Is it too late for the Internet to melt our brains? | Salon Books

The author of a new book, A Better Pencil, says the threat of brain-melting goes farther back than Hulu, the Internet or television.

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses culture-shifting technology in an interview with Salon Books, aptly titled Is the Internet melting our brains?

"So, what I'm trying to do is put the computer revolution into historical context to see how it fits with previous innovations in communication like pencils, like the printing press, like the clay tablet, like writing itself. A new communication technology does what old technology was able to do – sometimes better, sometimes in a little different way -- and I'm looking at how we make sense of all of this."

Salon's Vincent Rossmeier:

"Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. 'A Better Pencil' is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives."

Growing a new forest of news while dead-tree media fall

Seeing a new media ecology

My headline takes some liberties with Stephen Berlin Johnson's ecological metaphor for the current transition in the reporting and delivery of news, but I recommend his essay, one of several good ones this week on saving the news or finding a sustainable model for civic or public affairs journalism. Johnson's discussion leads to his information flowchart at the right.

For more about the trend in newspapers going online-mostly, online-only or out of business, see these:

• NPR: Chronicling the death of American newspapers
  
• Seattle Post Intelligencer
• Christian Science Monitor
• Rocky Mountain News
  

Johnson's thoughts came out of the much-blogged-about South by Southwest (sxsw) conference, while a panel discussion on the future of The San Francisco Chronicle -- and local news reporting -- inspired Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg and blogger Dave Winer to write equally thoughtful essays, each finding some room for optimism -- if not about newspapers, about the future of news itself.

(Also see Rosenberg on journalism schools, and Clay Shirky's piece I mentioned a few days ago.)

Beyond books and buildings: Always-on libraries

You'll find more questions than answers, but plenty of food for thought, in this First Monday article on Libraries in a world of permanent connectivity by Lorcan Dempsey, vice president for research and chief strategist of OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center.

(First Monday is an online peer-reviewed journal about the Internet and related topics. It requires no library-database subscription to view its full-text and heavily linked essays. Check out other articles in the latest issue.)

Dempsey puts together an extensive review of devices, software and services that have changed our use of communication and information over time and space, complete with an array of Web links to services from Twitter to Boopsie.

"As mobile communications diffuse networking into more of what we do, it reconfigures our relationship with time, space and other people, just as earlier networks did. Affordable air transport shortened the distance between home and college; now they are a phone call or text apart. Selective social networks live alongside face–to–face interaction in new ways. For example, individual students may participate in multiple communicating groups: short–term as in a particular class on a particular day, or longer term as with family or old school friends."

So where does "the library" fit in this new comm/info world? Library services have changed dramatically in the past 10 years, at least at the university libraries I've used in that time, but Dempsey hints that the institutional image may not be keeping up with its services.

"The library needs a brand which is meaningful and engaging, which communicates its value, and which transcends the caricatural impression many have based around the building and print collections," Dempsey says.

Maybe next to the "No one knows you're a dog on the Internet" cartoon, we need one that says, "No one has to say 'shhhh' in a digital library"?

Anthropology of YouTube - The Library Today
Michael Wesch discussed 'The Anthropology of YouTube' at the Library of Congress: "More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as 'the audience.'"

Food for thought... In both my "Specialized Journalism" and "Media History" classes, we can talk about anthropology and journalism, new media and old media, and professor Wesch's observation that user-generated content, commentary, tagging and collaboration are a new "integrated mediascape" -- and that media are not just delivery systems or content, but a new way of "mediating human relationships."