Summing Up – IL2011

It might be too early for nostalgia about Internet Librarian 2011. On the final day, I attended a session in which someone said in loud tones that what libraries need by 2015 is a single site, compatible with all browsers, enabled for all apps, chock full of every social networking opportunity, overflowing with content and opportunities for user interaction, graced with helpful but not pushy directions that perhaps would include a well-situated QR code, all in a convenient and pleasing layout. I will not say that the speaker was from Vanderbilt, because to give away the person’s identity would be unfair, especially due to the slight exaggeration in the description of what he had to say. He might as well have made an appearance in Congress to say that what we need four years from now is full employment, a balanced federal budget, world peace, and free puppies for all the children who are victims of America’s obesity epidemic (the children and their families would be forbidden from eating the puppies).

Prior to the session mentioned above, the masses huddled into the exhibit area to await the drawing for the free iPads. A free iPad makes people feel better about conferences. Mostly, a free tchotchke will ameliorate the worst conference. For those who did not win, the man from Information Today promised there would be another drawing at next year’s conference.

 

Quotation of the Day (so far)

In libraries, we’re dealing with a lot of introverts.
— Christina de Castell (Vancouver Public Library) in the session “Building Support for Change & Customer Relationships” at IL2011

Many useful and clever examples offered by the speaker from the Vancouver Library, including how the Vancouver Library managed to reduce the incidents of masturbation (by non-staff people) behind the shelving.  If you were in another track of the conference, you missed out on a session characterized by suggestions and examples applicable to a wide variety of institutions.

Stephen Abram Plays the Cyberchild Card

Children are relatively new on the historical scene, according to those who study changes in perceptions of human beings.  For example, historians of ancient Rome can cite what will probably be an astonishing example to make the case. The tombstone of Quintus Artulus, who died at the age of four at the silver mines of Baños de la Encina in Andalusia, depicts the child in a short tunic, barefoot, carrying the tools of his trade, a miner’s axe and basket.  Human beings used to be put to work as soon as they were physically able.

This stands in stark contrast to the hyper-protective attitude of many North Americans who justify all sorts of questionable actions by bringing children into the discussion as a trump card.  We have to censor books or movies to protect children.  We need sexual predator laws because so many people in the United States have seen Chris Hansen lure scores of paedophiles on to the set of his “Dateline” television show, and child labor laws, so that the country never sees another Quintus Artulus.  Federal budgets must look like Giacometti sculptures to prevent future children from having debt. The category of the child is practically sacred in some circles.

Cyberchild

Into this context comes Stephen Abram, VP of Gale Cengage, one of the speakers at IL2011’s session on “Ebooks & the Future of Publishing, Lending, Learning.” Man of forceful and interesting opinions, Mr. Abram announced that young people (never quite defined during the session, except as non-Boomers) possess “Ferrari engines” for brains and have massive attention spans. (Such massive attention spans might have called for Hummers as the vehicular example.) His rationale rested on video games. Some youngsters make their way through different levels of video games, games that sometimes take 45 days to complete. The conclusion the audience was supposed to draw from Mr. Abram’s unattributed evidence is that all young people have impressive attention spans, far greater than the lifespan of anything on Twitter that might be labeled new. Mr. Abrams uttered bold generational generalizations.

During the Q&A, a person posed a question to Mr. Abram. The questioner was someone working with underprivileged children in the Oakland area, and he noted less than impressive skills in math and English among those children. Mr. Abram’s response bypassed completely the questioner’s challenge. Instead, Mr. Abram wanted to launch a second example to confirm his generalization about children (yes, this was a session on ebooks, but human discourse sometimes takes revealing and entertaining tangents).

Mr. Abram felt obliged to mention the value of first-person shooter games (FPS among the initiated) for young people.  The train left the track by that point. Mr. Abram tossed in some comment about how FPS games seem to involve U.S. forces attacking countries on an imaginary wish list, Canada being one of those, according to Mr. Abram.  Something about the U.S. wanting Canada’s oil, if I caught the aside by Mr. Abram. I checked CNN for reports of a troop buildup on the Alberta border, but nothing. Mr. Abram ran out of time before closing the book (not an ebook, by the way) on that example, but one could suppose he would have cited data about how FPS games improve hand-eye coordination among the young, or help the young to appreciate more their bodily appendages before possibly losing those in actual battles. There was also talk from Mr. Abram about young people no longer chewing lead paint off their cribs, and that being a contributing factor to their Ferrari-like minds in comparison to Boomers. Mr. Abram had a lot to say in a short time, and my sense is that he enjoys being a provocateur, even when he is not speaking directly to the topic at hand. His assertion-spree was mainly appealing and engaging, but I speak only for myself in that, and not for a generation.

