SIVACRACY.NET

Here are some excerpts from one account:

...Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said. ...

The survey showed 62 percent of Generation Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year, with a steady decline in usage according to age. Some 57 percent of adults aged 43 to 52 said they visited a library in 2007, followed by 46 percent of adults aged 53 to 61; 42 percent of adults aged 62 to 71; and just 32 percent of adults over 72. ...

The actual study is accessible here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here, at the Patent Troll Tracker. Yeesh.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Inside Higher Ed reports:

Five university presses have announced a collaboration that seeks to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow more books to be released. The collaboration, created with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will set up a joint operation for copy editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures. The presses will retain complete control over book selection and distribution.

The collaboration is being formally announced at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, which opened in Chicago Thursday. NYU Press will manage the grant, which will also involve Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press. The grant will provide for modest royalties for authors as well as for joint marketing for the books produced. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This being the traditional season of offense and blasphemy, I feel like I shouldn't miss out on the holiday spirit. So here goes with a few words of outright heresy with which to mark the Yuletide this year:

Don't buy Apple iTunes gift cards.

That's right. No matter how hectic your X-mas Eve or how emphatically you hear pleas from young Noah and Britney, moms and dads, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, older and wiser sisters and brothers should not purchase gift cards that only encourage young people to buy music with DRM, music that has no where to go but planned obsolescence.

Those of us who were early adopters know a little bit about mortality. Three computers, five computers -- it sounds like a lot to begin with. But we, who have taken a few ailing iPods to the Apple store and who have laid a few hard drives to rest, know that having a limited number of downloads represents a relatively short lease on musical life when compared to the half century or century of pleasure that collectors of vinyl experience.

Apple will make millions of dollars on gift cards without your help this year. Here's my advice for what to do instead: go retro; buy vinyl. They are still people making the stuff, and there are lots of happy people to sell the old tunes to you.

I took some pictures at LA's own Record Surplus yesterday to show what all you lovers of cold, hard pseudo-music currency are missing out on.

Now, a holiday story to get all you shoppers in the right mood: when I was a teenager, I had a friend, Alice Burkner, who exchanged Frank Sinatra albums with her family. The way I heard it, that was pretty much it for their Christmas gift exchange. No one-upmanship, no status presents, no bigger gift in a bigger box.

There are apparently a lot of different Frank Sinatra records, with some remarkable album cover art, so there was always plenty of Ol' Blue Eyes to go around underneath the tree. Of course, if they exchanged the same albums, that was okay too.

How I envied Alice Burkner! While the rest of us were swapping soap and candles and ugly sweaters and crystal snowmen and -- eventually -- gift cards, they could enjoy "Songs for Young Lovers" and "Minute Masters" and "No One Cares" and "In the Wee Small Hours" from The Voice.

So this Christmas, you can say, "I Did It My Way," by purchasing music that will last.

Posted by Liz Losh at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Read about it here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of weeks ago I criticized my dear friend Kembrew McLeod for using a moment of confrontation with President Bill Clinton to demand he apologize for criticizing Sister Souljah ("who?", you ask? Well, apparently she mattered to some people way back in 1992.).

Kembrew tried to post comments here. But there was a technical glitch. So he sent me his response in an email. But I was frozen out of posting for a few days for some reason. Then I got busy with grading and writing. So let Kembrew's comments slip.

This gave Kembrew a chance to reformulate his defense of his Robot portrayal and get the Washington Post to publish it instead of Sivacracy.

Bravo for Kembrew for generating so much publicity for himself. More power to you, my man.

So check out I, Roboprofessor:

By Kembrew McLeod Wednesday, December 19, 2007; 12:00 PM

Last week, when former President Bill Clinton came to Iowa City, I went to the event, stood on a chair, and told him to apologize to Sister Souljah. At first he was caught off guard and uttered a sophomoric putdown -- "Look, look in the mirror" -- before chastising me for throwing out leaflets, because it kills trees. The incident I wanted him to apologize for was 15 years old, but our exchange made national news.

Oh, one other detail: The whole time, I was dressed like a robot. (To see the video, click here.)

Why a robot? And why bring up an event from 1992? Well, one point at a time.

I put on the silver vest, sparkly shoes, shiny helmet, and oversized sunglasses because I knew it was exactly the kind of look, and hook, reporters would go for. After all, the news media has a dependable preference for spectacle over substance.

These days, pulling a media prank is like throwing a rock in the pop culture pond. You just plop it in and watch its effects ripple outwards. My stunt received play on various blogs, on cable news networks, and in newspapers, which churned out surreal headlines like "Roboprofessor Heckles Former President."

Despite its absurd trappings, I do think there was something to the substance of my message. The "Sister Souljah moment," as it has come to be known, taught me that Bill Clinton was more of an opportunist than an advocate of social justice. And it's relevant to the current presidential race because it provided an early glimpse into the cynicism of the Clinton political machine.

Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign was flagging in June 1992, when he took the words of Sister Souljah out of context in a speech before the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. Souljah, a Black activist and recording artist, was talking about the Los Angeles riots sparked by the Rodney King verdict and was trying to paraphrase the mindset of a gang member when she told The Washington Post: "I mean, if Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" Yet, in an effort to appeal to upper-middle class swing voters, Clinton portrayed her as a reckless radical who advocated interracial violence. "If you took the words 'white' and 'black' and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech," he said. It was a brilliantly effective political move. It also exploited an ugly kind of racial politics.

Is Sister Souljah the most important issue we should be discussing in the current presidential campaign? No, but that brings me back to the media. Some commentators said I looked like a moron in my costume. And I can't really disagree. But which is more idiotic: a grown man dressed as a robot or the fact that so much space and time was devoted to a grown man dressed as a robot, at the expense of worthier issues?

Today, it is easy to see how reality can be meticulously contrived, or carelessly created, by the institutions that shape our consciousness. And it is important to hold media and government accountable for their depictions, or deceptions. If that means dressing like a robot and acting the fool, so be it.

The writer is a University of Iowa communication professor and author of "Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property."

Ok. So it's important to hold government accountable for false depictions and deception. I can't argue with that.

But there are a couple of problems with this point. First, Clinton no longer works for this government -- the one that launched an illegal and losing war, destroyed the Constitution (not to mention the Magna Carta), is on the verge of outlawing abortion, and does not believe in global warming, evolution, or truth in any form.

Second, way back in 1992 when Clinton criticized Sister Souljah, he was not doing anything close to any of these horrible things that our government now does. In fact, that little speech about a little person made almost no difference to the world. Contrary to myth, that speech did nothing to solidify white middle-class support for Clinton. He never won the majority of white voters throughout the South. He won several Southern states both times he ran for president because of massive and overwhelming support from African-American voters. African Americans justifiable appreciate the fact that in the real world, Clinton always worked for them. He spent his entire life working for them and with them. African Americans did not care much about Sister Souljah back in 1992 or since, for that matter. To steal a phrase from Chuck D, she never meant shit to them.

Kembrew also writes that this was about exposing the media for focusing on the silly -- the robotic -- at the expense of the serious. Well, if anything, Kembrew was complicit in this phenomenon. He did not expose the problem. He capitalized on it.

Most of the media coverage of Kembrew's stunt completely ignored even the Sister Souljah apology request. Those that did mention Sister Souljah used its irrelevancy to emphasize the absurdity of Kembrew's performance. Had Kembrew picked an issue or complaint that mattered in the world, he might have been harder to dismiss.

What if a professor dressed as a Robot had demanded that Clinton apologize to all Americans for lying when he denied his early support for the invasion of Iraq? That would have put Clinton on the spot, generated a discussion, and attracted media attention anchored in a real issue.

Let's pretend Clinton had acted differently in Iowa City. Let's imagine that Clinton took an interest in this robot in his midst and invited it up to the stage to explain the request for an apology. Then, addressing a crowd that is deeply concerned about the brutal, bloody war and the 45 million Americans living without health insurance would have had to listen to Kembrew try to explain why Sister Souljah matters.

Then, let's pretend that Clinton actually apologized to Sister Souljah at Kembrew's request.

Please tell me how our country or world would be better. Would one life improve? Would one child get fed? Would one person suffering from HIV get healthy?

Kembrew wrote in the Post that Clinton is "more of an opportunist than an advocate of social justice."

Really?

Last time I checked, President Clinton spent the last seven years of his life ensuring free or low-cost medical treatment for millions who suffer from HIV infections and AIDS in Africa and rebuilding Southeast Asia after the Tsunami of 2004.

Clinton did all this after serving our country at great personal cost as president for eight years. That was eight years of peace and prosperity, you remember. During those eight years, he did not tear up the Constitution, undermine women's rights, trump scientific consensus, or lie to us to generate support to illegally invade a sovereign nation.

