I'll Take Boredom Over Facebook Anyday

Socrates:
"The unexamined life is not worth living."

About two weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about a couple we both knew. They'd been married for a few years, not too long (I can't remember how long exactly), and as far as I knew, were very happy with one another. But earlier that day, the wife, we'll call her Jen, changed her relationship status on Facebook to single. The status change had for some reason popped up on my news feed and when I saw it I had a reaction that's probably pretty common (no matter how frequently people get divorced) and not all that interesting. I thought, "Holy crap!" or some derivation of that general sentiment. After a quick peek below the post, my initial reaction was forgotten and replaced by curiosity and disbelief that some of Jen's "friends" had actually "liked" her status. So, after my friend and I finished joking about all the possible meanings and interpretations of an individual "liking" someone else's divorce--are they reveling in their pain; happy that their friend is out of an unhappy relationship; are they, by clicking "like", stating their intentions to court the new divorcee (the meaninglessness of such a vapid statement makes the mind reel and the imagination go wild)--and so we went on and joked at the simplicity with which Facebook and other social-media sites try to distill really complicated and at times morally ambiguous events and emotions into trite and therefore meaningless bites of data. It wan't long after we ceased our rants that we realized we might see the husband, we'll call him Joe, at an event later that night.

"So do we bring up the divorce?"

Information wants to be expensive.

flickr user nirak

In the late 60's, Stewart Brown posited that information wants to be expensive and free at the same time. That the tension between these competing desires will not go away, they will always fight one another. This continues to be true, and Aaraon Swartz, the young co-founder of reddit found dead in his apartment on Friday, is yet another casualty in that conflict.

To some degree this post is one of those tangential “I was there” articles that come up when some tragedy occurs. I was working on my Library Science masters degree in Boston, and had a staff position as the Stacks Manager for the Architecture and Urban Planning library at MIT, when Aaron hacked us for a bunch of JSTOR articles. At the time the MIT libraries community seemed amused, and the vendor was satisfied when he turned the files over to them.

The Department of Justice, however, went on to press charges. With an attitude characterized by some as a witch hunt, they sustained pressure on Aaron Swartz for what amounted to exploiting a loophole to check out too many books. They continued until, just this past Friday, a truly great man took his life under the relentless threat of decades in prison.

Why call Aaron Swartz a great man? Among many other accomplishments, he helped invent the RSS protocol that brings you this blog, and updates many of your favorite websites. He, as mentioned above, helped found reddit.com, "the front page to the internet," a site that even the President of the United States uses. Aaron worked on the Creative Commons License that lets people freely share their artistic work while keeping their ownership of it. He also founded Demand Progress, which galvanized the public to demand the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, which would have hobbled how we share content on the internet.

He also was a huge ally of libraries, someone who really got what we’re about. Aaron was a founding force behind open access online library, Openlibrary.org. One that sought to have a wiki page for every book, and share its data with anyone in the world. And he fought against the great paywall database vendors put up to keep information out of the hands of the people who can use it, in favor of those who can pay for it.

Information wants to be free, because it’s the nature of people to share. It also want to be expensive because individuals can make resources valuable by keeping them scarce. But you can help break that tension. If you are in the position to publish your research, think about making it available in an Open Access forum or under a Creative Commons license. There is a wide community of scholars who could benefit from your ideas, but who may not be able to access them otherwise.

Columbus and a Sea of Blue Ideas

Columbus Breaking the Egg (Christopher Columbus) by William Hogarth

For a scientist -- or anyone for that matter -- to proclaim the discovery of a physical thing (a country, a particle, a planet, a new species of fish) has always rubbed me as a potentially childish endeavor, and, maybe more to the point, an altogether arrogant claim.* How could they possibly know, for sure, that in the thousands of years of recorded history no one else has found what they have?

Since we have recently celebrated Columbus Day, let’s use him as an example. “He,” the claim goes, “discovered America.” Well, actually, no. There are lots of things wrong with this claim, but I’ll only go into a few very briefly because the topic has been belabored by so many historians and activists that my adding to that body of lit. will do no one any good:  (1) he found a country/continent that was inhabited for about 12,000 years prior to his arrival, by an Asian population that walked an unimaginably long and icy bridge into Canada (which now, of course, isn’t there); (2) even if we try to claim that he was the first European to find the continent, there are problems here too; Vikings living on the southern tip of Greenland had traded and frequented the continent (they called it Vinland) long long before Spain traveled much further west than the Canary Islands; (3) he didn’t find America, he found Cuba.

Of course, this, the historical, empirical version of Columbus is not the person that we celebrated this past Monday. We celebrated the symbol of Columbus. A symbol that, for better or worse, is the symbol of America: determined; individualistic; steadfast in the face of the great, dangerous expanses of the unknown; slightly arrogant and reckless; and ultimately victorious in his endeavor to go where no one thought was possible – to add icing to the cake, he also came back rich. The story of Columbus mirrors the founding story of the US so well that to critique Columbus, even Columbus as myth, while continuing to sing the refrain of our own origin story, would rival the appearance of a patient suffering a traumatic brain hemorrhage caused by a great unknown cognizant dissonance. So here we are, kind of stuck with him, and a story we now know to be bull--

The Wizard and the Great Zeitgeist

"House of Knowledge" by Jaume Plensa 

If the internet or blogs were old enough to have what one might call a tradition, we can be sure that it would be predominantly based in retelling what is new, what is breaking or just broken, what is currently trending or being viewed, right now, at this moment, look! But the internet and blogs are still young, and a few years of repetitive habits does not a tradition make. But leaving aside questions of classifying a tradition, I believe I will break the habit, pattern… whatever you want to call it, and dredge from its recesses two discoveries – one very old, and one not quite so old (but still predating the Google-epoch*). Both of which I believe shed some light on how the internet has changed the way information is spread, though doesn't change the ways we interpret it.**