Unfortunately, it looks as if the American Academy of Pediatrics disagrees with Mr. Abram, and is warning parents to keep youngsters away from video screens.  There might also be a hole or two in the way Mr. Abram wanted to use the example of crib-chewing infants and lead paint, but back to ebooks for a moment.

The other member of the panel, David Bowers, VP at Oxford University Press, wanted the audience to know that OUP, a non-profit, is paying attention to ebooks, given that OverDrive predicts there will be 16 million downloads of ebooks this year. He called ebooks “the next frontier.”  Both Mr. Bowers and Mr. Abram talked about moving toward an ebook world in which an ebook could run on any device, be ADA compliant, and meet idiosyncratic requests of particular instructors. Copyright issues and payments to authors and other contributors remain challenges. Mr. Bowers foresees entrepreneurs rescuing the day. Neither Mr. Bowers or Mr. Abram addressed the matter of universities like Harvard and Princeton starting movements that will keep scholarly content public and at the universities.  Some universities and colleges have the resources and the talent to take publishing into their own hands.  Harvard and Princeton’s faculties have started down that road. Yet, that apparently would not bother Mr. Abram, who began his talk by refuting the notion, brought up in an earlier session in the same room, that publishers make decisions based on profit considerations.  The idea seemed to anger him, and he wanted the audience to know that everyone at his company arrived at work each morning with profit far, far, perhaps even parsecs, from their minds.

Hurrah for Hutch

Carmel Public Library - image from USGenWeb Archives

He lacked the best images in his PowerPoint slides. He was clearly a bit nervous at first. He overused the phrase “the bottom line is.” However, Hutch Tippetts delivered one of the most well-rounded presentations about the potential of libraries that I have witnessed in several trips to IL conferences. It was IL2011’s Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington moment. Unfortunately, no more than about 30 people heard what he had to say this morning in the San Carlos Ballroom.

Mr. Tippetts explained how the community became involved with the Douglas County Libraries, and how the workers at DCL thought carefully about how they could help their community. The librarians fielded children’s questions about their homework, assisted the election board, confabbed with folks from the local high school district to find out about its needs, partnered with local museums and art institutions to the point that DCL’s staff had to stop giving away so many passes to cultural events due to their popularity. They did it all without QR codes or expensive content management systems or iPads or displays of supercharged metatagging.

While outsiders might wonder about the compromises Mr. Tippetts & Company had to make by aligning themselves so closely with local business interests, and about the seeming absence of a healthy skepticism regarding the library’s larger political context, almost anyone working in the public sector could appreciate Mr. Tippett’s dilemma: the glaring fact that he has more and more library users while receiving continually fewer public dollars. That is the case with public colleges and universities as well. Enrollments balloon across the board in higher education while state legislatures slash funding. Perhaps had Mr. Tippetts time, he might have generated some ideas to shift the public’s attitude back to supporting the long-term public good with tax dollars. Public libraries are one of those goods.

Lumps Who Tout Trends

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
— Walter Benjamin

Speakers at Internet Librarian 2011 urge us to watch trends, keep up with them. The urgings are rarely accompanied by rationales. Perhaps this is ideology at work, the moment when attention to trendiness (you can substitute “information” for trendiness) needs no justification.  It calls for no one’s assent.

What is “trending” on Twitter attracts attention, but it looks as if the game is rigged.  From the description in the article, one should be wary about the validity and value of what’s “trending” on Twitter, though CNN, the Huffington Post, and other institutions allegedly devoted to providing information treat trends as news.

What we’re seeing is an outcome of a purely algorithmic mechanism, with its built in biases, hence not always intuitive or logical. The algorithm is affected by volume, changes over time, and is customized for every one of the 111 geographic regions chosen by Twitter.

According to the author’s article, Twitter has designed its display of results to prevent longevity. Built-in obsolescence does not begin to capture the level of chronos-warping and reality-warping taking place.

if one seeks to keep a topic trending, it is important to change it every few days.