That's not to say that Clinton is above legitimate criticism for his policy shortcomings. Here is a partial list of things I would bring up if I had a chance to talk the guy now:

1) The genocide in Rwanda, which Clinton did not consider worthy of dealing with at the time. Significantly, Clinton has apologized for this sans robotic demands to do so.

2) The removal of human-rights considerations from our trade deals with China.

3) Continued blind support for the Pakistani government.

4) The political cowardice that resulted in "don't ask; don't tell" and the subsequent purges of brave gay service people from our military.

5) The choice of the incompetent Louis Freh as FBI director.

6) The DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

And, of course, I will always be angry at Clinton for failing to realize that yielding to his basest urges would corrode his agenda, harm the country, and generate a Constitutional crisis. He should have known that people who hate him would do everything in their power to prevent him from doing his job.

I could come up with a much longer list of Clinton's mistakes, many of which came from his political opportunism, cynicism, and lack of imagination. But none of them means he deserves to be ridiculed or heckled.

Besides, heckling is a tool of the voiceless and powerless. Kembrew is a tenured professor at a major university who publishes major books and has placed op-eds in places like The New York Times and the Washington Post. Kembrew is hardly weak, voiceless, or marginal.

Some of Clinton's mistakes while in office are grave. All of them matter more than Sister Souljah. Still, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, can you name a living American who has done more to make life possible or better for children on this planet?

Seriously, can anyone name someone who has done more good for the poorest of us than William Jefferson Clinton?

What has Sister Souljah ever done? Maybe she should apologize to Clinton.

I definitely think Kembrew should.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My UVA colleague Chris Sprigman is the star of this article in The Boston Globe:

LAST FEBRUARY, JOE ROGAN, the beefy host of the gross-out extravaganza "Fear Factor," got on the stage at the Los Angeles club The Comedy Store and unleashed a tirade against the comedian Carlos Mencia, who sat beside him on a stool, angrily protesting. According to Rogan, Mencia had been stealing other comedians' material for years, and the only way to stop him was by making his habits widely known. This Rogan did his best to achieve; shortly thereafter, he posted a video of the exchange - liberally peppered with indecencies and spliced with supporting material - on his website. From there it spread quickly over the Internet.

For most people who caught the Rogan-Mencia incident, it was little more than a minor entertainment - another B-celebrity dust-up. But for the legal scholar Christopher Sprigman, it was clear and hitherto ignored evidence that the country's recent approach to intellectual-property law has been wrongheaded.

Over the past 15 years, the rise of digital technology and the global economy has made it ever easier to copy, distribute, and profit from the fruits of other people's creativity - from the new Fergie album spreading across peer-to-peer networks to pirated "Spider-Man" DVDs showing up on the streets of Shanghai. In response, American lawmakers have instituted increasingly sweeping laws, seeking to stymie intellectual-property theft with lengthier copyright terms and more stringent consequences for violators. Without these measures, they reason, innovators will lose money, and innovation will suffer.

In something as simple as the public outcry of a Hollywood jokester, Sprigman, an associate professor of law at the University of Virginia, sees an approach that he hopes could put the lie to this thinking, and turn the heads of lawmakers. He sees a comedian enforcing respect for originality without resorting to legislation, lawyers, or the courts. He sees intellectual property being protected - not by the strong arm of the government, but by way of the very technologies that have incited stronger laws in the first place.

"People usually talk about how the Internet destroys intellectual property," says Sprigman. "But here the Internet enforces intellectual property. It helps to protect creativity by shaming pirates."

Comedy is not the only creative industry in which scholars are finding evidence that challenges assumptions held on Capitol Hill. Over the past two years, a flurry of papers have appeared on so-called "negative spaces" of intellectual-property law - industries that receive little to no legal protection for their ideas or products, yet that continue to innovate, often at a rapid clip. Articles have already appeared about high fashion, haute cuisine, and professional magic, with another planned by Sprigman and a colleague about stand-up comedy. And already, Washington seems to be paying attention. Last July, Sprigman testified in Congress against a bill that would have tightened copyright control in the fashion industry; the fashionistas, he argued, are better off on their own.

Sprigman and his colleagues see "negative spaces" as evidence that creative industries do not necessarily need strong laws to protect their ideas and products. And although their inquiry is in its early stages, they have high hopes that the field will flourish in the coming years, and, perhaps, help restore balance to an intellectual-property system they see as dangerously out of whack. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Techdirt: The Myth Of Finding A 'Balance' In Copyright Laws:

It never fails. During various battles over copyright laws, someone will come along and present themselves as wanting to be the "moderate" provider between the warring parties of "users" on one side and "copyright holders" on the other side, declaring that what's really needed is a good "balance" in copyright law that is fair to both sides. News.com has just such an article about the ridiculous new Pro-IP bill. However, as we've discussed before, that's the wrong way to look at it. The more you focus on balance, the more useless your recommendations are. That's because the whole idea is based on a faulty premise that the interests of copyright holders and users are not aligned.

In fact, if structured properly there's no reason that the interests of both sides can't be perfectly aligned, making both sides happy without either having to "give up" something. If you can create a bigger market where both sides come out of the situation better, then there's no balance necessary at all. Balance is only needed when both sides come out slightly worse off. This is even more true these days when the entire dichotomy between "content creators" and "content consumers" has blurred. These days, most people are both content creators and content users. In fact, one of the great things about the internet is that it's completely knocked down the barrier between the two, and helped make it easier than ever to create content the same way content has always been built: by building on other ideas that are out there.

So rather than trying to look for "balanced" solutions that make both parties somewhat worse off, isn't it time we recognized that copyright doesn't have to be a zero-sum game with winners and losers? If you get rid of the restrictions that copyrights artificially impose, you create a non-zero-sum game, where everyone can be better off. It may seem a little trickier for copyright holders, as their business models change, but it expands the overall market for their products while opening up tons of new business models that allow them to profit at a greater rate without pissing off users. Meanwhile, users aren't restricted. So, let's toss out the idea of creating a lose-lose situation around "balance" and focus on building win-win situations that get rid of artificial restrictions and focus on bigger opportunities for everyone.

Exactly. I have been saying this for years. No one knows what "balance" would look like. The proper way to run a regulatory system is to decide what its goals should be and ask whether each move or change enhances or retards progress toward that goal. That's not "balance" between poles of interest. It's a performance-based and values-based approach.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

All he wants to do is hate on Obama, in really broad terms. Props to Frank Rich, for taking a more analytical approach toward the candidates. Yeesh. Is Krugman hoping to be a Clinton advisor or something? Or is he just jerkier than I once thought?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Because it's holiday time, I figured it might be fun to share some thoughts about a few of my favorite things. Now, don't get your hopes up. If you're looking for gift ideas, these recommendations won't exactly help you. They belong more to the category, "useful things I've discovered online" than to the category, "things you can buy for friends and loved ones at the store." Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

Grammar Girl
For those of you with grammar questions--or, for that matter, for those of you with grammar guilt--this is the place to go. Mignon Fogarty is an authority on the subject, and her posts and podcasts will tell you all you need to know about how to make your prose sing. What I especially appreciate is her sense of English as a living language, and thus her sensitivity to the history of its grammar. So, for example, my high school English teachers drilled the "never split infinitives" rule into my head ad nauseum, presumably because most had had the rule driven into their heads ad nauseum. Fogarty, however, explains that the rule is a hold-over from the world of Latin declensions, and that it's little more than a vestige in the English language. There are lots of other gems like this, so I'm grateful to my friend, Suzanne Enck-Wanzer, for turning me on to the site.

SourceWatch
As a professor of media and cultural studies, I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't know about the existence of this site until recently. In a nutshell, SourceWatch is a wiki site dedicated "to produc[ing] a directory of the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda." In other words, it's dedicated to peeling back the layers of public information, in an effort to shine a light on all the public relations and advertising folks who are working behind the scenes. The site is a project undertaken by the Center for Media and Democracy and, of course, by its many contributors. (I just wonder how they keep all the PR mavens from spinning their own entries.)

The Century of the Self
This video was recommended to me by my friends Elaine Vautier and Timothy Roscoe. It's a four-part documentary directed by Adam Curtis, and it focuses on the history/uptake of psychoanalysis in the United States and Britain in 20th century. What's especially fascinating is to see how different approaches to psychoanalysis fell in and out of favor over time, and how the vicissitudes of the profession affected the way in which psychoanalytically-inclined press agents and advertisers imagined both their audiences and their work. The third installment is the most interesting to me, in that it charts the rise of the "empowered" self. There seem to me some fascinating connections to be made here to the rise of so-called "active audiences" in cultural studies.

Posted by Ted Striphas at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Osocio.

