At least librarians aren't alone in this brave new world of technology not only changing but upending and overhauling just about everything but the manner in which we take in oxygen. Academics are curmudgeons once again, and this time the issue is wikipedia. The underlying fear seems to be that wikipedia will render them unnecessary. Being a reference librarian, and being curious about nearly every subject under the sun, I, like many of today's younger people, love to browse wikipedia for information on a vast array of subjects I never took a class in. On the job, however, I rarely take it seriously and, for obvious reasons, always give people a disclaimer when I use it to look up information.
A recent article in Information Today provides a fresh look at wikipedia. It is not going to disappear, nor is it going to supersede the need for academia and its role in research and teaching the need for the proper evaluation of information, especially if we teach people to recognize wikipedia for what it is and allow it to be a gateway to the kind of information gathering and evaluating it can best be used as, and to work at improving it to better serve that role. It's an interesting article that I highly recommend:
Link to article
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
The Total Experience, part 2
You may wonder what I mean by the idea of culture itself becoming an anachronism. I don't have a clear definition of culture, but I can provide some examples. We no longer have to draw or paint because we have photography. We no longer have to read music and play the piano or sing together because we have recorded music. We no longer have to wear real clothing because we have polyester (oh, wait. We tried that in the 70s and we learned we didn't like it. Let's not make that mistake again.) We no longer have to paint our houses because we have tacky-looking vinyl substitute siding that can be spotted a mile away to save us the hassle. We no longer have to walk on our sidewalks from one place of business to another because we would rather drive anyway, damn the consequences.
A bit discursive, but I think you get my point. When something becomes a luxury and no longer a necessity, does its virtual substitute meet the neet it once met? Or is a new need created when we realize something intangible is missing? It is something I cannot define, but I know it when I see it. The interior designer who came to my sister's new house recently was drawn instantly to the hand-crafted statuettes and bookends I purchased for her from the fair trade store (where I do nearly all of my Christmas shopping). What was different about them? Whatever it was, she could tell right away. I mean, you can buy mass-produced knicknkack thingys at Mal-wart that look just like them and were manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, but why am I not drawn to them in the same way? How come we can so quickly tell the difference? Why should it matter?
It has to do with what I call a total experience. A total experience involves all of the senses and all of the dimensions of existence, not just one. A total experience meets more than basic needs, but self-actualization needs as well. A total experience invites imagination, sparks ideas, brings back memories, calls us to dream of possibilities. A total experience calls for celebration, makes us want to whistle or sing or paint a picture or write a poem or a play or a story. A total experience is what I have when I take a walk through a forest or a historic neighborhood and used to have almost everywhere else but no longer can. A total experience reminds us of the ends, not just the means. The means call for us to be practical. The means are necessary. The ends may not be imminently practical, but they may be every bit as called for. Let's not lose sight of them and get lost in the shuffle of struggling in the muck and the mire of the means.
Everything we do we do for an experience. We express negatively when we our expectations are thwarted and have to learn to live without expecting anything. Ironically, happiness seems to find the people who aren't trying to find it. We don't always know how to define the experiences we seek, but we know very well that there can be no substitutes.
Hugging is one of the ultimate total experiences. It is fleeting, like all experiences. It has no meaning beyond itself. It involves many senses and dimensions of our being. It is many experiences at once. Above all, it is shared experience. And it requires our total presence and participation. It allows no substitutes. The best way to live, I am told, is to participate in your experience and experience your participation.
So I honor my experiences, even (or especially) when they don't make sense. I forget that I "should" just "get used to" the growing ticky-tackiness of the scenery around me and recognize it when something valuable seems to be disappearing even if words to describe it escape me. Someone recently told me that, in his opinion, vinyl siding is "soulless". Well, I guess "soul" is as good a word as any.
One thing I do know, however, is that the statuettes and figurines that were handcrafted in so-called "developing" countries that I purchase for the members of my family are the things that will get passed down to the next generations, not the computer tables and TV sets and other ephemeral and purely "practical" paraphernalia we now keep around the house. They are not "useful" or "practical". But they live and breathe with us. They have soul. We can look upon them and have a total experience. And that is an end in itself.
The Total Experience
Technology doesn't solve problems. You and I know that. Oh, it answers questions. It solves puzzles. It enables us to do things we've not been able to do before. And that can assist us in our problem-solving. That's for sure. But it doesn't solve problems. It just changes the way we handle them. And it changes the nature of the problems. Take counterfeiting, for example. Thanks to sophisticated technology, it has become necessary to keep one step ahead of counterfeiters by almost continually changing the designs on our currency. We invent something, someone finds a way to use it to our disadvantage, and we then have to invent something to counter it. It's been happening that way as far back as we have records. A quick look at the history of weaponry will show that very pattern.
