Banning the Word “Robust” from Internet Librarian

Romulus and Remus by Rubens

From now on, librarians and other presenters will be obliged to check a thesaurus to locate synonyms for “robust.” We have had too many robust search engines, robust web sites, and robust apps.  We are overwhelmed by robust content.  Robust was fine when it used to refer to the ample people, say, in a painting by Rubens or Botero.  Its overuse at IL conferences has put the “bust” in robust.

Internet Librarian 2009 Begins

Painting in the Portola Hotel

This year will be different. The theme, “Net Initiatives for Tough Times,” means that some people will be foregrounding a link between the economy and technology, something that has been absent, for the most part, in previous conferences here in Monterey.  Granted, many of the usual suspects have not changed their session titles or their approach to thinking about technology, but a few session address specifically a world in which global capitalism has not been kind to librarians or anyone else. We might be experiencing a new awakening at IL2009.  The presuppositions might no longer be that the most important things in people lives are new outfits for their Second Life avatars or fancy extension cords with multiple outlets that encourage social networking (e.g., sharing outlets with other energy hungry users at airports).  That last example is not an invention. Someone really mentioned such a thing last year.  This year’s program makes it look as if some people realize that many other people in North America have a difficult time paying their bills, are overextended on credit, can no longer afford the latest gadget, and perhaps still cannot afford a broadband connection.

The IL crowd, in general, still does not look behind the economic and political curtain when recommending new technologies.  People do not question recommending Facebook, even though the political bent of Facebook’s founders is well known.  No one seems concerned that Google has been involved in censorship and in succumbing to the darker motives of the Patriot Act.  IL participants embraced Second Life without seeing its Linden dollars as a version of the derivatives that Wall Street traders used to fuel the debt crisis.  Maybe IL2009 will bring with it a different, wider vision.  Do not expect a sea change. The best forecast we might be able to hope for is Partly Cloudy with a Continuation of the Usual Meatballs. Still, the fog mighth have lifted.

The Two Faces of Facebook

The pressure to join Facebook surprises in light of an article in The Guardian about who runs the outfit, and what their aims happen to be.

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism.

As with many things ideological, what is happening will not be transparent.  A little digging is required.

"Let Them Eat Cake" from Flickr Creative Commons

While all of us might be operating with good intentions, the people with whom we associate (via their products, services, etc.) might have designs on us.  Another example is Whole Foods, the seemingly wholesome store that brings us organic products and paper bags for our groceries, so that we cause minimal damage to the environment.  That view of Whole Foods might need to be revised in light of John Mackey’s recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.  The man who gives you free trade coffee also espouses an agenda that supports markets ahead of people, because he has read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and he did not see anything about a duty to provide care to the sick and suffering, and if it is not spelled out in those documents, it simply is not a duty, and certainly not an American duty.

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.

Mr. Mackey’s solution to the current problems with health care in the U.S.:  Let them eat (organic) cake.

Tina Brown Conducts Premortem Investigation of Publishers at BookExpo

Martin Heidegger wrote that “language speaks” (Die Sprache spricht), and that phrase ought to have meant that this blog should have been producing entries while I was attending to other things.  While my appropriation of Heidegger for a lesson about blogs was wrong, Vicki Hearne is right in one of her poems that “time spreads from / The momentary hesitations.” The hesitation in question turned into a few months.

Book Expo 2009 - New York City - personal photo

During those months I did attend BookExpo America 2009, and it proved to be prospectively funereal, as if the gathering was a performance of the reverse of Maurice Blanchot’s The Book to Come (Le livre à venir – 1959).

Tina Brown attempted to persuade some major publishers that they will be undone by technology.  Brown used the example of her move to The Daily Beast, a web venture that she indicated altered the way she thinks about journalism and about time, because electronic publishing runs at a different pace from print journalism, one of several pertinent phenomenological differences.  The publishers would not engage directly with Brown’s analogy that book publishing faces a similar set of dire circumstances that have impacted newspapers.  Several times she attempted to solicit commentary on the analogy, and each time panel members either ignored her or talked in nonchalant tones about tangential issues, such as how they had already positioned their companies to “monetize” new technological opportunities via agreements with Amazon over content for the Kindle.  Brown wanted the panelists to engage in commentary about a vision of a world without

Tina Brown (right) - Creative Commons photo from Flickr

books on paper, a vision of a world that might not include an event like BookExpo. Eventually, Brown could not speak at a level to be heard (she arrived with what seemed to be the beginning of laryngitis), and some in the audience must have interpreted her diminishing voice as metaphorical.  About half way through the session, Brown’s husband, Sir Harold Evans, took over the moderating duties for her.

BookExpo America itself, by numerous accounts, revealed the vulnerabilities of publishers. Some did not show up for the event; others, like Macmillan, retreated to cheaper, smaller spaces off the main exhibition floor, and almost all of the publishers had reduced their offerings of advanced copies of new and forthcoming books.  Attendance was down significantly.  The future of books will likely not include some of the companies that served as the engine for this year’s BookExpo, the conference that might be one of the last places for the public to witness CEOs in denial about their current capacities to avoid the same fate as newspapers, and in different ways, libraries.