Posted by Liz Losh at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I carpool to work, since I live about fifty miles away from where I teach. It gives me an opportunity to chat with colleagues from other departments (mostly people from computer science and informatics, but I do sometimes drive with philosophers, political scientists, and educators). And obviously it also takes another emissions-producing vehicle off the road and reduces congestion.

Here's the amazing thing: this behavior is somehow abhorrent to the Bush administration.

According to "Carpoolers free ride may be over," local officials in the MTA are being forced to take a more free-enterprise approach to freeway management in order to qualify for federal transportation dollars. Although Southland policy makers held out once before on converting carpool lanes to toll lanes for affluent, impatient drivers, they apparently now need the money enough that the "free ride" of people willing to take turns and coordinate their schedules with others in order to ride collectively in the diamond lanes is apparently over.

So nice to know that the conservative movement is so in favor of local control and states' rights . . . as long as you don't live in California.

Posted by Liz Losh at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Great send up of every other song on the radio.

Update: There's video!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here, at Regret The Error.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From here, where there are lots more:

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Praise Jeebus, Christmas is saved. And, see also.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Part One:

Part Two:

Posted by Liz Losh at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cool, even if it is made by Disney...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the blog Recording Industry v. The People notes:

The RIAA's brief makes the novel contention, contradicting its lawyers' arguments at the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster, that making personal copies of songs from one's CD onto one's computer is an infringement.

[This despite the fact that in front] of the US Supreme Court, the record company lawyers said:

MGM v. Grokster oral argument page 12 lines 1-7.

More at Wired.com.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SSRN-Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform by Pamela Samuelson:

Abstract:
The Copyright Act of 1976 is far too long, complex, and largely incomprehensible to non-copyright professionals. It is also the work product of pre-computer technology era. This law also lacks normative heft. That is, it does not embody a clear vision about what its normative purposes are.

This article offers the author's preliminary thoughts about why copyright reform is needed, why it will be difficult to undertake, and why notwithstanding these difficulties, it may nonetheless be worth doing. It offers suggestions about how one might go about trimming the statute to a more managemable length, articulating more simply its core normative purposes, and spinning certain situation-specific provisions off into a rulemaking process.

Thirty years after enactment of the '76 Act, with the benefit of considerable experience with computer and other advanced technologies and the rise of amateur creators, it may finally be possible to think through in a more comprehensive way how to adapt copyright to digital networked environments as well as how to maintain its integrity as to existing industry products and services that do not exist outside of the digital realm.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

U of I prof heckles Clinton | DesMoinesRegister.com | The Des Moines Register

U of I prof heckles Clinton

JASON CLAYWORTH
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

Iowa City, Ia. -- A University of Iowa professor dressed as a robot interrupted Bill Clinton at a campaign stop here late Monday, screaming for an apology before security escorted him from the building.

The professor, Kembrew McLeod, stood on a chair and screamed several statements, including: “Robots of the world want you to apologize.”

The audience erupted into loud boos.

McLeod, before security officers could reach him, tossed hundreds of cards into the audience of about 400 people in protest of statements the former president made in 1992 of Sister Souljah, a member of the musical group Public Enemy.

“I like to talk in a way that, you know, will draw attention to these serious issues,” McLeod said after the event. “And maybe the way that I draw attention to them is an absurd way but it was the only way that I could draw attention to the particular issue of Sister Souljah, which is an issue that’s been swept under the carpet.”

The cards included an Internet address for a group that calls itself “Mad Robots In Favor of Bill Clinton Apologizing.”

The site tells how Sister Souljah made statements to the Washington Post about the 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked when an all-white jury acquitted the white police officers who were captured on tape beating a black man, Rodney King.

Her statement focused on how society largely ignores black-on-black violence. It included the quote: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”

That quote has largely been picked up on its own, without the larger context. Clinton, in June of 1992, gave a speech at the Rainbow Coalition, which compared Sister Souljah’s quote to David Duke, a former white supremist.

"If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Bill Clinton said in 1992.

Volunteers picked up most of the cards soon after the incident. Bill Clinton, who was for appearing for his wife U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, did not apologize.

McLeod said he is the Iowa chapter president of the group, which calls themselves Mr-IFOBCA, or RB-1 for short. The group also has chapters in New York, California, Virginia and Georgia, he said.

McLeod is an associate professor in the department of communication studies. He said he has tenure. He was not arrested.

“This is Iowa so they were polite and I was polite. When they told me I had to leave, I did,” McLeod said.

The video is here

I have to say, I love you Kembrew. But If you are going to criticize a man who has spent the past seven years making sure millions of kids can get HIV drugs for free, you have to pick a better issue than Sister Souljah. After all, she could not matter less to the world today. Who the heck remembers her anyway? And besides, she was kind of racist. And heckling is such a petty, Republican thing to do. It's really beneath you.

If I had the chance to criticize President Clinton, I would raise his inactions in Rwanda, his timidity toward atrocious governments like China and Burma, and his market-fundamentalist approach toward and unwillingness to protect nuclear stockpiles in the former Soviet Republics.

Jeez, Rwanda alone would have been a good call. He should apologize for that every day of his life.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chronicle.com:

Copyright Alliance Proposes Wiki to Help Professors Get Permissions for Classroom Use

Washington -- So a professor wants to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail to her class on British humor, and she wants to check with the film studio to get permission. How would she do that? As it stands, the semester could be over by the time the professor even finds the right person to ask.

A nonprofit group called the Copyright Alliance, whose members include associations for the motion-picture and recording industries, announced today that it would like to help broker such requests. The idea, described briefly at an academic symposium held by the group on Monday in Washington, is to create a Web site where professors could post questions like the the one above and get answers from an industry official. The online resource would take the form of a wiki, a communal Web site that allows visitors to easily post new comments and track the changes that have been made. ...

Apparently neither the crooks who run this "Copyright Alliance" nor the reporters and editors of the Chronicle of Higher Ed realize that showing films in class is EXPLICITLY allowed under Sec. 110 of the Copyright Act.

17 USC § 110: “the following are not infringements of copyright: (1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction…”

This is outrageous. Can we sue these people?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

CJR: Eight Questions Reporters Should Ask Huckabee

1. In an interview on the Rev. Kenneth Copeland’s television show, “Believer’s Voice of Victory,” posted on his Web site, you said the following: “If we see any part of our society and culture that’s decaying, what’s going to keep it from rotting? The Christians. God’s people.” Do you believe that people who are not Christians are not “God’s people”?

2. In this same interview you referred to “God’s absolutes.” Could you tell us what “God’s absolutes” are?

3. You support a flat sales tax of 23 percent to replace all existing federal taxes, and you insist that its total effects will be “revenue-neutral.” Since lower-income people pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than higher-income people, the result of your plan would be that a higher percentage of total taxes collected would be paid by lower-income people. Do you think this proposal is compatible with Christian beliefs? As a Christian, do you think it is consonant with the principles of Jesus to support the abolition of taxes on capital gains and interest?

4. In your book, From Hope to Higher Ground, you wrote: “Wal-Mart is a case study in the genius of the American marketplace.” Yet despite some recent improvements, most of Wal-Mart’s employees were not covered by the company’s health insurance. (Another round of improvements scheduled for January 2008 still requires an annual premium of $2,000 for a company whose employees often earn less than $20,000.) Moreover, the company has been forced to pay more than $200 million to employees they forced to work off the clock, and according to the Web site Walmartwatch.com, “Wal-Mart is currently facing the largest workplace-bias lawsuit in U.S. history for widespread discrimination against women employees; a class action lawsuit filed by African-American truck drivers; and numerous other cases involving discrimination against workers with disabilities.” What is your reaction?

5. Speaking about the children of illegal immigrants, you said recently that “we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.” Today, the children of poor people are penalized for their parents’ poverty. Obviously, they inherit less. Their schools are inferior. So are their job prospects. What would you do about this?

6. The other day, you said this: “Long before God ever created a government structure, the basic structure was the family.” When did God create a government structure? Did He create the government of the United States? Did He create the government of Iran? Pakistan? Afghanistan? Iraq? Did He create the government of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany? If not, who did?

7. There are many Biblical verses that support female submissiveness. Do you agree with them?

8. “I would love to see a human life amendment to our constitution,” you said last September. “Human life begins at conception.” According to some physicians, intrauterine devices (IUDs), emergency contraception (the “morning after pill,” or “Plan B”), the pill, the patch, and the Depo-Provera shot may work by preventing the implantation of fertilized eggs—after conception. Does this mean that you support the banning not only of abortion but of any or all of these methods of contraception?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ed Felten writes on Freedom to Tinker that we can distill some general lessons from the dumb moves Facebook made with their social marketing tool, Beacon:

(1) Overlawyerization: Organizations see privacy as a legal compliance problem. They're happy as long as what they're doing doesn'€™t break the law; so they do something that is lawful but foolish.