Anyone with a cursory interest in current events must feel at times inundated by the constant flow of news and discoveries and new information. It would be a full time job for any one person to keep up with all the revelations of any given sort circulated online. Everything from large, possibly world changing events – like the Arab Spring or evidence of the Higgs Boson (the “God particle”) – to less-than-world-changing revelations, like did you hear Rafalca, Mitt Romney's ballerina horse, lost the Olympics, or that the Orioles have yet to squander their winning record – and that’s to say nothing of the I-wish-that-tree-would-fall-in-a-forest-without-being-heard revelations that are tweeted and re-tweeted from the many TMZ-like sites that populate the web. Save a few controversial exceptions (evolution springs to mind), we accept most of these discoveries and news stories with an unspoken understanding that though it might be true today, tomorrow is another day entirely.

Ideas on truth and accuracy fluctuate as the piles of information grow. It seems we have cultivated an understanding that truth is a matter to be decided later, that we will either take note as we watch the evidence grow or we will quickly forget when another event comes storming along and blows the whole mess somewhere beyond our concern and past the scope of our Yahoo news feed. Without even giving it much thought, we assume that someone else has reviewed and edited all these tiny pieces of info; we trust, intrinsically, subconsciously, that the framework exists to discern truth from fiction and will eventually let us know the verdict. Yet this framework for fact-checking ­– as vague and large and unclassifiable as it is – breaks down more than we care to imagine. Most of the falsities are quickly forgotten, but others, more than I care to recall, get stuck in the teeth of the Great Zeitgeist, and live, looming over us, as a reminder of how gullible we sometimes are (what religion is Obama again?).

Olympics, Twitter, and Access to Information

The London 2012 Olympics are embracing the social web, especially Twitter. You can follow just about every athlete, team and news organization, along with a variety of Olympic Twitter feeds. Twitter is a social media platform that allows users to report current events in 140 characters or less.

In the United States, the International Olympic Committee licensed the Olympics content exclusively to NBC. Despite record-breaking viewership, NBC has been receiving a lot of criticism for its coverage. The Twitter hash tag #NBCfail has been trending as more people turn to the Internet to voice their complaints. It first started with the opening ceremony, and continued with complaints about tape delays and spoilers by NBC’s own network.  

The main issue is access to information. At a time when the Internet allows everyone to receive real-time information, how can information distributors like NBC balance the uncontrollable online updates with the six hour time difference between London and the United States (east coast)? Most of the medal competitions are tape delayed to appear during prime time, when most people would be watching.

The opening ceremonies were broadcasted at 7:30pm eastern. The tape delay wasn’t as much of an issue, but the fact that NBC edited the ceremony was, especially when NBC cut a part of the ceremony interpreted as a dedication to terrorist victims, and instead aired an interview between Ryan Seacrest and Michael Phelps. One vocal critic of NBC’s decisions is Jeff Jarvis, author of Public Parts and a transparency champion. He tweeted “the last reason for a channel on TV is curation. But if you don't give me the best, why will I need you?” Jarvis’ point brings up the idea that if NBC is going to control the content, there should be some value added – although, the concept of what’s valuable is subjective. In this case, NBC can say (and has said) the value they added is tailoring the content to American audiences.  

Not only was content left out, but a recording of the opening ceremonies in its entirety isn’t available online. In addition, live-streaming of the Olympics events is restricted to those who subscribe to cable:

Shouldn’t this information be freely and readily available?

But this content isn’t owned by “the people” – it’s owned by the International Olympic Committee. You’ve maybe heard Stewart Brand’s quote, “Information wants to be free,” but he also said “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.” One article pointed out that streaming the content online isn’t financially prudent for NBC. A broadcast audience is worth much more to the network, and they’ve been showing up in millions. Until a financially sustainable model is developed for online content or the audience stops tuning in to broadcast television, the content is much more valuable to NBC through tape-delayed television.

Have you been following the Olympics? Do you watch the events during prime time or do you keep track in real time through websites and social media?   

In 2016, the Olympics will be in Rio de Janeiro, which is only a one hour time difference from the east coast of the United States. This might remove some of the tape delay issues, but won’t remedy the access to live-streaming content – valuable information that networks won’t want to give away freely. 

Finding good information online: A Biologist's perspective

It is fairly easy to find information on the internet, but how can we find good information on the web?  A blogger for Scientific American provides several tips for finding high quality content on the web.  Among his recommendations are to use specialized search engines and databases as well as to fact check everything you find.  His first piece of advice, "don't be scared of scientific papers" might be particularly interesting to many students at UB when they find themselves needing to find scholarly journal articles.  First, the article explains what these are, and then provides some tips for how to find citations for scientific articles.  Before you get discouraged by his list of options for actually getting a copy of the articles you find, know that you can get almost all of these items through Langsdale Library.

Many of these articles will be on of Langsdale's online databases.  But which one should you check?  You you can use the library's "journal finder" to look for a journal title and see which databases have it. If we don't have it available online, you can get the article in 2-3 business days by completing an Interlibrary Loan request. 

And of course, you can search the library databases directly, which gives you many more options for good websites with which to start your search.  So the article provides some good tips to anyone who wants to find good information online, but for folks at UB, it is a whole lot easier.

College students eager to learn but need help negotiating the information overload!

Seattle Times guest columnists Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg push back on the prevailing idea that today's college students are slackers. Rather, these researchers argue that colleges must retool to help young people learn the skills to negotiate the vast amount of information at their disposal. Read their column here.