July 19, 2010
Posted at 3:53 PM in The Way We Live Now
There's a stack of publishers' catalogs on my desk at work nearly a foot high. There are 5, 645 messages in my mail inbox. My family's digital photo archives contain about 13,000 pictures--and my kids are only in elementary school. You don't want to know how many scraps of paper I have on my desk at home, waiting for me to sort through and file or (more likely) recycle them. I have far more ideas for stories, fiction and non, than I've made time for yet. The list goes on.
Welcome to my personal version of hyperabundance. It's been a personal preoccupation lately but also a professional one, as the term has been turning up a lot lately in conversations I have and conferences I go to. Hyperabundance was front and center at the Association of American University Presses conference I covered in June in Salt Lake City, where Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communication for the National Academies Press, led a brainstorming session on hyperabundance and publishing. Scholarly publishers, who specialize in material that has a small target audience to begin with, feel especially vulnerable to hyperabundance these days. If the world is drowning in too much information, your monograph stands even less chance of finding an audience and a market.
I thought about hyperabundance as I was reviewing Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and William Powers's Hamlet's BlackBerry for the Washington Post. (Read the review here.) Both books confront the digital overload a lot of us deal with every time we switch on our computers or power up our iPhones. There's too much information and chatter out there, the argument goes, and we spend too much time getting distracted by it, which means we're not spending enough time concentrating on the skills and activities that really matter: deep reading, sustained focus, creative thinking. Partly as a result of Carr's book, there has been a hyperabundance of commentary about what the internet is doing to our brains.
If you read my Post review, you'll see that I have some serious reservations about Carr's argument, how he makes it, and just how much of the world it really applies to. I also think it's an important conversation to have, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time navigating digital seas of information.
Here's a proposal. I am not going to recommend that you unplug or de-digitize your life. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the intellectual and digital clutter, the hyperabundance of commentary about hyperabundance, try thinking of the problem in terms of scarcity, the antimatter to hyperabundance's matter. Don't list, as I tend to do, all the things you have too much of (tasks, email, ideas, obligations, articles and stories and blog posts to write and to read). What do you wish you had more of? Is it time, the most precious of mortal commodities? Patience? Readers? Money? Satisfying reads? Books with your name on them? If you have time, let me know what's underwhelming you--what you don't have enough of. But I'll understand if you decide to go read a book instead, even if it's The Shallows.
Now, if I can just get to Inbox 0.
May 28, 2010
Posted at 11:20 PM in Academe
There's an intriguing project under way right now called Hacking the Academy. The basic idea is to crowd-source a book in a week. The topic? How to overhaul/undo/redo/reshape the mechanisms that govern scholarship and how it is created, taught, and shared. Read the details here. It's not my place to suggest answers but I can ask questions. Here are a few.
To: The forces of change
From: JHoward
So you want to hack the academy? I can’t tell you how to do it. I can ask you a few well-intentioned questions, though, because journalists ask questions. These are a few that have occurred to me as I do what I do: write about academic publishing, go to conferences, talk to scholars and editors and publishers and librarians, and generally get my feet wet in the fast-flowing, ever-shifting river of scholarly communication. These are questions lobbed at you from the sidelines, not from the trenches. I’m an observer, not a specialist, which may make these useful or may not. Either way, I'm curious to see the results of your experiment. [N.B. All this represents my own views, not those of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I’m grateful to for hiring me to think and write about all this in the first place.]
1) What do you mean by that? Or: Beware the language of the oppressor. I keep a running list in my head of phrases I hear so often they no longer mean anything. For instance, can you break down “adding value” for me? If you’re not an employee of NORAD or a grain farmer, do you really need to talk about “silos”? And on and on. Every field has its vocabulary and a rhetoric by which it recognizes itself; every discipline and every trade, including mine, has a shorthand. That’s useful. And limiting. It’s good to keep an eye on when useful has given way to limiting, especially if you’re trying to remake the world. A fresh message requires a fresh vocabulary—or a freshening up of the old one. If you come up with a handy alternative to the phrase “the dissemination of research” please let me know, because I sure could use one.
