What the internet is doing to us

I am sure you are just dying to know what I read this summer.  Well, there was a lot of brain candy (mystery novels).  But I also read a bunch of books about how the internet is changing us (and not necessarily for the better):

Aboujaoude, Elias. Virtually you: the dangerous powers of the e-personality. New York: Norton, 2011. (Publisher’s description)

• This one gets awarded The Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval.  This book is that good.  Aboujaoude talks about the ways that our online personality seeps into our offline life, and that is a recipe for disaster.  He identifies five main psychological forces in our e-personalities: “grandiosity, or the feeling that the sky is the limit when it comes to what we can accomplish online; narcissism, or how we tend to think of ourselves as the center of gravity of the World Wide Web; darkness, or how the Internet nurtures our morbid side; regression, or the remarkable immaturity we seem capable of once we log on; and impulsivity, or the urge-driven lifestyle many fall into online” (43). Aboujaoude call this the “Net effect”. Aboujaoude is a psychiatrist, and he talks about how the Net effect can ruin our ‘real’ (as opposed to ‘virtual’) lives. This should be required reading for anyone with internet access.  It certainly gave me pause, and led to more than a few days this summer where I took an internet hiatus.

Carr, Nicholas. The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: Norton, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

• Okay, this will sound terrible, since this book is really about our declining attention spans:  I thought this book was unnecessarily long and poorly written.  Carr would probably say that’s because my brain is being re-wired by the internet.  I say it’s because he needed a more ruthless editor.  If you want to get the gist of the argument but not slog through a rather dull read, I suggest reading the essay he wrote for The Atlantic that was the basis for this book: Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google making us stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains”, The Atlantic July/August 2008.

Lanier, Jaron. You are not a gadget: a manifesto. New York: Knopf, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

• One of Lanier’s major arguments is that our culture now promotes only re-mixing and re-hashing old art.  We don’t make anything new.  (When was the last time you heard about a new movie that was not just a remake of an old movie?)  We remix music,  We cut-and-paste the stuff of the internet into new stuff.  What we fail to do is create anything, and this is a problem for the future.

Pariser, Eli. The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. New York: Penguin, 2011. (Publisher’s description)

• This book should be required reading for everyone who uses Google and/or Facebook.  This also could have been edited to be a bit shorter, but at least it is an easy read.  I learned a lot about filtering from Pariser.  Here’s one that you probably didn’t know: when you look at your Facebook New Feed, it displays the Top news by default.  But you can click on “Most recent” to see even more posts.  The trick is that most people think that clicking on “Most recent” shows you all of your friends’ posts.  However, that is not the case.  It only shows you posts that are similar to the sorts of posts you’ve clicked on before.  Every click is changing what is displayed to you, both in Facebook and on the internet in general.  Pariser also maintains a blog on this topic: The Filter Bubble.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or be programmed: ten commands for a digital age. New York: OR Books, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

• This book is also really good.  It’s a short work that talks about the re-mix culture of the internet.  It also mentions how we are being ‘programmed’ by the internet and by software.  So few people know how to do programming, and that means that we are stuck receiving what is given to us; we can’t make changes ourselves.  This is really unfortunate, because it puts the power of creation into the hands of very few people, and they generally are driven by market forces to create not the best software, but the software that will sell the most.  (This reminds of me of tv.  They don’t make shows that are good; they make shows that attract the largest market audience.  Those are usually two different things.)  Rushkoff doesn’t just talk about software programming, though.  The book is much larger than that.  I highly recommend it.  I’m going to give this one The Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval too.

[Tech tips] SpiderOak

I am a big fan of DropBox, which is an application that helps you sync files from your hard drive into the cloud.  It’s wonderful for people who have to use different computers, but forget to email things to themselves or carry their USB drives so that they can access their files wherever they are.  It’s also really helpful to know that there is a place where you can store your files and never, ever dump coffee on them.  Most importantly, you can set it up to sync your files automatically, so that you don’t have to remember to do it.  You can even set up parts of your synced files to share with other users, so sharing is easy, too.

The one drawback to DropBox, though, is that it is not particularly secure.  It’s secure enough for mundane things, but the really important things that you want to back up are not necessarily safe there.  There were recent security breaches at DropBox that made me search for a better solution.

I just discovered SpiderOak.  SpiderOak is similar to DropBox, in that it syncs your files to the cloud.  But before it does that, it encrypts them.  If someone were to steal data from SpiderOak, they would need your encryption key to read your files.  SpiderOak doesn’t store your password, which is how your encryption key is made.   (If you want to read more about the encryption technology they’re using, visit this page.)

SpiderOak is slightly more complicated to setup than DropBox, and it takes a while to do your first major backup of files.  (That’s because they need to be encrypted first.)  But once the file syncing is set up, it’s really easy and fast.  They also have really helpful videos and instructions on their site to walk you through the process.

Having said that, I want to remind my academic audience that it is not appropriate to store certain kinds of information in this way.  For more details about privacy and security for student data, please read this statement.

