Not That Kind of Librarian

Forthcoming Library Project: TERMS

watch this space for your chance to participate next month

Great, now I have a Lionel Ritchie song stuck in my head, thanks alot!!

Hello!!!,

I am hellen,

I saw your contact , and i was deeply moved.I think that you are a very interesting person.So I decided to use the chance to get to know you.i dont think  that the age  appearance is so important. The most important is what is inside you and how do you feel about the life.


I know this life from many sides and I am rather mature already to know how to make a man happy.I think we should use every chance to find our happiness. and I am contacting you for obvious reason which you will understand.

i am sending this mail just to know if this email address is OK,reply me so that i will send my photo and more details to you,and i have a very important thing to tell you,
i still hope for your reply,

have a pleasant day,

hellen.

Can a Smart Phone Make You Stupid?

Let us start with two quotes:

The first is from a FAQ that Tim Berners-Lee wrote on the semantic web in September 1998 (Yeah, 11 years ago) “The concept of machine-understandable documents does not imply some magical artificial intelligence which allows machines to comprehend human mumblings. It only indicates a machine’s ability to solve a well-defined problem by performing well-defined operations on existing well-defined data. Instead of asking machines to understand people’s language, it involves asking people to make the extra effort”

The second from a ReadWriteWeb post almost ten years later in May 2008 “Even five years ago we lived in the boxed world of Windows-dominated UIs. There were standard UI elements - menus, tabs, combo boxes, tables - and every single desktop application was full of these elements and nothing else. User interface was not the place to be innovative. It was considered unorthodox and even dangerous to present the interface in non-standard ways because everyone believed that users were, to be frank, stupid, and wouldn’t want to deal with anything other than what they were used to.”

In both quotes, the inherent premise is people still need to approach the InterWeb and its applications in an intelligent fashion and denying an acknowledgement of users’ intelligence to determine context lends itself to poor web design. However, experience is indicating that these principals do not hold true in practice. More and more, it appears that people are expecting the InterWeb to provide its own consistent contextuality and inferability. If a statement made via email, blog, or online article is not stated outright but instead only suggested or hinted at, then the implied meaning is quite often lost. This inability to apply a contextual meaning to a single web interaction is somewhat fascinating and also rather terrifying. As though whole generations now are completely unable to comprehend and find sub-text. Alongside with the inability to determine context in the online environment is an equally disturbing trend for some to not comprehend or determine inference from statements made via emails, blogs, or online articles.

Let us posit that the readily available technology and applications that allow us to read email, blogs, and online articles from anywhere at any time has resulted in a deficit to detail. These details are nuances that most reasonable intelligent people normally recognize when dedicating themselves to a close reading of text. In the online environment, reading is more a scan than an traditional “engrossing read.” Trying to get to more information quickly, nuance is the victim of inattention and in the end efficiencies are not achieved. While scanning may result in five email messages being read in a minute, the subsequent replies that ask for information that were already provided in those five email messages result in more back-and-forth reiteration of information already provided and in the end fifteen to thirty minutes have elapsed. If those five email messages had been read with attention for fifteen minutes, more information is transmitted from one person to another and more efficiency achieved.

In regards to contextualization, there still seems to be surprise/confusion when one set of online tools acts differently from others. There is still resentment/frustration in library/information science realms when one set of abstracting/indexing tools work differently from another or when a discovery/referral mechanism for reference referrals performs their function in a relational manner that is context sensitive. There is still a strong desire in this community to create a one search option that provides a single uniform results set despite the fact that the broadcast search is occurring over very dissimilar electronic resources and thus dictates a difference in response.

Let’s return to the opening quote from Tim Berners-Lee: “Instead of asking machines to understand people’s language, it involves asking people to make the extra effort” Extra efforts seem to be in short supply. Obviously in an information glut, many do want machines to understand our language and don’t want to take the time to think about information provided. Nor do some seem able to accept the fact that an experience within a social network should be a completely different experience than with an online scholars network. Taking time to think appears to be the greatest victim with the advent of smart technologies and that’s rather stupid.