2) How do you keep crowd-sourcing from becoming another in crowd? This is tricky. A revolution does not succeed without like-minded souls, compadres, comrades in arms working together. How do you create alternative forms of authority without creating an alternative regime? Are you opening the gates or shutting them? Storming the barricades or erecting new ones? Will the next generation (or those who feel excluded from the conversation) be tempted to bring out the tumbrels for you?
3) Have you looked for friends in the enemy camp lately? Or: Maybe you will find allies where you don’t expect any. As a journalist, I’m no stranger to generalizations. Still, it’s disconcerting to go to different conferences and hear Entire Category X-- administrators/university presses/librarians/journal editors/fill in the blank--written off as part of the problem when at least a few daring souls might not mind being part of a solution. It may not be *your* solution. You might have to venture a closer look to find out. I can’t say what you will discover. It may not be at all what you expect. It might be exactly what you expect. Let me know.
May 12, 2010
Posted at 3:30 PM in Freedom of Expression
My kids had a lemonade stand a couple of weeks ago. They made a little money--enough to clear a profit and pad their piggybanks a little. Neighbors and passers-by stopped to chat and have a cup of lemonade and a freshly baked gingersnap. It was a pleasant scene--who doesn't love lemonade on a hot day, especially when it's peddled by two cute kids?--and it left us feeling pretty good about the neighborhood and about humanity in general. The willingness of people to support junior entrepreneurialism is truly nice to see.
I mention this because I've been writing a lot about libel lately, and libel is not a subject that makes you feel good about your fellow human beings. You could say that libel is the antithesis of neighborliness. Now the internet has made neighbors of us all, it's easier than ever to give offense--and easier than ever to decide to be offended, sometimes enough to take it to court instead of working it out over the fence or in the letters column.
Americans are used to sheltering under the First Amendment. We sometimes forget that other countries do not recognize that standard. My coverage lately has focused on libel beyond U.S. borders. In the U.K., which has a reputation in the States as a haven for libel tourists, there's momentum behind a movement to reform libel laws. In France next month, the editor of an academic journal will face criminal-libel charges over a review he published on a book-review website he also edits.
The French case is so unusual it may not set any kind of worrisome precedent. But it could, and that makes other editors and reviewers nervous. As well it should. In a publishing environment that does not conform to national boundaries, more writers and editors are vulnerable to legal actions no matter where they and potential plaintiffs live and work.
After my two latest stories about libel ran, I traded emails with Joe Sharkey, an American writer whose work appears in the New York Times and elsewhere. Sharkey has been a passionate campaigner against libel tourism, in part because he has been on the receiving end of a libel action brought against him in Brazil. That case involves an air crash in Brazil that Sharkey survived and went on to write about. (I won't rehash the details here, but see this post on his blog.) Sharkey feels strongly that the MSM has not given this issue enough attention. He says that all of us ought to be worried. Here's what he told me:
"So much of the libel tourism attention has been on the UK, but a huge part of the issue is the creep of these cases in other countries, not just Brazil in my case but Canada and Ireland and who knows where else. Also, I think it is crucial that Americans understand the threat is broad, and the implications are not just for authors and journalists, but for scholars, scientists, reviewers and even users of social networks. The libel case in France over a book review is still another important example. In my opinion, and given the Internet, this is the most grave threat to free speech in the U.S. in my lifetime."
Here's a mini-roundup of libel links that might be handy if you want to read further. I will add to this list as I think of more links that might be useful.
LIBEL LINKS AND RESOURCES:
The Libel Reform Campaign (U.K.). Petition and website maintained by the coalition of the Index on Censorship, English PEN, and Sense About Science that's lobbying for reform of U.K. libel laws.
"London: The Capital of Libel Tourism?" by Gavin Phillipson. An English legal scholar argues that the media has overstated how big a threat libel tourism is.
"Something Rotten in the State of English Libel Law?" by Alastair Mullis and Andrew Scott. Two legal scholars, one at the University of East Anglia and one at the LSE, argue that some of the criticisms of English libel law are "misjudged."
