DOOM and rubbish

[bliumchik]

My class Communication and Information Environments has a common theme of technophobia. Experts Advise Caution. "New" Media - Good Or Evil? Video Killed The Radio Star - And It's Coming For You(tube).

For heaven's sake. We still write with pen and paper when we've had typewriters and computers for decades. I'm sure it's decreasing a little the more portable computers get, but it's not obsolete or redundant by any means. Similarly I always think the people bewailing the internet spelling DOOM for the printed book and the CD have an air of willful hysteria about them. This next change is the harbringer of the apocalypse, no? Well, THIS one then - fine, THIS one. The elusive End Of Society As We Know it is always just over the horizon. I'm doing the reading for our first essay and apparently Andrew Keen thinks Wikipedia spells the death of Encyclopedia Brittanica and its ilk - while simultaneously being unreliable tripe and nonsense. Funny how the new thing is always utter rubbish AND YET taking over the world. Luring us in with its seductive dodginess and shitty quality OF TEMPTATION. Kids these days!

This guy just makes me sprain my face for rolling my eyes, honestly. I'm going to have such fun demolishing him in my essay tomorrow. (Yeah, it's due Wednesday and I've done a paragraph. No worries! It's only twelve hundred words! *manic grin*)

PS: Two new friends in Writing: Style And Structure who speak Russian and think Russian is awesome respectively. Random! ("Oh, I'm not Russian. I just think Cyrillic is really cool looking, you know?") Also I'm glad I'm not claustrophobic because the lifts are pretty narrow and the one in the humanities building unexpectedly had no lights on today.Me and some guy get in and the doors shut on total darkness except for the eerie red glow of the number lights. Beat. "Well, this is awkward."

Comments

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Oh hai i is in libraryanizm and we thinkz bookseseses are will be stayings, kthx.

Except reference books; those are being increasingly offered as online subscriptions, because (a) they get better control over access, (b) they use significantly less shelf space, (c) it's easier for multiple users to get at them all at once, and (d) they update them faster.

Also, Wikipedia's not that bad. There was an interesting article in Nature about it, actually; Wikipedia articles were generally found to be as reliable as Britannica articles.

BUT THESE THINGS, YOU KNOWS THEM.

So, instead: remember, writing an essay about why Andrew Keen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Keen) is a bitter, twisted little man given to wallowing in misinformed bias and reactionary drivel is not scholarly, and will not get you marks. And I thought Marc Prensky was bad.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Lol, a wiki article about him. Irony!

To be fair I'm only using him for some choice reactionary quotes in an essay about fanfiction culture on livejournal. Yes, really. They said we could pick any CI Environment we wanted as long as it was one we interacted with, so... :P

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

The overwhelming impression I get, anyway, is that he came out of that retreat where he had his little Epiphany having internalised their idea of the "democratized" New media Revolution minus the "and that's a good thing" bit after seeing what pretentious capital-D Dreamers they all were. An appropriately cynical person who hadn't been so initially caught up in the wave would just have said "what a load of wankers" and gone and done their own thing. Instead Keen decides to blame the tools. (By which I mean Web 2.0 rather than the walking talking tools of the kind that go on Wiki Revolution Retreats.)