Friday, February 13, 2009

Big Day Out With Librarians 2009



Online NW is one of my favorite days of the year. If you look closely you can see signs of Spring between Albany and the OSU conference center across the street from Parker (or Resser Salsa?) Stadium, which looks bigger than ever. ( It amazes me that such infrastructures exist only to put on six home games per year.)

But it does not amaze me that Online has been around for 26 years hosted in a variety of locations. I love Online for a variety of reasons, but one is that it gives one both a preview and a snapshot of the technology. The library community tends to shovel stuff out of their way that doesn't work. But if it does work they attack it head on with both the heart and soul of the information doctor and give us access with presentation and support that is like wizardry at times. The library community in the Internet infrastructure era is one of my favorite zones in the universe.

If the Online conference day for the year is a good one, you come out considering key trends and how they contrasted from prior years. Online 2009 cross section confirmed numerous times during the day that we are living in the midst of a huge wave of influence from monolithic prominence of Facebook and the ubiquity of video online.

BJ Fogg and His Hour of (Persuasion) Power



BJ Fogg's speciality is persuasive technology. He had a coined word on one of his first slides. Captology = computers + persuasion. He does research, teaches at Stanford and goes out to Industry.

He is a fortunate man to have his field of psychological study when we see how a widely permeated social technology that no one has really seen the likes of before be a part of triggers that sometime see a million people not only hearing about but making a kind of connection with a technology. I'm talking about Facebook, of course, which is now at 16 million users. Whatever it is, Fogg sees Facebook as here to continue to grow its web. He says Facebook could kill itself. Marketing and sales of the data on users would lose their credibility. He says the key is for users to be aggressive with Facebook and take control of their profiles.

The first part of his talk walked around observations of how powerful web video was. He showed an informal experiment (by psychologist standards, I guess) of how a personal birthday appeal for his favorite charity was most effective in imbedded video.

Fogg was the kind of keynote speaker who is a bit showy about pulling from a kind of personal jukeboxes of stuff from other presentations, conferences and workshops and then pulling them up on the fly for a pretty nice speaker fee, I would imagine.

BJ's next section was about defining what motivates us. There are three pairs of motivators that impact humans universally according to good Dr. Fogg. They are:

He showed this interminable video about playing with his dog, Millie, and later gave an impromptu door prize of the same style ball that he and Millie were playing fetch with. (A weird misguided moment of theater) Then he gave this whole pitch about simplicity as a driving force for persuasion and the speech gave me a kind of sensation that was somewhere between Sunday school and a day where you knew your body was working pretty well overall. But then he also got into a pretty interesting rap about ritual computing.

But the lasting anecdote was about the class he did in Facebook at Stanford. Teams of students marketed products, I get the impresion that most were software or web-related products. About two-thirds of products (those not coincidentally that succeeded were products that were simply executed or were grounded in premises of simplicity) Some of the projects were very successful financially, some teams were raking in 2k per week. This, said Fogg, obviously made parents happy.

Fogg was okay, but I am going to ask the program committee to bring in Brenda Laurel next year. She'll show you some patterns, beth'um for sure.


Rachel Bridgewater & Anne-Marie Deitering on politics, history and media: social and otherwise


The seeds of the presentation Reed College librarian Rachel Bridgewater and Anne-Marie Deitering of Oregon State University gave this year began on Septmber 26 2008, the night of the first presidential debate. It was truly a kind of mixed media experience for Bridgewater of social networking, traditional media, and discussing the debate in person with her partner. "It made the debate exciting," she said, and "I finally got Twitter."

Bridgewater and Dietering looked back at three environments and traditions when it came to American politics and their manifestation or development in relationship to "social media." And I think it significant and well-considered that Bridgewater did not call it social networking. All this Web 2.0 stuff has turned into something bigger. It has turned into a medium of itself.

The Soapbox. The first lens or metaphor these librarians took on was the American tradition of being able to take a corner, get on a platform and make your view known. Dietering stressed how this is a "powerful image for the disenfranchised" and is "the antithesis of traditional media." We can accept that we will occasional crazy person on the corner is one of the by-products of this tradition have to put up with.

Dietering's training as an historian and the passion that brought her to that training was evident as she used the concept of soapbox as a point to review the history of American journalism. She quickly covered its evolution from the partisan century to penny press and wire services. She reminded me of one of my several examples of technology's shaping of communication form i.e. the unreliability of the electronic telegraph lead to the practice of the encapsulated lead beginning news stories. You had to get as much of the story out as you could before your connection was lost.