The Association of American Publishers has been lobbying for federal protection for American authors and publishers against foreign libel judgments. This AAP statement given to the House Judiciary Committee in February 2009 lays out their position.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has compiled a bloggers' guide to online defamation law.
April 16, 2010
Posted at 5:02 PM in Net Life
Counting this entry, I have managed to turn up on four blogs this week. I've been guest-blogging at Bookslut, which I always get a kick out of. Bookslut ought to be part of your regular lit-net rounds if it's not already.
For the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog, I wrote about "Collector in Chief," a new blog launched by AOTUS, a k a David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. His call for "citizen archivists" to get involved in helping the Archives do its work provoked some interesting reax over at ArchivesNext, a site that's well worth keeping an eye on if you groove on archives. (And who doesn't?) On Wired Campus I also noted the kinda mind-bending news that the Library of Congress will archive every public tweet every sent forth on Twitter since it went live in March 2006. That, too, provoked some fascinating commentary around the Twitterverse and blogosphere and even in the old MSM about the wisdom and risks of the move. When I have time, I'll compile a roundup of the better posts/articles I've seen on the topic.
And--ta da--the Chronicle debuted its blog on scholarly publishing today. Called PageView, it will have posts by yours truly and several other book-loving Chronicle folk, so please swing by and take a look.
Fiction-writing got a little lost in the shuffle this week, but I did get good news on the fiction front. The Smoking Poet will publish some short fiction of mine in its summer issue. I'll post that link when I have it.
Shameless plea: If you don't already follow me on Twitter (@JenHoward), I'd love it if you would. When I have 1K followers, I get to drink beer on the roof with my colleagues, and it's getting to be that season in DC when it is very pleasant to do things like that. So help me out, because beer really does taste better when you drink it on the roof (safely--safety first, always).
April 5, 2010
Posted at 2:33 PM in Lost in the Stacks
On a wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, my 7-year-old daughter reminded me that our local library was having its book sale. So she, her younger brother, and I piled in the car and headed over. After about 20 minutes, the kids settled themselves in a corner with a stack of books more than a foot high. I kept browsing. By the time we were ready to settle up, we had picked out 14 books, which set us back a whopping $9.
None of what we bought was rare: some Magic Treehouse adventures , a few Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, H.A. Rey's The Stars: A New Way to See Them. My daughter turned up a relic from the 1960s: a book on Indian crafts and how to make them, which turned out to be perfect, 40 years later, for her 2nd-grade class's study of Native Americans. The serendipitous joy of finding it was worth every modest penny. The point is that there was readers' gold to be found on all those tables of random paperbacks and obscure hardcovers.
The prize of the day was a 2,000-page Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (unabridged) from the 1950s, which I found for a buck on the "Last Chance" table. The words "Last Chance" brought out the side of me that wants to adopt every dog and cat at the animal shelter every time I visit. Luckily for my household, a massive dictionary is a lot easier to care for than a mastiff or a mongrel. The Webster's has been living on our coffee table, delighting the children and their elders with its heft and erudition. And I got it for a buck. A buck! Time was you'd have shelled out a lot more than that for such a thing. Sure, everybody looks everything up online now, but there's still a lot of joy to be had from browsing a 10-inch-thick guide to the weird wonders of English. So many words one never knew and will never have occasion to use. And those thumbnail sketches have a certain whimsy to them.
Who knows what gems and rarities we will find at the library sales of the next few years? My friend Jim and I traded a few thoughts about this via Twitter. We agreed that it could be a golden age, as the bound book loses some of its luster and libraries shuffle old tomes out to make room for...whatever the libraries of the future consider essential. There will be some good stuff to be snapped up. "For a while, there will be a boom, as everyone offloads their old books," Jim said. "But eventually, will there be cardboard boxes full of cracked and yellowed old Kindles and iPads, for a buck each?" And after that? "A hellish Mad Max existence where gangs of savages burn old copies of Harry Potter to run their cars in the outback," Jim said.
Last chance! Get 'em while they last!