In an important sense, Twitter decides what is new, and what counts as a new trend, although people who cite what is trending seem to act as if such reports are accurate, important descriptions of what is taking place, information arriving for an audience without interference or bias — mere machine counting. A number of people and entities might benefit from manufacturing trends, and others might suffer from the same manufacturing.

Readers might be interested to learn that Walter Benjamin is one of the most frequently cited critics by scholars of literature, history, and translation studies. The quotation above might be viewed as a sign that TFP is following a trend, but please keep in mind that Benjamin’s comment about information is over half a century old.

It is likely unnecessary to quantify the attention to trends at the IL2011 conference.  We might want to react to that attention the way one would when hearing the word “lump” from a doctor (see above the etymology of “trend”) — with alarm.

Joe Murphy as Apple Advertisement – We’ve Been Played

from Roger Budney Fine Art Gallery in Carmel

Welcome to Internet Librarian 2011.  After today’s keynote address and the emphasis on entrepreneurship, it might have seemed natural to some that IL’s “business model” began to work about as well as the U.S. economy. Jenn Van Grove had to bow out of her session to be replaced by Joe Murphy.  The wireless network in the room became overwhelmed, and so your friendly, neighborhood IL bloggers who had come to hear Van Grove could not post, and all the social networking activity in the room was stymied, the perfect atmosphere for a conference emphasizing the wonders of the latest technology.  Mr. Murphy placed the sour cherry on this communicative cake when he wanted to demonstrate for the audience a potentially humorous response to a question posed to Siri, the name of the voice recognition software on the 4s iPhone Mr. Murphy waited for two hours last week to purchase. Mr. Murphy lacked a data connection to engage Siri in “conversation.”

Why was the audience subjected to Mr. Murphy shilling for Apple?  How many slides did we need to see from the screen of his 4S, sometimes working with Spotify, playing a tune from the Muppets, sometimes illustrating his love of “LivingSocial”? Maybe Mr. Murphy was “branding” his presentation, without needing encouragement from Tim Spaulding, CEO of LibraryThing, who said later in the day that “branding is a good thing; you need to know where things come from.” He has that wrong, but that is a story for another day.

Mr. Murphy seemed to be coming from a most temporary space, somewhere that would last a couple of weeks to a year (until the next IL conference?), because Mr. Murphy asserted more than once that, of course, the audience wanted to be aligned with the latest trends.  The most telling part of his push on this front — his endorsement of Google Plus (g+), manifested itself about midway into the talk, despite Mr. Murphy’s awareness that the graph for Google Plus subscribers shows a turn south.  “The past week’s stats are down,” but, according to Mr. Murphy, the audience should not abandon Google Plus.  Occasionally, we are supposed to go rogue and ignore one week’s trend lines. Mr. Murphy characterized the audience as living on the edge, on the cusp of “the latest” thingamajig, and he even had a photograph of a cliff’s edge to bring the point to a point of no return.  From Mr. Murphy’s perspective, librarians constitute different people, edgy people, the kind who know about the latest and best betas (yes, that’s a noun from Gary Price’s session).

According to Mr. Murphy, librarians are also lemmings. They latch on to the trends. If Oprah endorses some particular piece of software or CNN purchases a technology company, that is sufficient reason for librarians to jump on board. If Oprah and CNN are doing X, then, to cite Mr. Murphy’s reasoning, X is a good thing.  I wish that I were exaggerating Mr. Murphy’s statements.

When presenters at IL are not invoking linguistic violence through “killer” apps or descriptions of “World of Warcraft,” many of them express implicitly or explicitly — and sometimes with religious fervor — a Weltanschauung utterly compatible with the worst aspects of late capitalism: the rush to trendiness, to have the latest and fastest gadgets, to be seen with the right products and “cool” people who think happily of themselves as commodities.  The inability to push back on IL’s continual trend toward endorsement of the capitalism that keeps crashing results in clunky, uncomfortable language at some sessions, such as the one on “21st Century Book Recommendation Engines,” during which almost all the CEOs stumbled when trying to find a word for people who go to libraries. Almost all of them felt obliged to cite all the currently acceptable terms: patrons, users, customers. They have no problem thinking of book readers and researchers as customers, and IL has an entire session with an exclamation point on the idea (“It’s All About the Customer!”).