(2) Institutional structure: Privacy is spun off to a special office or officer so the rest of the organization doesn’t have to worry about it; and the privacy office doesn't have the power to head off mistakes.

(3) Treating privacy as only a PR problem: Rather than asking whether its practices are really acceptable to clients, the organization does what it wants and then tries to sell its actions to clients. The strategy works, until angry clients seize control of the conversation.

(4) Undervaluing emotional factors: The organization sees a potential privacy backlash as "only"€ an emotional response, which must take a backseat to more important business factors. But clients might be angry for a reason; and in any case they will act on their anger.

(5) Irrational desire for control: Decisionmakers like to feel that they're in control of client interactions. Sometimes they insist on control even when it would be rational to follow the client's lead. Where privacy is concerned, they want to decide what clients should want, rather than listening to what clients actually do want.

Perhaps the underlying cause is the complex and subtle nature of privacy. We agree that privacy matters, but we don’t all agree on its contours. It's hard to offer precise rules for recognizing a privacy problem, but we know one when we see it. Or at least we know it after we'€™ve seen it.

Ed is right about all of this.

Why does this matter to a discussion about Google?

Well, for one thing, the Facebook ad revenue strategy is an attempt to leverage personal preferences with more accuracy and influence than Google can. Google can profile most users by IP number and many users by personal identifiers (if they log in to Google to use GMail or some other service). But it's an imperfect profiling system. Using search history as a proxy for preferences is rough. You need years of data to do accurate profiling and ad targeting. Facebook thinks it can do better.

Beacon was an attempt to do just that. Social marketing is the holy grail. It's based on reductive misreadings of social network theory (blame Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point or Seth Godin's Ideavirus). If people often make consumer choices based on trusted "experts" in their social realms, then Facebook could engineer such an alert.

Every time your super-hip friend Joe bought something on line (from a handful of sites) you and all of Joe's 200 Facebook friends would have received a notice of the purchase in their newsfeeds. You were supposed to think, "hey, if Joe likes buying his plane tickets on Travelocity, then it must be super-cool, like Joe himself!"

Of course, there was massive protest to this move. The surveillance/profiling/publicity function was way obvious. Google's surveillance/profiling function is discreet to the point of invisibility. That's its brilliance and virtue. Your preferences are between you and Google (or so we are led to believe).

After more than 50,000 Facebook users screamed about the service, Facebook officials relented and installed some options that require permission for each Beacon alert. This is much better.

However, in the midst of the uproar Facebook officials basically called all Facebook users dumb, claiming that people always whine about privacy at first but then they get used to the violations over time. And besides, young people don't care about privacy, right? (note my smirky reference to the "Born Digital" idea). From a NY Times story about Beacon:

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

See, this canard that young people don't care about privacy is supported only by shallow anecdotal evidence and a complete misunderstanding of what privacy means. Privacy is not some stable set of facts and features that we all agree should not circulate. What we hold private varies from individual to individual. But we all want to keep something safe.

Privacy is not about the information. It's about the power. It's about the ability to decide whether and what to keep private. So while millions of people might now be comfortable declaring on Facebook that they are seeking members of the same sex or that they hooked up with so-and-so, that does not indicate a lack of concern for privacy. Everyone still wants to be in control of what gets out there and how to publicize it. When a company (or a government or a mob of vigilantes) claims that power for themselves and denies that power to an individual, we have a privacy problem.

That's what Facebook did. That's what Google has avoided (so far). And that's why we don't seem to collectively "get" privacy. The public conversation has been really dumb so far. Let's hope this "Beacon" of light improves it.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We should all be ashamed. Imagine if this woman were not a wealthy, politically connected American? Imagine if she were an Iraqi who did not speak English. Imagine how many horrible accounts of US mercenary contractors raping people that we will never hear about.

These people are raping and killing in our name, under the protection of our flag.

How many more of these atrocities can we endure?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From today's Inside Higher Education comes a story about a recent symposium, convened at George Washington University, to explore copyright issues on university campuses. The sponsoring agency? A new group benignly calling itself "Copyright Alliance." Its mission, according to the piece, is to "promote strong copyright protection for artists." Ut-oh.

What struck me most about the story was this particular passage, which refers to "a lack of critical engagement with copyright issues at the university level and the result that students often don’t understand the logic behind prohibitions on illegal file sharing."

Huh? For my part, I can only imagine teaching about intellectual property critically, and trying to cultivate a critical sensibility in my students with respect to I.P. issues past, present, and future. Indeed most of the folks I know who teach about I.P. do exactly the same thing, trying their best to balance a healthy respect for the law with a recognition that, at least in some cases, I.P. law may well have been extended too far beyond the parameters set forth in the United States Constitution.

The question I'm left with is this: since when does "critical engagement" really mean "acquiescence?"

Posted by Ted Striphas at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sciencedebate 2008:

A Call for a Presidential Debate on Science and Technology

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we, the undersigned, call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Medicine and Health, and Science and Technology Policy.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Crooked Timber:

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PROFESSOR OF POP: On Writing A Grown-Up Paper:

Undergraduates in Media Studies often have problems with the writing of papers & that's in part at least because they are attracted to many different ways of writing & communicating, and so they often feel confused about which form to use, it seems to me. Add to this a new diversity in the range of types of writing & communication (email, blogging, etc.) and it is understandable that there is sometimes difficulty in changing gears from a journalism class to a blogging independent study to a creative writing class and the composition of a dense theoretical paper.

What is not understandable, however, is failing to make the effort to learn how to properly construct an academic paper while you are in college. Surely we can all agree on that.

And so, in a spirit of providing Right Speech guidance on papers (helpful, timely, truthful) here are some basic thoughts on how to write a grown-up paper (for a class with me, anyway) & they come with a reminder -- the last piece(s) of work you do, at the end of a semester, can often make a big difference. Learning how to find mental stamina in the last days & weeks of a project, and what a huge difference this can make to the final outcome, is one of the most important (but least heralded?) tasks that can be learned in college. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Salon.com:

The White House press secretary and, like, the "Bay of Pigs thing."

Tim Grieve

Dec. 10, 2007 | At a White House press briefing on Oct. 26, a reporter asked Dana Perino about Vladimir Putin's suggestion that a U.S. plan to base parts of a missile shield in Europe was similar to the events that led to the Cuban missile crisis.

Perino's response: "Well, I think that the historical comparison is not -- does not exactly work. What I can say is what President Putin went on to say, which is that the president and President Putin have said that we can work together on this."

When a second reporter asked whether Putin's comparison to the Cuban missile crisis had been "helpful," Perino said: "I think that -- look, the president has said that we have a good but complicated and complex relationship with Russia. And the president has a relationship with President Putin, one, that he treats him with a lot of respect, and because of that, he's able to have very frank and honest discussions with him. And I think the relationship -- in a variety of ways, we work well together on many different issues."

If that sounds like Perino was buying time or filibustering or otherwise talking around the question, well, that's because she was.

Appearing on NPR's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me" over the weekend, Perino said she "panicked" when she got the Cuban missile crisis question because she wasn't exactly sure what the Cuban missile crisis was. "I really know nothing about the Cuban missile crisis," Perino said. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

Perino said she went home that night and asked her husband, "'Wasn't that, like, the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.'"

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over on his blog, Print is Dead, Jeff Gomez writes:

... I might agree that being digitally adept maybe isn’t generational, but there’s no way you can say that kids today aren’t Digital Natives. It’s a fact. From the moment they’re born (under the watchful electronic eye of digital cameras and camcorders, not to mention the bevy of beeping medical equipment nearby), to every aspect of their ensuing lives (electronic baby monitors, video games, cell phones, digital watches, TVs, MP3s, the Internet, etc.), they will exist in an electronic milieu.

A hundred years ago, kids who were born were Generation Victrola; today they’re Generation Download. To argue against this is to swim against the tide of not only history but common sense. Because generations are defined by the world in which they’re born and nurtured. Whatever surrounds that generation is later what comes to define it. Because of this, someone could be said to have grown up in the era of Vietnam even though they didn’t fight in Vietnam, or never even gave it much thought. But the influence that Vietnam had on the books and music and movies of the time is resolutely inescapable.

Vaidhyanathan points out that just because someone was born within the accepted timeframe of what constituted Generation X, it doesn’t mean they had the same experience. With that I completely agree. Just because you were born in 1972 doesn’t mean you’re a carbon copy of Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites. Instead, stating that someone was born at that time simply means that they were exposed to the prevailing attitudes and influences which were omnipresent during those years (whether they were part of those influences or not).