If you decide to switch, you might want to take a few minutes and think about the ways you use DropBox.  If you’re sharing folders, for instance, you’ll have to let people know that the folders are moving elsewhere, and give people access to the new folders.  Switching might be a little more complicated than just pushing a button.  Still, I think it’s worth it.

(For more information on DropBox security, check out this post. Also, their news terms of service are poorly written, which calls into question whether you own your files.  Here is information on a complaint to the FTC about DropBox.)

[Tech tips] Google+

Maybe you’ve heard about Google+ (“Google Plus”) in the news, or someone you know sent you an invitation  (lucky you!).  What is this thing?  And how do you use it?

In brief, Google+ is a new social networking service, very similar to Facebook, but with some specific details that make it better than Facebook.*  Where Google+ excels is in the ability to group together your friends into totally separate Circles, so you have easier control over what each Circle of friends can see.  (Facebook allows you to do something like this with lists, but it is not intuitive to figure out, and you always wonder if it is really working, anyway.)

Google+ also allows you to engage in video chat with multiple people.  This might be a good way to do study groups in the future, or to collaborate on group projects.

To find out more about Google Plus, you can visit their demo page: http://www.google.com/+/demo/. They also have a more detailed FAQ page: http://www.google.com/support/+/

If you want to use this service, but don’t have an invitation, you can sign up on this page to be notified when it is available to the public:  https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/.

One of my favorite features in Google+ is the “+1″ (“plus one”) button.  If you use Facebook, you know that it has a “Like” button.  Imagine though, that you have a friend who just posted a really important, but horrific, news story about war crimes, for example.  While you want other people to read the story, you might be reluctant to use the “Like” button, because you don’t like war crimes.  This has led Facebook users to clamor for an “unlike” button, as a way of promoting stories, but without saying you “like” them.  The same goes for commenting on someone’s status when they are undergoing personal tragedy.  You don’t like the fact that your friend’s house burned down, but you want to use the “Like” button to promote the news on your Facebook Wall to your other friends.

Google fixes this by using a “+1″ button, which is more value-neutral.  It’s just a way of saying, “Me, too” or “Read this”, without saying you like it.  That’s pretty ingenious, I think.

Google has tried several social networking applications over the past few years, and most of them have been unsuccessful.  Some were too advanced and too different-from-the-norm for some users (Google Wave), and some were just launched poorly, leading to lawsuits instead of broad adoption (Google Buzz).

My one caveat about Google+ so far is the way it handles pictures – but it’s the exact same way that pictures are shared all over the internet.  (I just wish it were different.)  What I have to say in Google’s defense, though, is that it tells you exactly what happens with pictures during the sign-up process.  Basically, if you post a picture (or any other content) in Google+ (or Facebook, or anywhere else on the web), it doesn’t matter if you only send the picture to your Circle of friends.  Once your friends can see it, there is nothing to stop them from taking the picture and posting it elsewhere.  This is true everywhere on the internet; once you post a picture where others can view it, you can never stop them from putting it somewhere else, where other people can view it, too. (This is why those stupid pictures of yourself are never a good idea.  You think the picture is only being shared with your ‘friends’, but there’s nothing physically stopping them from posting the picture everywhere.  Remember that adding someone to your list of friends is pretty much the same as inviting them into your home.  Act accordingly.  Lock up the important stuff – the stuff that is not flattering to you, or makes you look unemployable, etc. – and keep it out of their hands.  They are your friends today, but who knows about that friendship down the road.)

Google+ can integrate with your Picasa web albums, which is a photo-sharing service from Google.  So, if you want to share (tasteful) vacation photos in Google+, you can just import the pictures from your Picasa web album.  Or, you can just upload pictures directly in Google+, if you prefer.

I was lucky to land an early invitation to Google+, so I am testing it out.  I will be following its development, and keeping an eye on the news about it.  I hope to do a show-and-tell of the service sometime in the fall.  In the meantime, my library users can feel free to contact me about it directly.  (But please do not ask me for an invitation; I don’t have any more to hand out.)

If you’re interested in a third-party overview of Google+, I recommend checking out the guide at AppStorm.

*As always, this essay represents my personal opinion, and not that of my employer.

The filter bubble and academic ‘impact’

Many articles in academia about serials and digital repositories mention measuring the ‘impact’ of a journal through various rubrics.  Now that Google results are ‘personalized’ using data from prior searches, I wonder how that will skew the impact of articles.  (Of course, Google is not alone in using cookies, search history, IP address, etc., to ‘personalize’ search results.  Facebook is another major service that is known for this, too.)

I just finished reading Eli Pariser’s The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you, and he discusses at length the ways that this personalization is going to impact our knowledge.  For instance, if you are an economist who mostly searches for, and clicks through to view, articles on a particular kind of economic theory, then you will see more results in that vein, and fewer results of other economic theories that do not fit into your search history.  While this can save time when doing research, the problem is that we are going to be exposed less frequently to worldviews that do not coincide with our own.

