Literature & Medicine

"It's not quite a book club, a class or group therapy. It's people gathering around books and humanities for specific reasons. It's for pleasure, for stimulation, to make connections and form a community and reflect on serious issues."

From a Baltimore Sun article (May 15, 2008) on a book club at Mercy Hospital Center. The club is based on a Maine Humanities Council program to encourage doctors and other hospital workers to think more about patient care.

Books on the recommended list include Pat Barker's Regeneration, Raymond Carver's Cathedral, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique-Bauby, and Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Could a virtual book club achieve similar results or is the more personal connection and group give-and-take essential?

2. Blog, blug, glub, glob

A writer friend of mine at the television studios' most recent dog-and-pony show commented that "blogging is so 2006. Everyone here is Twittering." Which in my mind would be the equivalent of the old news wire machines clacking out the latest with intermittent bell-ringing for bulletins. You could spend all day watching them spit out the news line by line. Or you could wait until the newspaper hit the flowerbed in the morning and get it all neatly compiled and organized for you.

Alas I am not up to Twittering, being stuck here in Thing 2, so back to my experience in the bloggy, bloggy dew. Setting it up was great fun. Thinking about content, ditto. I fuss way too long over niceties like paragraphs, which Blogger seems to have its own ideas about and refuses to insert spaces where I want them every time. When I tried to adjust one, it blew up the point size alarmingly and I couldn't figure out how to downsize it without retyping. Copying and pasting from Nisus Writer also didn't work until my local geek told me to switch from "edit HTML." Okay, duh. It was nice to have someone handy to answer my questions quickly.

Maybe a blogger workshop at the library to help people -- perhaps a book group or a storytime bunch of parents -- set up their own blogs would be a good community-building event. They can share their urls if they like and as practice they can be shown how to include a link to the good ol' library or related blogs and Web sites.

For the most part, though, blogs seem to rank fairly low on the Web interactivity scale. I really see them as more of a desktop publishing tool, a relatively speedy way to get information or thoughts into a public forum, even if it's just family and friends, or co-workers. But the medium is in the hands of the blogger, not the community of readers. It hasn't got the give-and-take of instant messaging or e-mail.

The numbers of reader responses to blogs vary widely. Those focused on a particular subject or group and explicitly encouraging comment get many more comments. If the goal is interactivity, a blog needs to:

• Target a specific audience.
• Solicit comments directly, by posing a question to prompt discussion, for example, or including a poll of reader opinion on a topic.
• Control the discussion through a moderator, weeding out the unprintable or inappropriate comments.

Any others?

Back to the Video

That "The Machine Is Us/ing Us" video kept nagging at me. Finally, I figured out the source of much of my negative reaction to it: the music. So I went back and played the video without the sound and found it much easier to process the content and not end up feeling all jittery.

The music,  "There's Nothing Impossible" by Deus, reminded me of TV commercials  for  trendy telecommunications or insurance firms. Presumably the professor liked the music, or found it fitting, but I wonder if he wasn't enamored of the verbal association of the video title and the artist's name. Deus ex machina? How meta.

Home Sweet Library

I drove right past my new library home today. I thought it was a church. So I doubled back and pulled into the lot just in time to see hordes of children pour out the door. Vacation Bible School. Or summer reading program. For me it was all the same feeling, the feeling of shelter, friendship, reading stories, singing.

My earliest library was on wheels. I'm not real clear on the copyright here, so I just linked to the Chicago Public Library. The bookmobile -- I think it was green -- showed up once every two weeks and smelled wonderfully of library bindings. We could only take out three books at a time. This was torture. By the time I was about 10 we had our very own branch about a mile from home -- walking/biking distance. But when I was in high school I spent Saturdays at the main branch, which also housed a small but terrific Civil War museum. What better place to spend
a few hours than here.

Except maybe at "my" new tobacco barn church library.

(Photos of Chicago Public Library mosaic floor tile and staircase courtesy Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University)

1. Start Up 1.0

“I am surprised by how much I like my computer, but I will never love it. … As a reader, I often feel I can detect the spoor of word processing in books, particularly long ones. The writers -- no longer slowed by having to change their typewriter ribbons, fill their fountain pens, or sharpen their quills -- tend to be prolix.”
-- Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris

I am writing this on paper first, and erasing as I go. Call it Printing 1.0. It is energy-efficient if not fast.

Web 1.0 is perhaps analogous to the early publication of books by kings and nobles using monks as their printers. It was, to co-opt the words of Tom Storey on OCLC’s Next Space site, “a monolithic, proprietary operating system” if ever there was one. Carrying the analogy another step, Web. 2.0 is a town meeting or radio call-in show full of disparate and often rancorous voices that might in the end produce a consensus and possibly action.

In his tour de force of digital editing (the speed of which gives new meaning to “hypertext”), Professor Wesch illustrates the elasticity of digital tools now available to connect people and share knowledge. But wouldn’t one written paragraph have done the same more quickly and clearly? I hoped to gain insight into the point of the video by reading some of the 7,000 or so comments posted on YouTube. After 16 pages, I had gleaned three things:

1.) Viewers thought it an awesome video, except for a few who also didn’t get it.

2.) It doesn’t take long for an online “conversation” to devolve into mocking and name-calling and worse.

3.) The Web-page tagging and annotating Wesch uses at one point is from Diigo (dee-go) an acronym for Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff. Which should be Diigos, but whatever.

“… in the information age, citizens must learn the tools of traditional journalism. It’s called news literacy, and it means you learn to be your own reporter or editor. … There’s a difference between evidence and inference, between solid information and junk.”

-- AARP Bulletin, Editorial July-Aug. 2008

We have moved from a society with limited information controlled by a few to one with massive amounts of information dispersed by the many. Storey, in his somewhat over-the-top paean to the interactive Internet -- “the second coming of the Web”? -- says the “new digital lifestyle” will drive everything we do. Let’s not forget that we are the machine and the drivers. But we need to start thinking about where we are heading. What will Web 3.0 be? I would hope it will be an expanded and refined base of knowledge that makes use of but is independent of the latest technological geegaws, a Web community that embodies the wisdom of C.P. Scott’s words: “Comment is free. Facts are sacred."

What I look forward to is the futurist Wendy Schultz's vision of the "library as aesthetic experience," her Library 4.0. Ever notice on "Battlestar Galactica" that Adm. Adama's quarters are furnished with real, old books and warm brass, not cold titanium, finishings?