After The Flood

Gleick writes about the encyclopedia before wikipedia. "fallaciously called The Anglo American Cyclopedia". A warren of fiction mingling with fact, another hall of mirrors and misprints, a compendium of pure and impure information that projects its own world.  That world is called Tlon. "It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers..."

At first this "world was considered to be complete chaos, "an irresponsible license of imagination". Another library of Babel was found to be "a record, scrambled yet permanent, of every human utterance."

This is where I believe Wikipedia and the traditional print based libraries are similar.  In a large sense, Wikipedia is just a chaotic network of human utterance. There are sometimes hundreds of links within each page that takes you all over the site.  Sometimes you forget what you began searching.  The information found on wikipedia I believe to be a mixture of pure and impure information.  Anyone can post on Wikipedia if you make an account.  This means that if you are smart enough to have an email address and make a username and password that you can edit information on Wikipedia. (Meaning that my grandma who knows the basics of the internet could edit information about coding a website) If you didn't get it, its a scary thought.  This might be a little different than the old libraries.  Gleick mentions titles for the contributors to the cyclopedia, whereas today surfer_girl_2003 could write about brain surgery.

Blog link

ohmygodshoess.tumblr.com

Tumblr Intro

    “There’s an awful lot you can tell about a person by their shoes.” Where they’re going. Where they’ve been. I’ve worn lots of shoes. I bet if I think about it real hard I could remember my first pair of shoes. Mama said they would take me anywhere. She said they were my magic shoes.”  Shoes can play many roles in a girl’s life.  Different shoes can be worn for certain occasions and have different memories associated with them.  For example, a girl’s prom shoes would mean less to her than the shoes that she wore on her wedding day.  The shoes that as a child she wore until the soles were worn down so much that they had to be thrown away.  Shoes have a sentimental value.  Shoes are also a privilege.  Not everyone can buy 1200 dollar Christian Louboutin red soled stilettos. Some people in the world have never owned their own pair.  Although some take their shoe obsession more seriously than others, they are still important nonetheless. Shoes are statement pieces that can make or break an outfit in everyday life and in the fashion world.  Fashion designers choose the perfect shoes to enhance and accentuate their line. In another aspect, shoes are made for animals and used for random and funny things that have nothing to do with the conventional use for them. My tumblr consists of everything that has to do with shoes and highlights all of the quirks and random things that are found in the present day of shoes.  Quotes by famous people are shown as well as essays written on basic shoe subjects like how to tie your shoes.  The title of my blog is Oh my God, Shoes.  Based on a youtube video in which a boy dresses up like a girl and says “oh my God, shoes” and “these shoes rock, these shoes suck”  It went viral a few years ago and I feel it is still relevant in this day in age.  I want people to be constantly surprised and just enjoy everything that is posted on my tumblr blog. Tumblr is all about finding random things from all corners of the internet and I feel like my tumblr highlights these moments.  For some odd reason people are OBSESSED with animals doing funny things. Some of my reblogs are animals in shoes to reflect the trend that is currently happening in today's society of the internet.

The Art of Google Books

The concept of the Art of Google books was extremely interesting to discover, as I had no idea that so many human mistakes were made while scanning.  I appreciate the human qualities that occur in such a digital age.  This just comes to show that not EVERYTHING can be done digitally.  Some human processes need to happen in order for the digital world to be successful.  I found the random hands found while scanning as well as the stains and other human accidents just as interesting because it shows the journey that publishing has made over the years and that someone once owned the book and spilled coffee or whatever they were drinking while enjoying the experience of reading a hard copy book.

What is the Social in Social Media Response

"We can put such considerations into a larger, strategic context that the “social media question” poses. Do all these neatly administrated contacts and address books at some point spill over and leave the virtual realm, as the popularity of dating sites seems to suggest? Do we only share information, experiences, and emotions, or do we also conspire, as “social swarms,” to raid reality in order to create so-called real-world events? Will contacts mutate into comrades? It seems that social media solves the organizational problems that the suburban baby-boom generation faced fifty years ago: boredom, isolation, depression, and desire."

These few questions pose a threat to everything that prior generations based their lives off of before now.  There has been a complete 180 degree flip in how people interact.  At some point, in certain situations, these social interactions leave the virtual realm but what is the ratio of those who know all of their facebook friends in real life before adding them compared to meeting online.  The social etiquette to me for adding friends is to meet them in person, either a short meeting or an evening together and wait a day or two before adding them.  People don't want to seem too eager to become facebook friends.  They also don't want to be the first one to suggest being friends on facebook.  Most of my social group uses facebook and other social media websites to ENHANCE their social interaction rather than INITIATING it.

Interface, Access, Loss

This is an extremely complex article that addresses a multitude of topics.  One passage that stood out to me was
"Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at 29the end of something—of modernism, of the American dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The
evidence was all around us in the ruins of the cities. […] Urban ruins were the emblematic places for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live. […]

A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. […] An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Although it was written by Solnit, I feel as though it is relevant to the rest of the small portion of the book we read.  The last sentence refers to the ideal home for art as an urban ruin.  It seems like a large cycle as the urban scene was made out of nothing from great artists and as it has deteriorated over years and years, it becomes a new element for artists to take advantage of.  It is outside of the ordinary production and consumption of the city. Which I would consider as a good start for artists to find a source of inspiration.  Profits would then come after this and would feed back into the cycle of economics and art as they go around and around.

Print and Pixel: The digital future of publishing

"Consolidation sounds so tidy, so crisp; but as Esposito writes: "there will be a bloody mess while the final vestiges of the old order are rooted out." Whatever the body count, we know that as we navigate the epochal shift from a print-centric to digital-dominant world, we will be traveling into territory now unknowable. Here at Places, as at publications everywhere, the uncertainties aren't mere abstractions; they're both urgent and ordinary. We are truly betwixt worlds, and as editor of a web-based journal, I've again and again felt the truth of William Gibson's familiar observation: "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."

This passage is extremely relevant to what is happening today. The print and pixel worlds are combining slowly and the digital world is taking over print editions.  The question of how will these corporations that are solely based print models will make money? Once a copy becomes digital, it is easily transferred from one computer to another.  This will decrease the revenue for these corporations.

The "bloody mess" has yet to really happen but I feel as though it will very soon.  The knife has been stabbed in and twisted a little, but no bloody mess.  This will affect so many people and families.  Once the digital age has completely crossed over, there is no going back.