Filed under: General
I didn’t think it was necessary to put a notice on this blog but Google Analytics shows that there are still people coming here, so the blog has moved to this domain - ian.onthereddot.com.
Add comment February 18th, 2008
Filed under: Tangled Web We Weave, On Singapore
I was still thinking what to write about the moving on of the library@orchard when I went down today to get some photos. The library solved the problem for me. The library was hosting an exhibition by the Vegetarian Society Singapore on, you guess it, being a vegetarian. I have always assumed that being a vegetarian was a religious decision, like the kind made by a Buddhist. Today, I learned that being a meat eater had a wide range of implications. From the exhibition, I learned about the cruel treatment of animals reared to provide food for us, the impact on the environment (i.e. the contribution to global warming and extinction of species) the demand of meat has caused and the health effects of a diet that has meat.
The interesting thing about what I learned was that this information is easily available on the Internet. If you go to Google and know the right keywords to use for your search queries, the information would be available. The key of course was that you had to be even aware of the issues pertaining to meat eating and being a vegetarian.
And that is why I feel we are going to miss the library@orchard.
Along the lines of what Jillian, a librarian working at library@orchard, shared, library@orchard was in a good location because the location allowed the library to ‘catch’ people who normally might not go to a library. The other libraries like the ones in the neighbourhoods such as Tampines and Bishan cater to people who already have the intention to go to the library while library@orchard caters to the passer-by. The unique location of the library, in a shopping center at the heart of our shopping district, becomes an attraction. I can imagine a situation where an individual is in town to engage in conspicuous consumption and decides to take a look at this library in Orchard Road. The individual might not borrow any books but information is spread, if the individual encounters the exhibition, and awareness is raised.
The library isn’t just a physical location to store books. Print media with books, magazines and newspapers as the different formats has been the main way for recording and disseminating human knowledge and that is what libraries have come to be commonly associated with. However the library has evolved to be a place to share knowledge and educate and there are many ways to do that. An exhibition with posters, pamphlets and videos is one of those ways.
With the lost of library@orchard, as Michael a volunteer from the Vegetarian Society Singapore shared, we have lost a valuable public space to share knowledge and raise awareness about issues that should be important to us.
The National Library Board has a programmes division that decides what exhibitions are to be held at the different branches. However each branch is given a certain level of autonomy where they can decide on exhibitions to hold at their branch. For this exhibition by the Vegetarian Society Singapore, the decision to host it was made by the librarians at library@orchard. Part of the exhibition was a display of books related to being a vegetarian. These books were chosen by the librarians. It is here where we see the importance of librarians. In a time where knowledge is growing at a rapid pace and its availability increasing, there is the need for librarians who practice the role of curatorship.
Beyond the need for librarians to select and direct our attention to what is relevant and important, there is the need for librarians to do information organization. While netizens have grown used to tagging to organize information by implementing a folksonomy from a bottoms-up approach, arguably there will always be the need for certain domains and forms of knowledge to be organized by implementing a taxonomy. With regards to print media, because books are physical artifacts and thus can only be at one place (in this case only on one shelf) at any given time, information organization is critical to the facilitation of finding what we need efficiently. While print media may fade in prominence as digital information moves to the foreground, it seems that there might still be the need for librarians at least in the form of people who are trained in the organization of information.
So how do we represent the way the books have been organized? Every book in the library has a label. For a fiction book, the label contains the first three characters of the author’s surname. For a non-fiction book, the label contains the first three characters of the author’s surname as well as a series of digits which represents the category of knowledge the book is classified under. In Singapore, our libraries use the Dewey Decimal System to classify the books. I learned something new from Jillian today. Instead of just labeling the books with the above mentioned information, the labels also have color strips printed on them where each color strip represents an alphanumeric character. These color strips help the librarians and library assistants determine that books have been shelved properly. I have been using the library for such a long time but have never registered the purpose of these strips until today.
I started the day agonizing about how I could contribute to library@orchard’s moving on with a blog post. But by going down to get material to write that post, the library and Jillian in her capacity as a librarian taught me a fair number of new things - I even learned a bit about Germany from a talk that was held. Libraries are not just a place to house books nor are librarians the people who just take care of books and hush us when we break the golden silence. Libraries and librarians are respectively the storehouses and custodians of knowledge in all its forms. In losing library@orchard, we as Singaporeans have lost, in the center of our conspicuous consumption, the space that trades in the most valuable of assets - knowledge. Jillian hinted at plans to come and I do hope we regain such a place, if not places, in the heart of our shopping district.
2 comments November 20th, 2007
Filed under: Musing about Life
Have you ever wondered about the sequence of events which occur when you withdraw money from an ATM? I have. Why is it that the machine insists that you take your card first before spitting out the money?