But there are also more important and subtle shifts, generational gaps that both envelope and separate us without us even knowing. And, in many ways, these are the most important developments of all. For instance, last week’s tragic mall shooting. As I watched the news reports, most of which described the mall as a growing place of danger and paranoia, it caused me to reflect upon my own life and childhood. As a youth growing up in suburban Southern California in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, most of my weekends were spent at the mall, hanging out in the arcade or at the pizza place, or just wandering around for endless hours (during any of the mall scenes in either Valley Girl or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I could have been an extra). In those days, the worse thing that could happen to you in a mall was that Asteroids might eat your quarter. Today, people go to the mall and get gunned down as they shop for Christmas presents. For today’s teenagers, malls (not to mention their own schools) can be a dangerous place. For me, they weren’t. So the meaning and length between my experience and theirs is indeed a generational gap. And its exists all around us in ways that far outshine the surface differences in music, fashion, or even anything necessarily cultural.

The bottom line is that no generation marches in lockstep; no era can be defined completely (the ‘20s weren’t roaring for everyone nor did everybody swing in the ‘60s, and surely someone was pissed off during the Summer of Love). Instead, the tags we give to generations are shorthand; they’re always just signifiers. To treat them literally is to mistreat them.

Here is the response I posted in his comments:

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I must take issue, however.

Malls and schools are not dangerous places. In fact, schools have not been safer in 50 years.

This is the problem. By focusing on the anecdote and the perceived trend, you define something you have not measured or certified. How do you know what a "prevailing attitude" is? And what if such an attitude (if measurable) does not match reality?

There may be a prevailing attitude that schools in the 2000s are dangerous. But the reality is that they are not.

Your story of growing up in California in the late 1970s and 1980s matches mine from Western New York at the same time. So we share some stuff. But how many poor or non-white young people in America at the time shared them?

These days, more than one out of four American children are born into poverty. Many of them are born to immigrant parents who do not speak or read English. How "digital" are they? Or do they not count?

Historical phenomena such as Vietnam matter to entire populations in complicated ways. They still matter. But slicing them into arbitrary age segments makes no sense.

Vietnam affected almost everyone in America who was 18 to 25 year old at the time. But it affected everyone differently. Those who served did not share the "zeitgeist" with those who resisted. Women and men experienced it differently. The poor tended to serve. The rich did not.

Everyone assumed in 1972 that there was some great "generational" mood or attitude that would pull voters to McGovern in the first election in which 18- to 20-year-olds could vote. Look how that went. Everyone was wrong.

By focusing on wealthy, white, educated people only, as journalists and pop-trend analysts tend to do, they miss out on the whole truth.

There was no "generation Victrola." Most children 100 years ago were born on farms and did not have running water, let alone Victrolas.

Shorthand is another word for stereotype. See Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion for an elaboration.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This story, "No punishments for Va Tech costumes," seems to indicate that campus officials were contemplating policing not only what students show in their Facebook pictures but also what they wear as Halloween costumes.

If any of these people ever go to West Hollywood for Halloween, they are in for a surprise. I've gone to plenty of parties with Unibombers and John Wayne Gacys in attendance.

According to this article, there is already a Facebook group called "People against this Costume."

Posted by Liz Losh at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The end is near.

No, not that end. I’m talking about the end of the semester, the time when everyone I know starts scurrying frantically to finish up projects and to take/administer exams before we finally get to recess for the holidays. For my part, the students in my graduate seminar on cultural studies are turning in papers this Monday, and my teaching assistants and I are administering a final exam in my undergraduate class on—get this—the very last time-slot on the very last day of final exams here at Indiana University. No one’s thrilled, but what can you do?

A recent blog post from one of my former students (and current TAs) reminded me of just how much writing angst emerges around this time of year. I thought it might be worthwhile, therefore, to share a bit of writing-related advice that I’ve accumulated over the years. Maybe it will help some of you, who find yourselves stuck, to break through whatever impasses are getting the better of you.

(1) “Just write…”
This piece of wisdom was given to me by one of my former mentors, John Nguyet Erni, while I was writing my undergraduate thesis. I had hit a roadblock and told him I couldn’t go on; my head was just empty, my creativity, tapped. He responded by telling me to “just write.” I subsequently learned an important lesson about myself as a writer: I often write best when I start with a writing “riff.” Instead of trying to begin by forming complete sentences, I often compose short, half-formed phrases that I subsequently develop. Just getting something down on paper sometimes can be the key.

(2) “There’s a problem…”
I inherited this little pearl from another one of my mentors, Lawrence Grossberg, when I asked him for his advice about what causes academic writers to block (I was blocked at the time—notice a pattern?). He told me that writing blocks often result from specific errors or problems that can be easily fixed. These have tended to take two forms in my experience. First, they can be organizational, as in when I include material in the body or conclusion of my paper-in-progress that really belongs in the introduction. Bad architecture makes bad buildings, as it were. Second, these problems can be research related. I’m embarrassed to say that on too many occasions I couldn’t write because I simply didn’t have sufficient data to write about. I know enough about myself as a writer now to recognize when this is happening, and so I get myself back to the library immediately.

(3) “Thank You…”
This one I picked up during my research on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. Long about the year 2000 or so, Ms. Winfrey invited author Andre Dubus III onto her TV show to talk about his novel House of Sand and Fog, which she’d selected for the Book Club. There, he mentioned having discovered the writing diary of his father, Andre Dubus II, who was also a novelist and who’d recently passed away. Whether Andre Dubus II had written six or six thousand words on any given day, he chronicled the number in his diary and unfailing appended two words thereafter: “thank you.” Being able to write anything was something to be grateful for, as far as Andre Dubus II was concerned. He never beat himself up about not having had a stellar writing day, every day. Instead, he focused on the positive aspects of what he actually managed to accomplish. I’ve learned from the Dubus’ that maintaining an affirmative disposition can help you to avoid writing paralysis.

(4) “It’s not f-----g Shakespeare!”
This one also comes from TV. A few years ago I watched the American Film Institute’s tribute to actor Sean Connery. During the show, Andy Garcia reflected on what he’d learned as a relatively young actor when he appeared with the veteran Connery in The Untouchables. In one scene, Garcia recalled, his character simply had to answer the telephone and utter a few utilitarian lines; thereafter, the scene was Connery’s. There was just one problem, though. Take after take, Garcia couldn’t get it right. He flubbed his lines several times and over-acted them even more. Frustrated, Connery finally turned to Garcia and shouted in that thick, Scottish brogue everyone’s so fond of imitating: “My god! It’s not f-----g Shakespeare!” Garcia apparently delivered the lines successfully on the very next take, having been relieved of the feeling that his small contribution was supposed to carry the whole scene.

There seems to me a useful parallel to be drawn here when it comes to writing. Sometimes, you just need to be a hack who gets through the unimportant stuff so that you can focus on the really significant material. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: isn’t it all important? No, it’s not. Get over it, and get over yourself. The trick lies in figuring out when to linger on certain aspects of your prose and when to let other aspects go. But at the end of the day, you must remember: much, and perhaps most, of what you’re writing isn’t “Shakespeare.”

Posted by Ted Striphas at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(Link via Ian Bogost.)

This is actually the second Billy Joel parody about social media on YouTube that we've featured here. Anne Bartow found this one about how "Internet stars are viral". Both are better than the sexism of "These Women I've Desired" on YouTube, which is a send-up of the same song.

For more "We Didn't Start the Fire" variations go here (about Half-Life 2), here (about Star Wars), here (about the baseball steroids scandal), here (about neighborhood fireworks gone awry), and here (about events post-1996).

Posted by Liz Losh at 3:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brook Haley found this clip from the tribute to Julia Roberts from the American Cinematheque. I loathe the pretensions of Julia Robert's movies, but the cameo and its associated political gag are worth waiting for.

Posted by Liz Losh at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Ars Technica:

... The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP... groan) Act of 2007 has the backing of many of the most powerful politicians on the House Judiciary Committee, including John Conyers (D-MI), Lamar Smith (R-TX), and "Hollywood" Howard Berman (D-CA).

In addition to strengthening both civil and criminal penalties for copyright and trademark infringement, the big development here is the proposed creation of the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (USIPER). This is a new executive branch office tasked with coordinating IP enforcement at the national and international level. To do this work internationally, the bill also authorizes US intellectual property officers to be sent to other countries in order to assist with crackdowns there. In addition, the Department of Justice gets additional funding and a new unit to help prosecute IP crimes. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Osocio, a blog devoted to international "social advertising and non-profit campaigns" in areas like "human rights," "poverty," "health," and the "environment," is officially online. It’s designed to be "the place where marketing and activism collide." The other people who write for the blog are actually designers, as well as activists, so it's got an eye for attention-getting images as well.

Posted by Liz Losh at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jonathan Band has published "Educational Fair Use Today" via the ARL. He makes some pretty bold arguments about how various recontexualizations of copyrighted material might be considered "transformative" and thus fair uses.

