Odyssey Online

…today’s Boston Globe has an interesting piece on Facebook, friends, and guilt.  It gets gently to the heart of the matter, is Facebook really about friends.  I suppose that is one positive associated with Facebook: it encourages people to think about what friendship really is.  Can you sustain a friendship over Facebook with photographs and wall posts.  Try an experiment–take someone whom you regularly Facebook (is this a verb like google too?) and write them a letter. You know, stamps, envelope, the whole nine yards. If your immediate response is “But, I’m too busy to write a letter…” you can consider that the results of the experiment.

…and while it’s been promoted here before the best thing ever written about Facebook is by Michael Gerson…

…from the Washington Post, a well written article about twenty-somethings who do not social network. While it is not Civil Disobedience there are some interesting comments made about social networking platforms–what they are and what they result in–by “ordinary folks,” not professional commentators.  A very useful article in terms of how people define genuine experience…

…as you may or may not remember we have a SLU Libraries Facebook page, with our Catalog and ConnectNY front and center (under the boxes tab), and now JSTOR.  So, along with all that a Facebook enthusiast might do, you can simply click to our Facebook account and sample the academic journal literature.  Librarians have been thinking about Facebook…quite a slew of libraries have Facebook accounts and friends like the Librarian in Black have argued seriously and with verve that libraries need to be in Web 2.0 places, because, well, that’s where the clientele is.

…on the other hand there is a sense of encroachment felt by students as institutions and well, parents, make their way to Facebook. My in-laws are all avid Facebook habitues, not so much their kids, mind you, but the parents.  Is Facebook a place where colleges students want to think about research? Perhaps not “to be or not to be” as far as important questions go, but the attempts at translating libraries to Web 2.0 spaces ask interesting questions about what people want out of libraries, and what people want out of life online…

…ah Friday and autumnal rain.  It was widely reported last week that Facebook has now a membership close to the population of the United States and for the first time, it turning a profit as a company (here is the CNN version of the story). And moving from social networking to social reading, Nina Siegal has offered an interesting essay call Thoughts on Bestsellers, which is about reading, readers, and the future of literature. It’s an analysis of the New York Times Best Seller list over the later part of the twentieth century, and this essay (which is long) is an usual but engaging mix of optimism and pessimism on the future of literary fiction.  Great reading for a rainy September Friday…

…with September upon us it is time, it is time, it is time to put off whatever you are doing and spend another twenty minutes in Facebook. We now have a SLU Libraries Facebook Page, so, all of you Facebook enthusiasts, simply look for us “Fanned” on the main SLU Facebook Page, or search St. Lawrence University Libraries and you’ll see all that we’re up to Facebook-wise.

…also, under the banner of all things Facebook, an interesting little piece from Atlantic Online about Facebook’s business strategy.  Seems they are thinking big and trying, according to Derek Thompson, to be  social networking’s “one portal to rule them all”…and under under the banner of something simultaneously sublime and ridiculous a Washington Post feature about people

turning to Facebook for religious companionship…

…researchers at Ohio State University have concluded a study which links Facebook use to lower grades.  While the researchers freely concede that Facebook might be more of a symptom than a disease, they can definitely point to a letter grade drop in excessive Facebook habitues.  Read Thoreau: simplify, for finals swear off Facebook, television, and popular music written after 1980….

…from the Boston Globe, all the reasons to dislike blackberries…a wonderful rant…reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon where a priest is looking out at his congregation saying,”We will now pause for a moment of silent texting…”

…lots of ranting about various things digital,  I realize. Summer hiatus from that coming up (but don’t worry, we’ll be blogging on this summer!)

…a nice story on CNN.com about postcards.  Gently makes the case for them as an analog twitter/texting…a print twitter/texting. Of course, postcards also came complete with handwriting so that a person’s penmanship with the emoticon that came with the message. The person came with the message–in a Paris Review “Art of Poetry” interview, the English Poet Ted Hughes remarked, “Handwriting is drawing.”

…an interesting (if long) piece on Facebook by Vanessa Grigoriadis on Facebook which comments on, among other things, how people use and misuse it, what it really sells, where it is going as a business, what it sells, how it might fail. Also some interesting commentary on how web 2.0 has conquered the “old web” and what that means.   For interesting commentary on that see Jonathan Zittrain’s wonderfully titled book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (ODY TK5105 875 I57 Z53 2008).

Quite a bit of editorializing on Google last time out, and I will stop to return to more properly bibliographic posts, but one more shot at Google and the idea of “opting out.” What Google has done, most importantly, is turned copyright responsibility on its head. Rather than asking permission of authors, they ask the author whose book is in Google Books or the home owner whose house is in Google Street View to tell them “no” and then they’ll comply. While Google would invoke necessity (we can’t possibly ask everybody), the fact they don’t ask, that they feel inclusion is a right, a normalcy, makes the hairs on the back of the neck tingle.  It’s rude, for starters. Secondly, there seems to be a serious case of overreach here. While there is precident, I realize, with things like the phone book or census, Google’s approach relies on a self-generated and self-venerated sense of their innate goodness (the whole Don’t Be Evil, after all), but, can’t one think about “opt out” has being the same as my neighbor helping themselves to my vegatables in my vegatable garden because I haven’t asked them not to and then only stopping when I catch them red-handed with a beet.  It’s cooperation by self-justification…and well, it’s rude.

Google is rude, this is what we’ve learned…

…while it could just be the lousy weather, or that I have yet another birthday looming, I feel a need to vent against mobile communcation technologies.  This is partially inspired by coming across this Conor Friedersdorf essay that argues Twitter is a Fad, is the Myspace of 2009.  From my wonderful people-watching office in ODY, there are times of day that the commencement quad is nothing but people walking (some in circles) and talking into something. Or looking down at something that has little buttons they are thumbing. Why the urgent need to communicate–or, better yet, why the aversion to walking in silence. When I talk outloud while walking I make sure to be communicating with only myself (I do talk to myself a trifle much), and I simply cannot for the life of me think about how a cross campus saunter could be bad…so my advice to any and all today is to go for a walk and talk wth no one…