WebJunction

This just arrived in the WJ community inbox, so I thought I'd share with you all.

Eric Ipsen (from LITA) points us to an article/broadcast from PBS NewHour on the iPod Phenomenon. The question is raised: "Do iPods put us into individual bubbles?"

excerpts:
JEFFREY BROWN: Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is one observer who raises alarms amid the euphoria over the iPod and other gadgets. She calls ours the age of ego-casting.

CHRISTINE ROSEN: You give certain kinds of signals to those around you in social space, the most important of which is: You don't matter. What I'm doing is more important. I have the cell phone conversation; I have the ear phones on; I'm focused on what I want to do. Ergo, none of you exist.

JEFFREY BROWN: Given such concerns, it's fascinating to see some new ways MP3 players are being used in many parts of society. At this Washington, D.C., nightclub, Cafe Saint-Ex, iPod users gather once a month to share favorite songs at an iPod jukebox night, individual choices blasting through the club, and perhaps creating a new musical community."

Do you think this is a valid concern? Is social software making us more anti-social in our physical presence?

Tools aren't social
I've found people are though.
http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=6622.

There you go. Librarians! Always wanting to label things!

OK what is one man's rock is another man's hammer, a tool is what you make of it.
We intuit that society can't afford to keep the Web 1.0 ideas, so we ought to let the "info" terminology (by itself go) go. We are talking about media, and looking for any tool which might be useful to a global community.

So let's just focus, in this community, on the Accessgrid for one second. And please don't say it's teleconferencing. It's a mish mash of every geeks dreams given the opportunity to run off and develop an expensive sandpit in their academic silo. Communities don't talk about "the item" unless it's history. It's always "the item in use" when engineers go about redesigning their naval vessels, librarians go about redesigning their libraries or democracies go about redesigning their ships of state. It's a fashion thing.

The printing press is a good analogy; only with Web 2.0. its more about interrelating global IP flows than buiding national dams. No?

"..... to function effectively in this context, libraries should, suggests Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC, focus on services that save time, that are targeted and engaging, and that are sensitive to the user’s workflow.1 As he puts it, libraries need to get “in the flow” of the user." http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues51.html Diffuse and Flow

I would say "community" instead of "user", because sometimes users will be producers.
The challenge seems to be in making clear, for everyone on the WWW, that theirs is a local communities with a global perspective. To progress, any 'social tools' initiative must encourage 'tourist guides' to overcome the limitations of their community's tools, and their fear of losing their local (domain's) component (as you've been honest enough to point out. thanks.)

Yep!

Damn nuisance having to unlearn all our very clever 'outdated' habits of thinking, ain't it?

I thought the main point you're making - that a professional should never inhibit a learning - is spot on. The encouraging part is that you don't have to say "where are my glasses?" You just have to ask (your son), "How much? How long? When (will you show me how YOU will use it)?

The progressive stuff, the integration of functions across (IP) widgets, professions and domains, gets us into the realm of becoming philosophic, and that's scary for any institutionalized mind. But the important stuff, so far as it increasingly makes sense to me, comes down to doing a bit of tour guiding across similar domain-centric communities-of-interest, and their fora, and giving common conversations a memory in a directory, regardless of the community's preferred (media) format(s).

For similar remote communities, like our own, to be encouraged, they will need to communicate with their global peers more regularly. When I talk about "communication", I do not mean 'media production', and its labelling and classification. although if you'd like a discussion about the researchchannel and digitalwells sometime it might be constructive. I do mean listening, which is something the book classification profession can't help but do, and usually do very well. I also mean talking, quietly, regularly, above the radar, like we are doing right now. But with some fat tools, like the accessgrid, as well.

I must own up to being enough of a geek to programme an all-in-one remote. (an audio engineer's training is hard to shake).I just couldn't see the complication; all it did was put a box's function into an icon - so the separations aren't so physically remote. Isn't this what librarians are asked to do do every day with common books? They just, up to now, 'do it' on behalf of national institutions and "their' (supposed) local communities-of-interest.

Now, with Web 2.0, librarians are being asked to 'do it' on behalf of their global communities, so that their institutions might learn about a thing and respond, before rather than after an event. We live in hope.