This is a subject that has been on my mind for some time, as you can tell if you've followed my rantings here. This latest ranting was sparked by a silent movie from the 1920s I watched last night. In observing the clothing and style, the architecture, the mannerisms of the people in the movie, I began to picture myself in a theatre, taking in the total experience of watching movie in 1924. The voices of people around me, the smell of cigar smoke wafting in from the lobby, the grand architecture of the movie palace, the fancy designs on the seats, the incredible background music, the sidewalk in front of the theatre, the dress and hairstyles of the people greeting each other on that sidewalk, the elegant style of their greetings. What looks to me like exaggerated gesticulation must have been looked at differently in 1924. But the most fascinating thought of all was the fact that the movie industry went on like that for over three decades. Three decades!!! How much sooner could they have invented sound if all of the effort put into building and designing the movie palaces, composing the background music, training actors in gesticulation, etc., went instead to finding a solution to the fact that they didn't have sound, what seems to us a perfectly necessary ingredient in a movie!?!!! How could they stand having that kind of incompleteness for so long?!?
Well, we've learned from the experience. We don't wait that long anymore before inventing things. In fact, we invent things like our jobs depend on it (and all too often, it seems they do). When it seems financially feasible, we construct big-box theatres made of the cheapest ticky-tacky we can find as quickly as possible. And when something different becomes more financially feasible, we raze the theatre and put up a new ticky-tacky big box retailer in its place (but not without enlarging the parking lot and adding room for a few more new businesses, making it all the more necessary that we drive to them instead of walking, the sidewalks we put around it only to be used by people whose car just broke down in the vicinity).
The lack of sound in movies made art, craft, and culture into a necessity. When certain things are no longer necessary, they become anachronisms. So what happens when culture itself becomes an anachronism? We have to choose it. To be continued....
This is a subject that has been on my mind for some time, as you can tell if you've followed my rantings here. This latest ranting was sparked by a silent movie from the 1920s I watched last night. In observing the clothing and style, the architecture, the mannerisms of the people in the movie, I began to picture myself in a theatre, taking in the total experience of watching movie in 1924. The voices of people around me, the smell of cigar smoke wafting in from the lobby, the grand architecture of the movie palace, the fancy designs on the seats, the incredible background music, the sidewalk in front of the theatre, the dress and hairstyles of the people greeting each other on that sidewalk, the elegant style of their greetings. What looks to me like exaggerated gesticulation must have been looked at differently in 1924. But the most fascinating thought of all was the fact that the movie industry went on like that for over three decades. Three decades!!! How much sooner could they have invented sound if all of the effort put into building and designing the movie palaces, composing the background music, training actors in gesticulation, etc., went instead to finding a solution to the fact that they didn't have sound, what seems to us a perfectly necessary ingredient in a movie!?!!! How could they stand having that kind of incompleteness for so long?!?
Well, we've learned from the experience. We don't wait that long anymore before inventing things. In fact, we invent things like our jobs depend on it (and all too often, it seems they do). When it seems financially feasible, we construct big-box theatres made of the cheapest ticky-tacky we can find as quickly as possible. And when something different becomes more financially feasible, we raze the theatre and put up a new ticky-tacky big box retailer in its place (but not without enlarging the parking lot and adding room for a few more new businesses, making it all the more necessary that we drive to them instead of walking, the sidewalks we put around it only to be used by people whose car just broke down in the vicinity).
The lack of sound in movies made art, craft, and culture into a necessity. When certain things are no longer necessary, they become anachronisms. So what happens when culture itself becomes an anachronism? We have to choose it. To be continued....
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Developmental Biology
Here was the question: Do you have a dictionary of terms in developmental biology?
Well, I needed more information so I could assess the situation and see which of our sources, if any, would be of some assistance.
She was taking a class in developmental biology at Ferris State (Biology 370), and she had a list of terms she had to define. Her textbook had no glossary (or index, so she claimed), and Webster’s was of no help and neither was a medical dictionary she consulted. When I asked if she had checked our science dictionaries, she told me she wasn’t very familiar with our collection. So I took her over to the area. After looking some of the terms up in a couple of reference books without success, we came across the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. A satisfactory definition was given for the first three terms, and she was off with the book complete her assignment.
Further investigation revealed that we have The Facts on File Dictionary of Biology, a source with longer, less technical definitions. She was grateful for it as well, since there were terms the other dictionary didn't cover.
Well, I needed more information so I could assess the situation and see which of our sources, if any, would be of some assistance.
She was taking a class in developmental biology at Ferris State (Biology 370), and she had a list of terms she had to define. Her textbook had no glossary (or index, so she claimed), and Webster’s was of no help and neither was a medical dictionary she consulted. When I asked if she had checked our science dictionaries, she told me she wasn’t very familiar with our collection. So I took her over to the area. After looking some of the terms up in a couple of reference books without success, we came across the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. A satisfactory definition was given for the first three terms, and she was off with the book complete her assignment.
Further investigation revealed that we have The Facts on File Dictionary of Biology, a source with longer, less technical definitions. She was grateful for it as well, since there were terms the other dictionary didn't cover.
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