I was thinking about this in the morning. The reason that I have is that some consultant probably told the people implementing the ATMs that if the money was given out first, people would tend to take the money and forget the card which would be ejected later.
The underlying principle here is that people won’t forget the ends (i.e. the money) but will forget the means (i.e. the card).
And then my mind wandered off and started thinking about parents. I’m not sure if it is common in most relationships, be it between a parent and child or two lovers, where whenever one party wants something from the other, the party desiring something will express some mix of affection, attention, affirmation towards the other party where the degree of expression is higher than when nothing is desired.
Basically, do people commonly say ‘I Love You’ followed by ‘Can I Have The Latest ___’.
With reference to the question concerning ATMs above, do people also have the same propensity to quickly forget those who have provided the means to achieve the ends they want.
How then can we make sure the provider isn’t forgotten?
More importantly how do we prevent the provider for being faulted when the means to achieve the ends we desire can no longer be given.
Chapter 16 of ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli might provide the answer:
Concerning Liberality And Meanness
Add comment November 15th, 2007
Filed under: Musing about Life, Tangled Web We Weave
Facebook as a piece of technology is amazing. As a site that purports to be a social utility that connects you with the people around you, it does just that. It is the ability to fulfill this purpose well that, to me, makes Facebook bad for friendships.
Firstly, weak ties have a place in society. Mark Granovetter in his book “The Strength of Weak Ties” explains how weak ties help spread information to individuals that are not accessible via strong ties.
The problem to me is that while Facebook becomes an effective tool to manage those connections with people that are weak ties, it also creates the danger of making more ties weak.
Take for example birthday wishes. It used to be that the only way to wish a person ‘Happy Birthday’ was to be physically with a person. Then there was mail, so now cards could be sent. Then there was the telephone, so a call just needed to be made. Then there was email. Then there was sms. It became progressively easier to show ‘we care’ as long as we made the effort to remember. Now, even the effort to remember is not needed as Facebook does it for you. Someone left a comment on an earlier post that seemed to indicate that the lessening of effort needed somehow results in the decrease in sincerity. I’m not sure if this is always the case. The message may be of a medium that is easier to use but that does not always make the message less sincere although it can be argued that the medium used is the message.
Granted then that using a medium that takes little effort on your part to communicate with your friends may not always be indicative of a lack of sincerity, how would Facebook be bad for friendships?
Before I go further, I would like to assert that the use of the word ‘friend’ to describe everyone on your social network by sites like Facebook increasingly blurs the distinction between what is an acquaintance and friend to generations that grew up with the Internet. I would like then to make another assertion - that such a distinction is actually important for the proper functioning of society and we are all worse off with the lost of that distinction.
The reason why Facebook is bad for friendships is the use of apps like ‘SuperPoke!’ and ‘Gifts’. ‘SuperPoke!’ is an application that allows you to specify ‘actions to be taken against a friend’. ‘Gifts’ allows you to give a virtual present to a friend which will result in an image representing the gift appearing on the friend’s profile. These applications allow you to do something to show the friend that you are aware of that individual in your online social network if not your life as well as a reminder to that friend that you are still around (i.e. keeping yourself in view). It is as much about the giver as it is about the given.
The problem of the use of such applications is that friendship becomes mediated by a form of media. When I was in Primary School, my friends were classmates and people that I played with after school. We were friends because we were being friends. We did stuff that friends did together. We stood by each other. We encouraged each other when exams came up…
When Friendster popularized online social networks, friends became a collector’s item. Granted that there were always those sort of people who just had to or seemed to know everyone and kept count in that ‘blackbook’, collecting friends became something everyone engaged in naturally by the use of online social networks. While not everyone took it to the extreme like those who seem to max out the number of friends they can have on an account, online social networks brought the concept of ‘having friends’ to the foreground of our consciousness.
Now, with Facebook and similar applications, we have reached a stage where it isn’t just about ‘having friends’ but ‘appearing to be friends’ not just to ourselves but to others in the network. Such applications then work against us. They reduce what could have possibly grown to strong ties to weak ties because little effort is made beyond connecting over applications like Facebook - it is just that easy. The sadder thing would be if existing friendships become reduced because instead of making the effort to meet up and really talk and spend time together, we put that off because being able to connect over Facebook deceives us by making us feel that the existing state of the friendship is healthy and that amount of interaction is sufficient.
Of course, it would probably not be superfluous to point out that I’m using a Timex definition of friendship in a digital age.
Friendship is being redefined by how we use technology. The question then is this - is that a good thing?
2 comments November 15th, 2007