The soabox metaphor was very prominent in the days of Howard Rheingold's populist view of virtual community fifteen years ago. Dietering showed how today's most popular electronic soapbox publication the Huffington Post is a convergence of old and new media similarly reflective of the debate night experience that lead to the presentation in the first place. "You can't really talk about social and traditional as separate things." The Huffington Post has user generated, social and tradtional media all at a one stop soapbox.

The Echo Chamber effect was blamed in part for Howard Dean's weak showing in 2004. Folks looked at its rise and fall as a road map for how insulated forums of shared views ultimately lead to a kind of inbreeding defeat. But then, of course, came Obama. Bridgewater explored the nature of our avoidance of cognitive dissonance. Her discussion, as she acknowledged, connected directly to Fogg's keynote discussion of the power of hope and fear & acceptance and rejection. Bridgewater made the case that the echo chamber is not necessarily bad or evil. It plays a connective role with traditional media and is an important tool for organization

I also liked Bridgewater's connection of how real life environments can be echo chambers as well. She showed a display of Obama signs, presumably from her lower SE Portland neighborhood which reminded me of how rare McCain supporters back in the campaign months were a rare presence indeed in these parts.

The Salon and its enlightenment origins in coffee houses, female organizers and as an organized, social and scheduled activity was discussed by Dietering. Can new more fully informed truths come out of the exchange and interchange of opposing views. We have an entire Presidency which seems to be riding on that notion.

And of course the Salon is an obvious metaphor and lens for much of what is going on in the world of the Web and the Internet. They showed how websites alike Daily Kos hold their own netiquette and are mini-worlds of their own.

The election of 2009 is indeed an interesting bench to assess the impact of new media. According to these librarians, 40% of all Americans watched videos relating to the campaigns, and in many cases these videos were distributed and forwarded through the trust networks of a populist citizenry. We looked at images through Flick'r feeds and Twittered to one another in great number, sought out more primary and unfiltered resources such as CSPAN clips, and monitored polling numbers at a variety of websites.

Inauguration Day provided some of the most illustrative moments about the state of media, new and old, social and traditional. Flick'r feeds of the Buscopter on its way to Texas was huge as were the other web sites where it seemed just about everyone in Washington on January 20 was laying out their media on the web as an eye witness.

And then there was CNN, the source most Internet users turned to, broadcasting in two windows: broadcast feed in one, Twitter reactions in another. As one of the librarian's friends said of the phenomena. "A single linear feed we all watch in real time. How retro."



Best Quote of the day


It actually came from a conference attendee, not a presenter.

I tend to think about Twitter being my Id, Facebook being my ego and my blog serving as my superego."





Fine Instructional Technology Solution for Teaching Ethics at Pacific University


A couple of folks in the library staff, at Pacific University, Isaac Gilman and Lynda Irons, managed to convince the powers that be that it would a good idea for their college freshman to be engaged in a class session devoted to the ethics of information technology as a part of their required Humanities class. They used technology to do this and even based the course on the library community's ACRL standard 5: "The information literate students understands many of the economic legal social issues surounding the use of information and access and uses info ethically and legally."

Standardized attempts at information and technology are one of the foundational areas I try to pursue at my institution so this was an excellent session for me to attend. I was really impressed with what they were able to accomplish with Google Sites and Pollanywhere. They used these tools to stage and engage the classes in what appeared to be meaningful discussions on freedom of speech, social networking, academic honesty, and Intellectual property/copyright. In regards to this last topic, they confirmed what I have seen in my classes: perceptional understanding of copyright and use are all over the map.

Lunch, Raffle and Bob & Kitty Return to the Alumni Lounge



Lunch at Online is always a good one. This year it was a salad buffet with about four varieties and copious platters of cookies. Radka gave her Idaho Spud to Laurie. It almost immediately got coveted by two of the others. Joan won some designer M&Ms. No one anything cool this year like cameras, USBs or hard drives. Two years ago almost everyone at our table came home with a door prize. Maybe Zachary's nametag was the lucky talisman)

I found it impossible to photograph and copresent at the session that Kitty and I facilitated, so I instead close out with this declination letter from John Foster Dulles. I guess he was too busy to come and talk to the Beavers. And so ends another year's big day out with librarians at Online.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:59 PM
Comments: Post a Comment