Where I see this being relevant to serials and digital repository management is that articles are often used to measure the ‘impact’ of faculty writings, or of an institutional repository in general.  Well, if many economists skew to one worldview, than more of those articles will be viewed – while equally good, but different economics articles will be viewed less, and therefore will be cited less frequently in papers, thereby lessening the impact of what could be a ground-breaking article.

It seems like we are moving from judging arguments on their merits to simply thinking along with the herd.  Of course, this has been a problem for a while, since no one person or set of people could ever really sift through all of the literature in a particular subject area.  But the problem is clearly going to be exacerbated by the ongoing personalization of search results.  (And I fear it will not be long before such data is used by academic databases, such as EBSCO, to filter search results ‘by relevancy’.)

If you are interested in reading more about this, you can visit Pariser’s website: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/. He also has a page on “Ten things you can do to pop your filter bubble”: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/10-things-you-can-do.

[Tech tips] Why filtered RSS feeds are awesome – and how you can make your own

Let’s imagine that you follow some RSS feeds for professional (or personal) reasons.  You have them nicely set up in an RSS reader so that they are not clogging up your inbox. But they’re getting overwhelming.  Maybe you have an RSS feed that is itself an aggregator, which means it picks up content from other RSS feeds.  That can be really convenient for you, since it means that you don’t have to follow feeds from multiple sites.

But it can also be annoying.

One of the RSS feeds I follow has multiple authors, and I find one of the authors to be particularly obnoxious.  I don’t like his posts.  He is, unfortunately, a pompous windbag who writes too much of too little substance.  Sure, I can skip his posts, but I’d much rather not see them at all.

The solution here is simple: I can filter my RSS feeds.  Most RSS readers can’t handle this task, but I found a very simple, free web application that makes it easy.  It’s called Feed Rinse.  You create an account on their site – you’re using LastPass to manage all your logins, right? – and then you add the RSS feed you want to follow to your account.  Then you can tell it to filter results.  In my case, I told it to cut out all the blog posts that started with a particular title, since the feed I filtered always prefaces articles by that one author with a particular title.

Once you save your filter, you’re nearly done.  Now you can copy the URL of your filtered RSS feed and add that to your RSS reader.

You can also combine RSS feeds into a ‘channel’ with filters, which might be helpful in the classroom.  You could pull together a bunch of feeds, add them to a channel, and then tell the filter to only publish posts that include certain terms, such as a geographic location or a person.  (For example, you could pull together news feeds from several world newspapers, and then filter them to only show results including the word “Lebanon”.  This would help you quickly create a source for up-to-date news for discussion in the classroom, without you having to individually hunt for articles to recommend to students!)

The more I think about this, the more I am amazed – and it’s so easy, compared to some other filtering systems you can construct.  So, go experiment.  Have a good time.

[Tech tips] Facebook privacy

I feel like that title is a bit of an oxymoron.

If you have a Facebook account, you probably just accepted the default security settings during the process of opening the account.

That’s not good enough.

You really need to learn how to take control of your account and understand what information is exposed.  I am sure that reading the privacy information on Facebook does not sound like your idea of a good time, but until you are familiar with it, you shouldn’t post anything in your account.  (To get to their privacy information, go to “Account” in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page. Choose “Help Center” from the drop-down menu.  In the left column, choose “Browse Help Topics”.  Take a look at the pages dealing with Privacy.)

For a helpful overview on keeping your Facebook information private – including how to display different levels of information to different friends – please head on over to Lifehacker to read this post: http://lifehacker.com/5808175/how-to-keep-people-from-seeing-your-facebook-info.

Mosquitoes; Jefferson’s moose; Time

The mosquito crusades: a history of the American anti-mosquito movement from the Reed Commission to the first Earth Day / Gordon Patterson. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)(Click here to access resource)

In search of Jefferson’s moose: notes on the state of cyberspace / David G. Post. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)(Click here to access resource)

The man who found time: James Hutton and the discovery of the Earth’s antiquity / Jack Repcheck. New York : Basic Books, 2009. (Publisher’s description)(Click here to access resource)

Facebook; microfinance; cultural theory

Mezrich, Ben. The accidental billionaires: the founding of Facebook: a tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal. New York: Anchor Books, 2010. (Publisher’s description)(Click here to access resource)

• This book was the basis for the film “The social network”.

Goldberg, Mike, and Eric Palladini. Managing risk and creating value with microfinance. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010. (Publisher’s description)(Click here to access resource)

Doran, Robert, ed. Cultural theory after 9/11. Substance, issue 115, v.37/1. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. (Publisher’s description)(Click here to access resource)

Technology and computing

Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. Total recall: how the E-memory revolution will change everything. New York: Dutton, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Schell, Jesse. The art of game design: a book of lenses. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. (Publisher’s description)

Everett, Anna. Digital diaspora: a race for cyberspace. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Guins, Raiford. Edited clean version: technology and the culture of control. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)