.

It reminds me of software projects that try to “go open source” after they’ve been written. It’s often nearly impossible because the code is a mess. When people write software to be open, they typically write it in a way that is understandable to the outside and isn’t embarrassing. For instance, I know some developers who use obscene words for their variables or vent their frustration about their love life in the comments in their code. They’d lose their jobs or their spouses if their code was suddenly “open”.

In most powerful institutions, corners are cut and methods are used in a somewhat “ends justify the means” sort of way. There are a lot of things that are done and said behind closed doors that wouldn’t survive public scrutiny, but have become common practice. In many cases, these practices aren’t necessarily critically wrong, but just embarrassing or politically incorrect in some way.

I believe that Wikileaks is just the beginning of a bigger trend where it will become harder and harder to hide information and citizen counter-surveillance will become a norm rather than an exception.

I think that this will cause a lot of pain to powerful institutions – some will be overthrown or crushed. However, I think that we can build institutions that are robust against transparency if we design them that way from the beginning. It will be harder than learning to write open source software, but I believe that in the end we’ll have a society that is better, stronger, more effective and fair.

Generation F*cked

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Recommended reading – Generation F*cked by Maria Hampton at Adbusters.org

As the generational divide deepens, it makes sense for the older generations to stake their claim now, while they have the power of the state on their side. Aside from handing out more than 10,000 Asbos (Antisocial Behaviour Orders, a cross between a human parking ticket and the sort of condemned notice you sometimes see on the walls of derelict buildings), the petty misanthropy that bans hoodie-wearing teenagers from shopping malls, forces parenting classes on failing single mums, and allows 79 percent of police forces to impose curfews on children, comes easily to a nation that thought up the idea that its young should be seen and not heard. But never before have we put them under this degree of surveillance while simultaneously turning a blind eye to our adult responsibilities. Satellites track their phones, marketeers groom them on cyberspace, police add the DNA from 600 innocent children a week to a 50,000-sample database, while libraries fingerprint them to borrow books – all linked by rafts of new childhood databases joining the dots. In an age of hyper-individualism we are recoiling from the very children we have created. Monitoring is not enough, we must be protected from them.

Wil Wheaton adds:

Unless we (in America and the UK) take an honest and critical look at the root causes of unrest, and stop dismissing it as nothing more than opportunists engaging in mayhem (though that is, obviously, part of it), our entire society is fucked.

I don’t condone what’s happening in England, but I sure as hell understand it. If you don’t give an entire generation a reason to care about their country — some ownership in it, and a voice in determining its (and their) future — it shouldn’t surprise you when that generation doesn’t give a fuck and burns it all down.

Those interviewed last week about their involvement in the riots have spoken of being caught up in a collective feeling that they were trying to prove something. That doesn’t excuse the opportunistic ransacking and looting that accompanied confrontations with police, nor does it justify the loss of life and injuries inflicted.

How the dust settles will determine when the next outburst takes place. How do we fix a damaged generation?

periwackles asks:

What can the future possibly look like when there are so many people who feel so disconnected to anything that nothing matters but their own moment-to-moment needs?

The differing characteristics of the rioters are explored in Brendan O’Neill’s piece on The Drum Opinion, where he outlines the cult of victimhood upheld by both the “nihilistic urban youth” and the “middle-class radicals”:

…neither side contributes a great deal to everyday society, the rioters being largely unemployed or even unemployable youth, and their middle-class cheerleaders being either permanent students or professional campaigners… both sides live off other people: many of the rioters are dependent on the welfare state while their head-tilting, doe-eyed sympathisers either also live off the welfare state (student loans etc) or off their parents’ estate (access to family cash etc).
…both of these sections of society have been well and truly schooled in the modern-day cult of victimhood, in the grating trend for embracing self-pity over pursuing political goals or self-improvement, leading them to view every hardship that they face as an insurmountable affliction enforced on them by The Man.
[...]
What unites these two groups is not, of course, shared life experiences or similar living conditions, but rather a victim mentality, a view of themselves as rather sad and pathetic individuals who will scream and scream and scream if they don’t get what they want. They share an infantilised view of themselves and of the world around them, believing that others, primarily the state, should take care of them. So where the student rioters were effectively pleading with the state to support them financially into their early adult lives, the urban rioters are likewise largely dependent on welfarism. What both sides seem to lack is self-respect, moral resourcefulness, social wherewithal.

From the Guardian, Paul Lewis’s coverage of those chaotic five days highlights a need for shared values to find their place amongst communities.

He speaks of treating a boy, only 12 years old, with a bleeding hand, and of a stab victim being cared for by a group of teenagers, until his ambulance arrived, who then hurled abuse at the police escort. What stopped these young people fighting was eventual restraint:

So why did the English riots of 2011 stop? Police chiefs will argue their strategy, which took three days to formulate, of flooding the streets with riot officers, proved a significant deterrence. The fact police numbers were bolstered by people determined to protect their own streets must also have had an impact, as did the rain.
But there was also a social pressure at work, and it came from the very same “culture” that David Cameron has blamed for the riots.
I spoke to parents who said they had persuaded their children to stay indoors, and young people who had held back their friends from taking part.
Even in the midst of the seeming immorality of rioting without a cause, there were signs of a moral compass, with young men trying to reign back others they felt were going too far.
[...]
Randhawa was talking hurriedly about shared religious values and the need for unity when a teenager in a mask barged in. “Fuck that man, I’m gonna get a gun and shoot somebody,” he said.
[...]
Disorder could still break out, but whatever happens in England over the coming days, the debate on that petrol forecourt should serve as a hopeful reminder; of grieving young men who would show restraint in a time of crisis that some would say has eluded politicians, police chiefs and judges.

Our paradigm is flawed, we react to situations by taking the most radical directions. We examine what problems were faced in the past and use the solution from a loosely similar event. Society needs an extreme makeover.