Georgia Harper takes issue with this idea of "transformation." I agree with her that it can't be used as a trump card in fair use questions. Plus, she points out, such a massive reading of transformation would make a reasonable judge recoil. We are talking, after all, about many millions of dollars at stake here in a market that appears to be working.

It's not that Georgia doesn't believe that courts should consider classroom fair use to be terribly strong. We just doubt that this is best argument.

After all, as Ann Bartow likes to point out, "multiple copies for classroom use" is right there in the preamble to Sec. 107. So it seems like Congress in 1976 wanted classroom use to be non-infringing.

Of course, courts today are likely to care more about the interests of publishers than children, and care almost nothing about legislative intent. But still, the law is the law.

Anyway, read Jonathan's article. It's pretty provocative and interesting. Georgia's reply is as well.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had my kids at the beginning of graduate school. So I really identify with the sentiments in the rapid-fire delivery of this video.

Via my colleague Ann Van Sant.

Posted by Liz Losh at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My neighbor and colleague Leslie Johnston writes:

... I have a slightly different spin and some different reasons, but I don't buy it either.

I often take part in discussions about services for faculty and students, and sometimes hear ageist comments about how older faculty are completely non-digital and all students are automatically all digital. Hah! Just like some folks have an interest or skill in languages or math or art and some folks don't, it's the same with whatever "digital" is. I have worked with faculty in 60s who saw something in being digital decades ago and have worked in that realm for years. I have worked with colleagues -- librarians and faculty -- in my own age group (I'm 44) who hate all technology with a passion and others who embrace it in all ways. I have worked with students at three different research universities who could not care less about being digital.

Being digital is not generational. At the core of what Jeff Gomez calls "Generation Download" and "Generation Upload" in his book Print is Dead, there is truly an ubiquitousness of digital media use that is changing media consumption and production paradigms and changing the media market. There is absolutely an increased level of acceptance that this is standard operating procedure. I'm still not willing to agree that an entire generation is digital and that the entirety of other generations are not. There's still predilection and interest and skill and, yes, issues of availability and affordability of technology that crosses all generations.

There are degrees of digital-ness. Different comfort levels. Different skill levels. Different levels of access. What do we have to apply such absolute labels?

Right on.

As Henry Jenkins writes, there is so much interesting stuff going one out there among age groups, among members of communities, and across oceans that flattening out everyone into "generations" or "natives" and "immigrants" is just false and useless.

It also has real-world implications. Once we assume that the kids out there love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that meet our presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliche or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs.

More precisely, we rush to digitize with an emphasis on speed and size rather and worry about quality and utility later. This is my problem with Paul Courant's argument, "We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically." That's simply not true. Besides, it twists a policy debate by using a market-based version of that classic rhetorical fallacy, "appeal to authority." As educators, we are guides to the best ways to research, write, and argue. Pandering to an imaginary market force is doing no one any favors.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark]

... Act IV: The act of reading

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 5

The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

...

Thanks to Deven Desai!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The "memory stick." Available here for, yikes, $80.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Based on this NYT account at least, Richard Prince's "appropriation art" seems to cross that line. But then again, the wronged photographer quoted in the article, Jim Krantz, doesn't seem to own the copyrights that Prince ignores, and it is not clear that copyright law would probive him with the "attribution and recognition" he desires, since Section 106A of the Copyright Act (a.k.a. VARA) wouldn't seem to apply. Unlike Prince's actions (again, basing this analysis strictly on the information in the linked article), here's a fair use reproduction of one of Krantz's photos:

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This article describes the way that some academics seem to take credit the research and ghostwriting of their research assistants. Below is an excerpt:

In September 2004, Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, found himself having to admit that his latest book, All Deliberate Speed, contained six paragraphs lifted verbatim from a book by Yale professor Jack Balkin, What “Brown v. Board of Education” Should Have Said. Equally surprising was the fact that Ogletree hadn’t known about the plagiarism, which occurred in a passage about the history of desegregation efforts, until he was told of it by Balkin himself.

Which is probably why little seems to have changed with the way Ogletree creates the written work to which he assigns his name; a student familiar with Ogletree’s writing process on a current book, as well as op-eds and briefs for law cases, says that, three years after the plagiarism scandal, Ogletree still parcels out the work to a group of about 10 students on his payroll. The distinguished professor of law will review, but generally leave untouched, the writing of his most trusted researchers. He then puts his name on top of it. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For a while I have been recoiling at all that talk about how young people today are "born digital" or are part of some special or distinct experiential universe that grants them special prowess or powers and blinds them to other things (like, say, books).

I don't buy it for one minute.

Partly, I resist such talk because I don't think that "generations" are meaningful social categories. Talking about "Generation X" as if there were some discernable unifying traits or experiences that all people born between 1964 and pick a year after 1974 is about as useful as saying that all Capricorns share some trait or experience. Yes, today one-twelfth of the world will "experience trouble at work but satisfaction in love." Right.

Invoking generations invariable demands an exclusive focus on people of wealth and means, because they get to express their preferences (for music, clothes, electronics, etc.) in ways that are easy to count. It always excludes immigrants, not to mention those born beyond the borders of the United States. And it excludes anyone on the margins of mainstream consumer or cultural behavior.

In the case of the "digital generation," the class, ethnic, and geographic biases could not be more obvious.

And besides, I have spent more than a decade in the constant company of people 18 to 23 years old. The faces change. The age range does not. I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly in every class. Yet it has not changes in more than 10 years. Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number of people who can't stand computers at all. A few every year lack mobile phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Most use Facebook and Myspace because they are easy, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not).

College students in America just are not as digital as we might want to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough to be all that digital. Like the rest of us, they will use a tool if the tool works for them and they can afford it. If not, then not.

All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that "kids won't read books" is just crap. They read books when there is a payoff. And they all (I mean all) tell me that they like the technology. They just don't like the price.

Henry Jenkins has issues as well:

... Talk of "digital natives" helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of "digital natives" may also mask the different degrees access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

...

Talking about digital natives also tends to make these changes all about digital media rather than encouraging us to think about the full range of media platforms which shape the world around us or for that matter, the complex set of relationships between old and new media that characterize convergence culture. The digital may be what feels new to us who are of older generations but it isn't as if these young people were exclusively interacting through digital platforms.

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants tends to exagerate the gaps between adults, seen as fumbling and hopelessly out of touch, and youth, seen as masterful. It invites us to see contemporary youth as feral, cut off from all adult influences, inhabiting a world where adults sound like the parents in the old Peanuts cartoons -- whah, whah, whah, whah -- rather than having anything meaningful to say to their offspring. In the process, it disempowers adults, encouraging them to feel helpless, and thus justifying their decision not to know and not to care what happens to young people as they move into the on-line world.

In reality, whether we are talking about games or fan culture or any of the other forms of expression which most often get associated with digital natives, we are talking about forms of cultural expression that involve at least as many adults as youth. Fan culture can trace its history back to the early part of the 20th century; the average gamer is in their twenties and thirties. These are spaces where adults and young people interact with each other in ways that are radically different from the fixed generational hierarchies affiliated with school, church, or the family. They are spaces where adults and young people can at least sometimes approach each other as equals, can learn from each other, can interact together in new terms, even if there's a growing tendency to pathologize any contact on line between adults and youth outside of those familiar structures.

As long as we divide the world into digital natives and immigrants, we won't be able to talk meaningfully about the kinds of sharing that occurs between adults and children and we won't be able to imagine other ways that adults can interact with youth outside of these cultural divides. What once seemed to be a powerful tool for rethinking old assumptions about what kinds of educational experiences or skills were valuable, which was what excited me about Prensky's original formulation, now becomes a rhetorical device that short circuits thinking about meaningful collaboration across the generations. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every morning we get the lame national edition of The New York Times (reading the Book Review on Sunday instead of Saturday is soooooo rest of America to a couple of New Yorkers). But the delivery guy frustrates us by getting it to us no earlier than 8:15 a.m., and we usually leave for work at 8:45. So there is little time to read even the skimpy edition. And we get the Charlottesville Daily Progress, which is a pretty good local newspaper. We have been talking about getting the Washington Post because it sends a big edition to all corners of Virginia and covers the state itself from bureaus all over the state. But every time I think about picking up the phone something stupid happens over there.

Last week it was the Obama debacle. Apparently the Post editors can't even see that they screwed up and committed really crappy journalism. Now, worse.

Greg Sargent writes:

Hmmm -- at this point, it's fair to say that something seriously bizarre is going on with the editors at The Washington Post. As we've been documenting here, the paper simply refuses to tell its readers that GOP falsehoods are what they are -- i.e., false. They did this last week with the bogus Obama Muslim smear, and more recently with Karl Rove's false claim that President Bush didn't push for an Iraq War vote in 2002.

