“Unchained, ain’t nothing stays the same
Unchained, and you hit the ground running”
As a student, textbooks are a fact of life. In the “old days”, you took your course schedule to the bookstore and hoped you could figure out what books went with what courses and prayed that you had enough cash to purchase the needed materials. With any luck, you had enough leftover for a candy bar.
Books were both horribly expensive and heavy. You waddled out of the bookstore with your booty, stopped at the nearest bench, and gathered up the strength to carry your load to your final destination. If you were fortunate, most of the material was useful. If not, you had some expensive bookshelf dressing for the next 20 years.
I was listening to a story on NPR this morning about conversion to e-texbooks at Northwest Missouri State. Unbelievably, the administration there has determined that all books will be issued in electronic format. Granted, this decision was made easier because they issue a laptop to every student. However, this seemed to me like a tremendous leap.
I’m all for electronic versions of books. It helps when you’re searching for a passage and certainly makes carrying everything in one bag more plausible. However, the actual reading is a tremendous strain for me. Older eyes make it difficult to focus on the screen for too long and you just can’t lean back in a chair and read with a laptop.
One of the items mentioned in the news story was that “publishers” have started to adapt their books to meet the demands of the digital age. Instead of merely rendering text, they are beginning to include multimedia video clips in addition to words and pictures. I hate to say it but this gave me a vision of an academic world without instructors. Then again, I also had a vision of Grammy awards being presented for best adaptation of an original text with the statue going to a calculus book. Bleah! Begone visions!
The reality is that change is happening. Books need to adapt to shorter attention spans and new methods of instruction delivery. The meaning of words are still relevant and I still have to understand the material in order to pass my class. Until I get that neural implant from Neuromancer that allows me to jack into cyberspace, I’m going to have to read, digest, and comprehend. I may be unchained from the printed book but I still need to hit the ground running.
So That's Life? 
Where Have All the Good Times Gone?
03/30/2009I took some time off from writing for the blog in hopes that I could renew the batteries a bit. Of course, I’ve been online and reading, but nothing caught my eye or ear to write about. As I read Facebook updates and tweets during this time, I began to notice an old creeping sensation slowly moving up my spine.
As you may remember from my early posts, I was initially hesitant to start using Twitter and Facebook because I didn’t feel that I had anything relevant to share with the world. What I had for lunch or even what I thought of a movie was not something that I felt would be interesting. Since then, I’ve been exposed to some fascinating interaction during the December 2009 blackout in Honolulu and I’ve even managed to help get 29 of my high school classmates to create Facebook accounts.
What’s the problem you ask? It starts with the running “feud” between Facebook and Twitter users that can summed up with the phrase, “Facebook is to keep in touch with people you knew before and Twitter is for talking to people you’d like to know”. In case you’ve been fortunate enough NOT to have encountered this schism, Facebook people are snobs about roping-in the most people from their past and Tweeters take pride in ridiculous numbers of followers who they’ve never met. Does either extreme sound good to you?
OK, ignoring fringe elements has been a hobby of mine for many years so I should have been able to let this pass with ease. I was successful at first, but recently it’s been more difficult. I thought maybe it was the Twitter overload I talked about before. Then it struck me. Just like IRL (in real life), there are morons everywhere! I guess I should have realized right off the bat that creating communities from a (at the base level) socially challenged group would be problematic. There’s a reason why geeks have the reputation they have and they’ve only redoubled their efforts in the new medium. Speaking as a (almost) reformed geek, overcoming this anti-social DNA requires some strong medicine. When you combine this bunch with the casual computer user who joins because the interface is easy to use, you get a volatile mix that is liable to burst into flames.
Facebook is full of people I barely knew, those who want to be my friend only because they want me to join a game with them, or gambling addicts looking for a poker chip handout. Twitter is replete with people who would have been gagged and stuffed into a dumpster for failing to curtail their predilection to blurt every thought that popped into their head. But these are domains where they rule. Places where they have all the knowledge and the general public has none.
So what is a person to do? Well, I’ve reviewed my Twitter follows and removed a bunch that irritate me on a regular basis. I’m eyeing a few who, while mildly entertaining, blather endlessly on topics only a middle-schooler would care about. On Facebook, I could easily delete people without their knowledge. Instead, I’ve created lists of friends and carefully segmented who can see what. Neither of these is a perfect solution, but it keeps me sane while I wait for some real software to handle things like this in an automated fashion.
So, where does all this leave me? Sadly, it brings me full circle with the same questions I started out with. Stay tuned for and see if I break free from the grip of inertia or mire in the quicksand.
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