One more bit of evidence. Gary Price recommended that his audience pay attention to Quixey, because Eric Schmidt is an investor, and Mr. Price noted how quickly the killer apps and best betas last sometimes no more than six months, because the start-up companies and their employees often take a trip on a technological Titanic.  Mr. Price’s advice is straight out of All the President’s Men: follow the money. Pay attention (only) to companies who have well-known and/or wealthy investors, because those companies are more likely to survive.  They will survive the year or more it takes them to become untrendy, uncool, and unedgy (a.k.a., dull), and thus fodder for humor at future IL meetings. (Think about the absence of any “Second Life” session this year when the Lifers outnumbered the sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf just a few years ago.)

The most recent rethinking of this line of behavior can be found in Jonah Lehrer’s “The Drive to Be Different,” a revealing article by someone not known as a critic of late capitalism, but who is now attempting to acknowledge its consequences for the kind of audience that attends IL conferences.

The real point of this paper, though, is that we can longer write off the “drive for distinctiveness” as merely a habit of insecure teenagers. Instead, it appears to be a pretty essential component of Westerners — that’s why it’s engaged in a deep psychological dialogue with rewards for food and sex. Of course, this won’t be news to retailers. They’ve long catered to our desire for uniqueness, selling us mass-produced commodities that promise to express our real, authentic selves. It’s not until we’re standing in line waiting for a cappuccino that we realize how badly we’ve been played.

Internet Librarian 2011 – Tweeteedumb, Tweeteedee, & the Revolution

The Fourth Policeman is scheduled to cover Internet Librarian 2011. The conference theme is a step down from a few years ago when the organizers found it impossible to deny that the conference was taking place within capitalism. The financial horrors of 2008 could not be avoided, except by the organization’s  executives’ refusal to reduce temporarily registration fees or to move the show to a place that would offer an answer to the question: Who would attend Internet Librarian if it were not in Monterey? This year, apparently suggesting — and this might be a stretch — a linkage to the Arab Spring, the theme is “revolution,” specifically “revolutionizing the internet through content and other stuff.” The Fourth Policeman was not asked to the executive committee meeting where seers settled on “revolution” for the conference moniker. On October 19, when the conference ends, expect the internet to be transformed, utterly new, bursting with retina-ripping content you have never before witnessed. Is the conference concluding with a screening of one of Eisenstein’s films?

The only “revolution” in Internet Librarian 2011 that TFP has detected thus far is that Jeff Wisniewski’s name appears only three times in the program this year (if my pdf item counter worked without a glitch), down from previous conferences when it seemed, like Celine Dion in Las Vegas, he should have had his own permanent performance space at the conference hotel.

The theme for this year’s conference ought to have been lowered expectations.

If you plan to attend, bring your “revolution” notebook/checklist with that notebook/checklist possibly linked to the usual social networking sites (see usual Lifehacker entry on how that happens), and keep score of the following as you attend each session:

1. A presenter makes a snide comment about Microsoft. (5 points)
2. A presenter mentions her “blogaversary” expecting immediate applause. (3 points)
3. A presenter points out that a multi-pronged electrical outlet is a “form of social networking.” (6 points)
4. A presenter praises anything connected to Apple and has no idea about this, and thus can feel no complicity about being an Apple polisher. (10 points)
5. A presenter explores as a tangent to the advertised topic of the session the notion that things labeled open-source equal political freedom. (4 points)
6. A presenter exhibits no knowledge that the internet’s genesis as a U.S. military project has relevance to the present state of the internet, and is not prepared to concede the sideshow point that those responsible for Arpanet never envisioned public use of such networks. (5 points)
7. A presenter weaves a colorful, embittered tale in which the presenter is a cutting-edge, hipster-worker in a library, usually dressed in black, battling constantly against uninformed, majority Luddites who neither appreciate nor understand the presenter’s “revolutionary” suggestions and credentials. (8 points)
8. A presenter touts the inspirational/revolutionary possibilities available via the iPad. (2 points)
9. If #8 includes computer projected images of David Hockney’s iPad drawings, add a 3 point bonus.
10. A presenter declares that gaming is an underused, undervalued road to advanced cognitive skills and/or to world peace — world peace being the stage after the IL2011 “revolution.” (5 points)
11. If World of Warcraft is an example used in #10, add 20 bonus points.

Toward the end of the conference, calculate the total score, and any number greater than one means that IL2o11 failed in its “revolutionary” aspirations, but managed, once again, to reinforce its own ideology.

David Hockney artwork