What will happen when the CEOs of major publishing houses consider books as an accident of the proliferation of paper, when the energy of their thinking turns away from “monetization” and bottom lines, and turns toward books in a richer (non-lucre-centric) context, à laFriedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900?

Agribusiness Wants You in a Persistent Vegetative State

You might need to wait to see Food, Inc. on DVD.  One theater in all of northern Texas is showing the documentary that will make you rethink your answer to the question: What’s happy about a Happy Meal?

Remember that the Texas beef industry sued Oprah and a vegetarian (Howard Lyman) for “beef defamation,” and lost. Maybe Food, Inc. will lead more people to adopt Oprah’s attitude.  The documentary illustrates the numerous ways some large agribusinesses do not want the public seeing, learning about, or thinking about the food from which their profits come.

Mark Doty over at Slate

This is not breaking news, but since I did not know it until this week, it was news for me.  Mark Doty has been participating in a lively discussion about poetry over at Slate.  That is cheering.

What causes chagrin on this topic is that Texas is losing Mr. Doty.  If you follow his blog (see the links section of this site), Mr. Doty charts his move eastward and northward.  For those of you who are his new neighbors, we Texans expect you to treat Mr. Doty well.

War of the Worlds

Internet Librarian 2007 concluded with a disguise, with Liz Lawley attired as her avatar, Maleficent, in World of Warcraft™. The audience noticed the disguise, but not what it disguised. The close of the conference coincided with Halloween, making the couture choice less suspicious, a trick instead of a treat.

Those in the front row of the auditorium Twittered about it. Bloggers took photographs with the latest cell phone technologies – the iPhone had just appeared, but apparently the content of Lawley’s talk went unnoticed. Professor Lawley returns for Internet Librarian 2008, and I worry about the librarians who listen to Professor Lawley, the ones kind enough to tolerate non-librarians at their conference. I am one of those outsiders, a non-librarian, though I am a Libran.

Dark things were displayed for the audience last year during Lawley’s presentation, though my point is a general one about a genre of presentations dealing with virtual worlds. It might be difficult to refashion the military milieu of a year ago when Lawley spoke, a time when the war in Iraq was arguably a more prominent feature in the American consciousness. Last year, many citizens took note of the quotidian killings of civilians and soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, Liz Lawley began with what she described as two “live demonstrations,” both of which involved the killing of a creature, one in Second Life™, the other in World of Warcraft™, and no one in the audience blinked. Why was most of the audience in a good humor about someone peddling death during a time of war? Librarians are highly educated people, and surely some must have rejected Lawley’s war of all against all.

In loving and proud tones, Lawley described her special involvement in World of Warcraft™, and how she embraced the competitive, agonistic nature of the game, but she made no explicit connection to the World of Warcraft™ called the Iraq war, or the so-called War on Terror. How could she not have been aware of that? Oh — her presentation fell under the category of gaming. Virtual worlds are not real worlds. I can almost sense some readers wanting at this point to yell out to me: “Get real!” Exactly.

Lawley’s barely disguised presentation did not turn on some difficult philosophical distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, á la Kant. I believe such words are banned at Internet Librarian anyway. Somehow presentations about virtual worlds receive immunity from questions about those worlds’ blatant connections to the real world (which includes the virtual), and to the real ideological implications of the activities in virtual worlds, most of those activities conforming to the most crass forms of capitalism. (Own an island in Second Life? Buy a new outfit this week with your Linden dollars? Sell your avatar on eBay?) Yet, presenters about Second Life™, World of Warcraft™, and other virtual worlds gain the real world benefits from adding an item to their CVs, convincing their institutions to use travel funds to attend a conference, and gaining professional cachet for presenting at Internet Librarian. Talking about virtual games and worlds involves necessarily the non-virtual world, and non-virtual lucre.

At Internet Librarian, the presenters at sessions on gaming technologies, virtual worlds, and the like, emphasize routinely the importance of play. Who can blame the librarians for wanting a touch of fun in their lives? Some of them sound as if they are not only doing jobs Americans don’t want to do, but also jobs librarians don’t want to do. When given the choice between looking up a 13-digit ISBN, and opening up a can of pwnage on an opponent in some game world, anyone can guess which sounds more fun. Many of the presenters at such sessions also claim on behalf of others that without an integration of this sense of play into the workplace called the institutional library, patrons (a.k.a. customers, users, guests, or smart ALACS – Advocates of Libraries Attached to Coffee Shops) will go elsewhere.

Little attention is paid to groups that would be unable to afford the latest toys mentioned at Internet Librarian’s “buzz sessions,” to the laboring – rather than playing – classes who do not have time to Twitter away, to constituencies that find the idea of Linden dollars preposterous. Internet Librarian could be about questioning and discussing the larger, and sometimes esoteric, forces that impact libraries and learning. It seems too often to be about celebrating technology at any cost, though you can drink the Kool Aid for free.

Cannery Row, Monterey on Sunday, Oct. 19