Well, today brings yet another egregious example of this. Specifically, the paper was so reluctant to subject Bush's claims to any real scrutiny that today it actually ignored its own reporting from only a day ago basically contradicting what the President said this morning at a press conference. The presser was about the new NIE saying Iran shuttered its nuke program years ago.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...though of course it is still mid afternoon. The rules for "strip dreidl."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Crooked Timber

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Boing Boing:

The MPAA's "University Toolkit" (a piece of monitoring software that universities are being asked to install on their networks to spy on students' communications) has been taken down, due to copyright violations. The Toolkit is based on the GPL-licensed Xubuntu operating system (a flavor of Linux). The GPL requires anyone who makes a program based on GPL'ed code has to release the source code for their program and license it under the GPL. The MPAA refused multiple requests to provide the sources for their spyware, so an Ubuntu developer sent a DMCA notice to the MPAA's ISP and demanded that the material be taken down as infringing.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

YouTube - Stop the Canadian DMCA!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Talking Points Memo | Watch'm Squirm

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Inside Higher Ed Scott McLemee asked a bunch of people for the best academic blogs that seem to fly below radar, i.e. elements of the long tail of the academic blogosphere. The whole thing is filled with great recommendations. It's added to my daily blogroll, which is a bit of a problem at this point.

Here is what I told Scott:

Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, has published widely on questions involving new media and intellectual property, and not long ago started a blog in conjunction with his book in progress, The Googlization of Everything.

Like Cathy Davidson (above), he points to Liz Losh’s VirtualPolitik: “Liz teaches rhetoric at UC-Irvine. She is one of the smartest people writing about information technology uses among educators and young people. The way she combines rhetorical criticism with technological sophistication is inspiring. I also dig Madisonian.net. It’s a group blog by a bunch of my favorite law professors. It’s sharp and well written, concerned with a broad array of legal issues but centers on intellectual property, mostly.”

Vaidhyanathan also says he is “a big fan” of Feminist Law Professors: “This blog keeps the good ol’ boys in the legal academy honest. Ann Bartow at the University of South Carolina is the editor and leader of the blog. Its contributions are wide ranging. And the writing is first-rate.”

Enjoy the whole list. It's pretty great. Thanks for doing this, Scott!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For Professors, 'Friending' Can Be Fraught - Chronicle.com

For Professors, 'Friending' Can Be Fraught

By SARA LIPKA

The old guy in the corner at a college party can come off as creepy. The same goes for a faculty member on Facebook, the online hangout first populated by students.

"Facebook was created as a place for students, not for professors," says Steve Moskowitz, a sophomore at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. Students should be able to express themselves freely there, he says, without worrying what some professor will think.

One way to do that is by joining groups. Their names, often clever, mark identities like bumper stickers. Mr. Moskowitz formed the group "Gee, I don't think I want my professors on Facebook anymore." Its icon is a lecturer crossed out with a big red X.

He started it when he discovered his music professor on the site. The professor had commented on another group, which students had created to mock his resemblance to a character in a local TV commercial.

"This is the funniest group," the professor wrote. "The guy that you say looks like me is my cousin (well 2nd cousin)." The students were mortified. Banter ceased.

But like it or not, professors are logging on. The number of Facebook users is doubling every six months, and adults, including professors, are the fastest-growing group among them. Some want to track down students who no longer respond to e-mail. Many are curious to see for themselves the addictive gabfest. As they sign on, they are negotiating the famously fraught teacher-student relationship in new ways.

People connect on Facebook by asking to "friend" one another. A typical user lists at least 100 such connections, while newbies are informed, "You don't have any friends yet." A humbling statement. It might make you want to find some.

But friending students can be even dicier than befriending them. In the real world, casual professors may ask students to call them by their first names, meet them for lunch, a beer, even. Most still don't think of themselves as pals.

Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, sent "friend" requests to several of his students, but then second-guessed himself. Would they feel obligated to accept? Would they think he expected something from them, maybe more participation in class?

It seemed unfair, says Mr. Bogost, who teaches in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. "I've definitely kind of backed off the undergrads," he says, "certainly in their earlier years."

Nancy Baym worries more about students' expectations of her. A few weeks ago, a young man she did not know tried to friend her, says Ms. Baym, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. The same student e-mailed her the next day, asking to get into a class that had a waiting list. He must have thought, "If she's my friend, then she'll let me into the class," she says.

Young, female faculty members already struggle to be seen as authority figures, says Ms. Baym. It was easy to imagine what might happen: "But how could you have given me a D? You're my friend on Facebook!"

And so, when undergrads ask to friend her, this professor politely declines. She encourages them to contact her again when they graduate — when there's no chance of their turning up in another class, or before a judicial panel she is on.

Most faculty members on Facebook keep their profiles professional — nothing racier than would be posted, say, on an office door. The consensus on friending seems to be: Accept students' requests but don't initiate any.

That's one of the guidelines for "Faculty Ethics on Facebook," a group started by Mark A. Clague, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "Since there's an uneven power dynamic, giving the power to the students to control the relationship" is good policy, he says.

Several dozen professors have joined the group, which also urges members not to troll students' profiles, friends or not. Even though students have become savvier about what they post — and how they adjust their privacy settings — faculty members still might discover things they wish they hadn't.

Richard Scott Nokes, a professor of English at Troy University, in Alabama, knows how that goes. A student once approached him late in the week to ask for an extension on an assignment. He said he was going to a relative's funeral. Mr. Nokes happened to sign on to Facebook a few days later, and something in his news feed — the site's voyeuristic compilation of friends' updates — caught his eye.

There was a new picture of the bereaved student, posted by a friend, on the beach in Panama City, Fla. Mr. Nokes, who had suspected as much, decided not to say anything. "I guess it's not the first time I've been lied to by a student," he says. But "it was the first time I had a photograph."

For all its pitfalls, Facebook can prompt meaningful exchanges. Some professors look up students who e-mail them with questions or are scheduled to come to office hours. What the professors learn, they say, makes them better advisers. Comments that students have posted — concern over a bad class presentation, for example — can provoke a thoughtful conversation. One professor knew to go easy on a student when he saw his status change from "in a relationship" to "single."

Cindy Lee, a senior at Simmons College, once "poked" a professor — Facebook-speak for a friendly nudge. He poked back. That virtual informality, she says, gave her a mentor she wouldn't have felt comfortable approaching otherwise.

Modern times have dealt the teacher-student relationship many challenges: sexual harassment, political correctness. "It's harder to have an earnest, and still professional, but personalized relationship with students," says Mr. Bogost.

A modern tool may complicate that relationship further. Or, with its quirky brand of humanity, help recover it.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, the very scientists who did that amazing work think that's a pile of crap:

Standing in the Way of Stem Cell Research

By Alan I. Leshner and James A. Thomson
Monday, December 3, 2007; Page A17

A new way to trick skin cells into acting like embryos changes both everything and nothing at all. Being able to reprogram skin cells into multipurpose stem cells without harming embryos launches an exciting new line of research. It's important to remember, though, that we're at square one, uncertain at this early stage whether souped-up skin cells hold the same promise as their embryonic cousins do.

Far from vindicating the current U.S. policy of withholding federal funds from many of those working to develop potentially lifesaving embryonic stem cells, recent papers in the journals Science and Cell described a breakthrough achieved despite political restrictions. In fact, work by both the U.S. and Japanese teams that reprogrammed skin cells depended entirely on previous embryonic stem cell research. ...

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

YouTube - Sorry, Internet

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From here:

Alia Muhammad Baker is the librarian of Basra, Iraq. “Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit. Until now – now they talk only of war.” In 2003, with the U.S invasion of Iraq imminent, Alia Muhammad Baker wondered what would happen to the books in Basra’s Central Library if their city was attacked. When the governor refused her request to move the books to a safe place, she began smuggling volumes out of the library each night after work. When the war reached Basra and bombs began to fall, Alia frantically called upon nearby neighbors of the library to help her save more books while buildings in the city burned. Over the course of one night, they packed books in crates, sacks and curtains, passing them over a 7-foot wall to hide them in the restaurant next door. In all, they saved 30,000 volumes, which Alia later hid in her own house and the houses of friends. There they remain, while Alia dreams of peace, and a new library for Basra. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From The Museum of Hoaxes:

"Only two students honestly stated they did not know what the term meant. Six left the question blank. But the other twenty-one handed in expositions, ranging from one-half to three pages long, in which they solemnly described it as, among other things, "automatism," "vitalism," "hypnosis" and the "behavior of the lower animals." It was astonishing because, of course, Dr. Fernberger had just coined this mythical word for the occasion."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kindle: The Holy Grail or the last gasp of eBooks? :

... The connectivity issue beyond ebooks is really the most compelling and important part of the device and strategy by Amazon. Ebook devices must do a much, much better job of accessing all types of content – they must access a variety of textual content types, from online subscription sites, to blogs, to newspapers. Amazon has even included easy access to Wikipedia on the Kindle. Consumers will buy a product if it fits our lifestyle. Kindle has done its best to make that possible.

