Researchers Find Internet Use Has Pros and Cons for Kids

Researchers Find Internet Use Has Pros and Cons for Kids—”The findings show that online interactions provide essential social support for otherwise isolated adolescents, but these online boards may also normalize and encourage self-injurious behavior and add potentially lethal behaviors to the repertoire of established adolescent self-injurers and those exploring identity options, said lead author Janis L. Whitlock of Cornell University.”

IRA Convention 2006: the prelude

I come to you this evening from the Hyatt Regency in lovely
Chicago. Tomorrow I am to attend sessions and whatnot. This evening we had a ReadWriteThink team dinner at Spiaggia, which was wonderful but so expensive. Nothing like food architecture to set off a meeting. I still don’t know how they cut the pancetta into little tiny curls for the pasta course. I would love to figure it out. It was remarkable. I wish that could have been my entire meal. Sadly, chefs do as they please.

My drive to Chicago was uneventful for the most part, except for the section when I drove by the Aurora/Joliet exit on 55 (yes, I took a very strange route, but I avoided all the construction). When my eye found the hotel that I met my father at when he was helping shut down an arsenal in Joliet, I teared up and wept in the car.

I was listening to the audio version of Don’t Think of an Elephant, which really doesn’t go well with weeping. Still there was a point in listening to the book where I thought that I might understand Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a system of reframing, and I thought that perhaps if I could just find the right freakin’ frame I wouldn’t be crying constantly when random things like a Comfort Inn in Joliet come into view.

Erasing your cell phone data – Lifehacker

Erasing your cell phone data – Lifehacker—given that my two years are up and I can get a new phone soon, I figured that I better save this.

TechRhet: Tag Literacy

Line56.com: Tag Literacy—now tagging is important and all, but I’m not sure that it’s a new and different literacy.

For Win or Mac: Rip a CD as one continuous MP3 in iTunes – Lifehacker

Rip a CD as one continuous MP3 in iTunes – Lifehacker—while I am not trying to rip an opera to my iPod, this could still be quite handy, especially for some partitioned audio books that I have that always want to play out of order.

CW2006 Presenation: Lakoff DVD

I’ve watched the companion DVD to the Elephant book, How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff, several times this evening—for lazy reasons, as it seemed much easier than slogging all the way through the book and I needed to feel like I was accomplishing something. The video is really to short to be very helpful. It’s as if Lakoff decided to read the outline to us. Very little explanation. I was hoping for more, especially for what I paid for it. Oh well.

Still much to figure out, and I’ve pulled a number of books off of the shelf. At some point, I acquired The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media by Raymond Gozzi, Jr., and apparently I need to skim through it. Ir worries me too that I don’t know how Media Ecology fits into my A/B scheme. I keep running into it,and it feels as if it’s just beyond what I’m doing. But it troubles me that it keeps coming up. How can I possibly work anything else into this craziness?

In the News: Beeks reading program is a success

NRVToday.com – Beeks reading program is a success—from the world of strange things from my hometown. Apparently, a bearded dragon is a lizard. While I’m sure that kissing such a lizard is harmless to the human, I do wonder what the hell that poor lizard thought.

TechRhet: Internet Debate: Preserving User Parity

NPR : Internet Debate: Preserving User Parity—isn’t it interesting that people don’t care to notice that there are fundamental race/class barriers to digital access, but if the conversation is about commercial access, everyone is outraged? Well, if you define everyone their way.

lost dna

When I notice a stray piece of hair or a jagged, torn fingernail fall to the ground, often I think that I should scoop it up, catch it from its fall and put it in my pocket. I must keep the evidence that I was there so no one can trace me. Must stay unknown and unseen. This thought of invisibility happens most often in places where anyone would expect me to be—my car, my house, my office. Maybe it’s just that I don’t pay attention in other spaces. Or maybe it’s in those spaces that I most need to disappear to ease it all away.

CW2006 Presentation: More Heidegger

My knowledge of theory could be bound in nutshell, but for some reason I’m investigating Heidegger. Mostly, I think I just feel smart when I hear the sound of the word in my head. So this morning, instead of getting ready for work, I procrastinated and googled for [heidegger technology]. For no particular reason that I recall, I chose the third link: Professor Hubert Dreyfus. It turned out to be far to long to read when I was supposed to be in the shower, but I did scroll it a bit and found this (I wish there were a way to insert a named anchor in someone else’s page):

In a quite different domain, in a talk at Berkeley on the difference between the modern library culture and the new information-retrieval culture, Terry Winograd notes a series of oppositions which, when organized into a chart, show the transformation of the Modern into the Postmodern along the lines that Heidegger described. Here are a few of the oppositions that Winograd found:

LIBRARY CULTURE	INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CULTURE
Careful selection a. quality of editions b. perspicuous description to enable judgment c. authenticity of the text	Access to everything a. inclusiveness of editions b. operational training to enable coping c. availability of texts
Classification a. disciplinary standards b. stable, organized, defined by specific interests.	Diversification a. user friendliness b. hypertext–following all lines of curiosity
Permanent collections a. preservation of a fixed text b. browsing	Dynamic collections a. intertextual evolution b. surfing the web

It is clear from these opposed lists that more has changed than the move from control of objects to flexibility of storage and access. What is being stored and accessed is no longer a fixed body of objects with fixed identities and contents. Moreover, the user seeking the information is not a subject who desires a more complete and reliable model of the world, but a protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons. In short, the postmodern human being is not interested in collecting but is constituted by connecting.

Either I’m losing my mind and totally lost, or I am completely on target and have a 500-page treatise to write. The columns are backwards from my notes—Winograd has B-A, and I have A-B. The need for “control of objects” in Winograd’s Library Culture parallels the Information Architecture control over agency that Marilyn Cooper identified in the CCCC session. The “protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons” is a more positive reading of the organic and systemic Information Ecologies. Library Culture is the “strict father,” and Information-Retrieval Culture is the “nurturing parent.”

As I said, I either suddenly undertand everything, or I’m totally lost and making things up.