Archive for the ‘Culture & Society’ Category

Did you know that the New York Public Library has Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s slippers and Charles Dickens’s favorite letter-opener in its collection? Or that they have a special collection of 40,000 restaurant menus, dating from the 1850s to the present? Robin Finn at the New York Times has written an excellent article about some of the NYPL’s more interesting items in Secrets of the Stacks.

This new video about the changing media landscape was developed for the Media Convergence Forum in partnership with The Economist and provides some interesting statistics including:

• The average American teen sends 2,272 texts per month.
• 40 million people have been Rickrolled.
• 95% of all songs downloaded last year weren’t paid for

via The Bivings Report

New York Magazine discusses the problem of attention in Sam Anderson’s In Defense of Distraction. The article discusses information overload, the limitations of attention, modern multi-tasking, and the advantages of a “new techno-cognitive nomadism”.

“As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. We recently elected the first-ever BlackBerry president, able to flit between sixteen national crises while focusing at a world-class level. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.”

Steven Johnson writes about the future of the book for the Wall Street Journal in How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write. In this insightful article, the author poses that new devices such as the Kindle and iPhone are changing the way people read, buy, and write books. According to Johnson, books will become increasingly social and accessible, however this increased access may lead to dimished attention, books being written with search engine rankings in mind, and new distribution models such as paying per chapter.

“Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article — sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument…

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”

Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett, (a lexicographer with a specialty for new and slang words), at the New York Times have issued a list of The Buzzwords of 2008. This list of nearly 40 new turns-of-phrase runs the gamut from political buzzwords to motion-picture-inspired catchphrases. Here are just a few that made the list:

• Edupunk - Hands-on, DIY-inspired teaching.
• Longphoto - A very short video lasting less than 90 seconds.
• Twitt - A combination of all the forms of Twitter, Twitt-, tweet, etc.
• Photobombing - Purposefully placing yourself in the background of someone else’s photo.
• Twi-Hard - Fans of the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, (rhymes with “Die Hard”)

Be sure to check out the full article for more. And if you enjoy reading about buzzwords, you might try heading over to Royal Pingdom for Current trends for Web terminology and buzzwords.

A project of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law presents the ins-and-outs of public domain, fair use, and copyright law in an easy-to-understand format. This 70-page, masterfully illustrated and incredibly detailed comic book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and offers free digital versions for download as well as makes individual pages accessible for remixing. If you’re interested in learning more about intellectual property law in an increasingly digitized and mashed-up culture, or you’re on the lookout for instructional materials, you’ll want to check this one out.

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has penned a two-part series of articles about today’s information overload issue. In part one: Info Overload: The Problem, Perez defines the problem and clues us in to the issue of too much information and not enough filters:

“Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.”

In part two: Info Overload: What Can We Do?, Perez goes on to suggest some possible coping strategies for dealing with too much information including:

• Create a Routine
• Easily Distracted? Dial Down the Noise…Temporarily
• Learn To Embrace Distraction
• Create Your Own Filters

This chart from Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, written by analysts at Forrester, illustrates some interesting trends dealing with who people put their trust in when it comes to information about products and services. The data shows that people trust friends as information sources above traditional media and expert opinions. Experts are relied upon only slightly more (3% more) than the reviews of strangers on websites. Josh Bernoff gives some suggestions about what this might mean for your brand in his post Data chart of the week: who do people trust?, including a tip that there might already be reviews of your organization on websites such as Yelp and the Consumerist.

This trend of placing trust in one’s peers over industry experts is echoed by the Edelman Trust Barometer 2008:

“In Brazil, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, “a person like me” is considered the most credible source of information about a company.”

The PBS series Frontline will investigate the reality of teens on the Web in Growing Up Online which airs tonight at 9pm ET.

“In “Growing Up Online,” FRONTLINE peers inside the world of this cyber-savvy generation through the eyes of teens and their parents, who often find themselves on opposite sides of a new digital divide. From cyber bullying to instant “Internet fame,” to the specter of online sexual predators, FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin investigates the risks, realities and misconceptions of teenage self-expression on the World Wide Web.”

Wired Magazine describes the formidable competition at the National Texting Championship held earlier this year in New York City. Over 300 competitors from across the country joined together in the Roseland Ballroom to put their texting skills to the test in a series of single-elimination rounds in which participants were given increasingly difficult phrases to type into their cell phones for a chance at $25,000.

In his article, In the World of Competitive Texting, Over 20 Is Over the Hill, Neil Janowitz tells us of the de-throning of a West Coast champ, and the rise of a thirteen year old texter, who according to the event website, sends over 4,000 text messages a month.

Latest posting from the Educause Librarian is “7 Things You Should Know About Augmented Reality”.

Augmented reality adds information and meaning to a real object or place. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality does not create a simulated reality. Instead, it takes a real object or space and uses technologies to add contextual data to deepen students’ understanding of it. To the extent that instructors can furnish students with a broad context for understanding the real world, students are more likely to comprehend and remember what they are learning. Through exposing students to an experiential, explorative, and authentic model of learning early in their higher education careers, augmented reality may help shift students from passive to active learning modes and thus become more successful learners.

The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, how it works, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use ELI’s “7 Things You Should Know About…”  briefs to gain a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In addition to the “7 Things You Should Know About…”  briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more visit the ELI Resources page.

Take a look at Teen Web a the Nashville Public Library. Flickr images, Teen Web Links on Del.icio.us, and embedded player showcasing the Teen Song Writing contest…and more!

If you’re a teen songwriter, and you didn’t participate in Nashville Public Library’s first ever teen songwriting contest, you missed out!

Finishes with a neat row of avatars, introducing the Library crew. It’s worth taking a look a the Web 2.0 features of Teen Web.

[From: Tame the Web]

The ease of communication as social networks grow highlights an emerging aspect of culture and society that librarians will want to keep in touch with. What are the communication changes that are taking place that relate to the history of protest? So just what is a smartmob? Stay in touch with the subversive dimension of social networking in our  society.

This book will explore of the use of communication networks in the context of activism. It Is about how networks emerge, what they look like, and how they act. An example from the Civil Rights era known as the Nashville sit-ins will set the stage by illustrating how a basic sit–in functions. A protest known as the Battle of Seattle will be used to show how the advances of communication and organization that have been facilitated by mobile communications technologies.12 It is imperative that the protestors of today understand how modern communications technology can improve the efficiency, precision, and effectiveness of protest.

This short, stunning, PDF by Shlomo Goltz on “Evolution of the Protest” is a must-read for students of smart mobs. Goltz combines scholarship and graphic design into a short booklet.

[From: Smart Mobs]