The commitment that Amazon has shown to give Kindle the iPod effect it deserves is an enormous risk. Amazon has not only committed itself to becoming a device manufacturer (well, at least a branding an OEM manufacturer’s device), it has committed itself to digitizing and converting everything publishers will give them. The combined expense is massive and if it doesn’t show the right return, may deal Amazon a deathly blow that even an 8th Harry Potter book couldn’t fix.

The risk here isn’t just to Amazon. If Kindle fails, the ebook is over, the theory of the “iPod model” is wrong for eBooks, and publishing must face the reality that consumers just don’t want to read immersive content on electronic screens of any sort… but let’s not rain on this glorious parade just yet. I think Kindle and the inevitable rivals it will spawn are here to stay. The ebook is dead, long live the ebook! ...

One thing I just can't grasp about every new e-book device and declaration of the end of print:

Do the designers understand how people actually use books in their lives? The bathtub? Takeoff and landing? The beach? The book club?

One thing I just can't grasp in every positive review of the Kindle:

Why is is better than a personal computer with a better screen?

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

David Weinberger writes:

Anthony Grafton's article in the November 5 New Yorker, Future Reading, intends to challenge the "infotopian" hyper-enthusiasm about online libraries. While Grafton acknowledges that "it's hard to exaggerate what is already becoming possible month by month and what will become possible in the next few years," he argues that the future will be continuous with the present as "the narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books."

Baloney. Yes, libraries will exist, and they'll still smell of varnish and mold, and some of us will continue to make important use of them. But Grafton seriously underestimates the existing and coming discontinuity. In fact, Grafton is so insistent on defending libraries that he lets his nostalgia overcome his logic.

His underestimation extends in both temporal directions. ...

Having huge collections available to everyone online would seem to make the distant past more present than ever, and not just in a technical sense. Nevertheless, Grafton is pointing to a genuine problem: The scanning projects are not resulting in "one accessible store of information." He might also have mentioned the role of copyright standing between us and what we need to know. But, who can tell? Maybe we'll get our heads right about copyright, and maybe the big scan collections will make enough metadata available that we can do searches that turn up hits across all of them. Metadata can make collections more "fluid" in Kevin Kelly's sense than Grafton acknowledges. And that could come about faster and less traumatically than Grafton seems to recognize. For example, it's not hard to imagine circumstances in which the Open Library initiative really takes off, connecting editions of books in ways that open up scholarship, rather than requiring scholars to go on library crawls to find every edition.

Second, Grafton pays no mind to the collective power of readers. Our ability to pull pieces together for one another is quite remarkable. For example, while we have always been able to annotate physical books (well, not the books in the libraries that Grafton is praising), those annotations in the online world can become public. Because we don't yet have good and widely-used networked annotation systems, we don't yet have a lot of innovation about how to derive sense from the annotations of the "horde" (Grafton's term for Internet users). But we will. Think about what scholars could learn about our sociology by processing annotation patterns. Those contributions from readers — Coleridge scholars and the "forgotten" — will be available to everyone with a browser, and not just to the dusty-shouldered scholar traveling to the obscure libraries spotting the globe.

Third, the entire publishing ecosystem will be radically disrupted once we have electronic book readers that work. The current Sony version apparently is ok for reading, and has the virtue of storing scores of books. But it still treats us like armchair potatoes who don't want to write in the margins or — more important — talk with one another as we read. Once we have networked, paper-quality book reading devices, reading will change from private to collaborative. That's disruptive economically, socially, and epistemologically.

Finally, in all this nostalgia for printed books — which a glance at my office will show I share — Grafton misses the disruption that's already occurred. Digital writing isn't between covers. It's eruptive, ecstatic, self-transcendent...which is to say it's hyperlinked. This changes how we write, how we read, and how we shape knowledge. ...

I don't read Tony's article as nostalgia. I don't think Tony as a "nostalgist" (is this a word?). In fact, I would assert that he is, in fact, a historian.

As to the charge that Tony ignores four major disruptions, I say he is innocent (he gets that copyright is an impediment to a universal library -- but so is contract and corporatization), guilty (but only of ignoring early experiments and some hype), innocent (because electronic books offer no overwhelming advantages to readers over paper books), and innocent (because he understands the difference between writing and reading).

Dave argues powerfully in his brilliant new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, that new, democratic, dynamic forms of information organization are powerful and important. But I think he makes a mistake in this reaction to Tony by claiming that anything is "inevitable." Tony, a wise historian, is unwilling to declare every change and challenge to be a revolution.

I think there is more in common between Dave and Tony than Dave allows in this response.

Nothing is inevitable.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've been talking about the hand-wringing reports from the NEA about an alleged decline of reading caused by electronic media. It's important to note that the putative author of these reports, NEA chief Dana Gioia, previously had a role in the "death of poetry" debates of the eighties and nineties long before he assumed his current position as a spokesperson about the supposed death of the book.

It's too long a rant to post on Sivacracy, but see why I call Gioia a longtime "necrophiliac" here.

P.S. Welcome Ted!

Posted by Liz Losh at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the BBC:

"They wear pink saris and go after corrupt officials and boorish men with sticks and axes.

The several hundred vigilante women of India's northern Uttar Pradesh state's Banda area proudly call themselves the "gulabi gang" (pink gang), striking fear in the hearts of wrongdoers and earning the grudging respect of officials.

The pink women of Banda shun political parties and NGOs because, in the words of their feisty leader, Sampat Pal Devi, "they are always looking for kickbacks when they offer to fund us".

Two years after they gave themselves a name and an attire, the women in pink have thrashed men who have abandoned or beaten their wives and unearthed corruption in the distribution of grain to the poor.

They have also stormed a police station and attacked a policeman after they took in an untouchable man and refused to register a case."

Read the rest here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Opinions: Tom Toles Cartoons - (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nancy Kaplan of the University of Baltimore, writing over at the mothership, if:book:

... The entire argument, in short, depends on the ability to demonstrate both that reading proficiency is declining and that the number of people who choose to read books in their leisure time is also declining. From those two trends, the NEA draws some inferences about what declines in reading books and declines in reading proficiency mean for the nation as a whole.

Much of the data used to support the core claims derives from statistics gathered and analyzed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). In particular, data on reading proficiency at three ages — 9, 13, and 17 — come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report on long term trends, a "nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. Assessments are conducted periodically [since 1971] in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history" (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/). In addition to assessing reading proficiency across three contexts for reading ("reading for literary experience, reading for information, and reading to perform a task"), the assessment also "asked students to report contextual variables such as time spent on homework, the number of pages read for school and homework, and the amount of time spent reading for fun" (TRONTR, p. 27). Data demonstrating the decline in reading proficiency among adult readers come from a separate NCES study, the National Assessments of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which has been conducted periodically since 1992.

Despite the numerous charts, graphs and tables in To Read or Not ot Read, a careful and responsible reading of the complete data provided by the NAEP and the NAAL undermine the conclusions the NEA draws. ...

... Reading well, doing well, and doing good may exhibit strong correlations but the underlying dynamics producing each of the three effects may have little to do with what Americans choose to do in their leisure time. Read responsibly, the data underlying the NEA's latest report simply do not support Mr. Gioia's assertions.

Like many other federal agencies under our current political regime, the National Endowment for the Arts seems to have fixed the data to fit its desired conclusions.

Damn. Read the whole thing.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gregory A. Jackson, who's the Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago, published an incredibly insightful piece about file-sharing on college campuses and what to do about it in this past week's Chronicle of Higher Education. I'm especially intrigued by the statistical evidence he uses to respond to what the music and movie industries allege is a file-sharing "epidemic" on college campuses. Apparently, only about one-half of one percent of faculty, staff, and students has been the subject of copyright complaints. I gather this statistic is still a bit rough around the edges, but it in any case, it certainly flies in the face of received wisdom.

Here are more highlights:

For obvious reasons, universities deplore violations of copyright law. Most institutions aggressively handle complaints filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, disconnecting offenders, invoking disciplinary processes, and imposing penalties. At my institution, the University of Chicago, first offenders must meet with a dean — on the record, to emphasize the seriousness of the offense. We fine second offenders $1,000, with the proceeds going to student aid. We paper our campus with posters about copyright infringement; we discuss the issue at orientations and in class; and we cover it in our acceptable-use policy, which all students, faculty and staff members, and other users must acknowledge before we let them on our network.

If the music and movie producers took steps to render those objections moot, I believe that illegal file sharing would become much less common.

You can read the complete article by clicking here (assuming you subscribe to The Chronicle).

Posted by Ted Striphas at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)