Books vs. Screens: The Disingenuous Argument

The UT Librarians Blog posted another authorless post I have attempted to comment on; while they announced some time ago that the blog would no longer put comments in a moderation queue, I seem to be stuck in one. Again. And thus:

The post in question is a link to the Globe and Mail article entitled, “Books Vs. Screens: Which should Your Kids be Reading?” The article contains such wisdom as:

In Britain, University of Oxford neuroscientist and former Royal Institution director Susan Greenfield revealed a far different vision – one that could have come straight out of an Atwoodian dystopia – when she warned that Internet-driven “mind change” was comparable with climate change as a threat to the species, “skewing the brain” to operate in an infantalized mode and creating “a world in which we are all required to become autistic.”

Less dire but no less pointed warnings have come from Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Massachusetts. “I do think something is going to be lost with the Twitter brain,” she said in an interview.

The UT Librarians (apparently collectively) said:

Is this something we should be thinking about? Deep Reading vs. Screen Reading? In today’s Globe & Mail, Dec. 12, 2011, John Barber, examines recent studies on screen reading vs. what is being called deep reading – something to consider as educators and leaders in our fields.

And now, finally, my reply from the moderation queue:

This is blatant scare-mongering, and disingenuous to boot. Comparing reading novels to reading tweets is like saying the card catalogue, with it’s tiny bits of information, was a threat to “deep thinking”.

There are many kinds of reading, and literate people engage in many of them, sometimes within the same afternoon. People who follow Margaret Atwood also, as a general rule, read novels. “Screen reading” pontificators need to spend some time looking at the actual reading (and writing) going on on the internet. Like BookCountry, from Penguin, which is practically brand new, and fictionpress. Look at all that reading and writing going on! Reading and writing of lengthy bits of writing, no less, and on screens! If you’re brave, look at Fanfiction.net (there are 56k stories on there about the television show Glee alone) or AO3 (which, for the record, has works over 100k words long with as many views and thousands of comments from readers). Lots of people read online, and form communities around texts. It might not be the kind of reading you want to see, but it’s sustained, lengthy, uninterrupted, and on screens.

We need to stop fixating on the form content takes. What the screen is providing is a platform for people who would never get their work passed through publishing houses and editors, and while you may scoff at that (because we all know money is the ultimate test of whether or not something has value, right?), there is more text to read and engage with now than ever before, and people are engaging. Young people are engaging. Some of that text is in short format (like twitter). Some of it is so long publishers would balk at the idea of trying to publish it in physical form. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a screen. Content in content. This new form has the potential to save the monograph, not just to kill it. The form of the novel, the short story, the extended series, the monograph are all alive and well and being published online.

I think, as librarians, we should be concerned with providing access to content, and, perhaps, providing platforms for content to be published, found, and engaged with on every level (deep or browse). Marrying ourselves to paper is the death knell of this profession.

Compassion

I’m starting to think that compassion may be a learned skill rather than an innate trait. I know we like to think of all the best qualities of human beings as something we have intrinsically but society squeezes them out of us, but I suspect compassion may be more complicated.

Or maybe not. Maybe we just live in societies that make it harder to keep at the forefront.

What is it they say? That our societies have grown too big, and that’s why urban dwellers have all these ticks to help them avoid noticing that the herd they’re running in is far, far too large to fully comprehend? Ignoring strangers on the bus, keeping our eyes averted while walking on the sidewalk? Is the absence of compassion a result of all that?

I don’t know. But it seems to me that it’s work to remember that every human being has struggles of their own that you may not be able to read on their bodies and faces (if you bothered to read their bodies or their faces, that is). And I’ve decided that compassion is something I’m going to spend more time deliberately drawing out of myself. I shall consider it constantly.

I say all this because I’m increasingly aware of the absence of compassion we tend to show students. We so often seem to assume the worst of them. I don’t really know why; we were all students ourselves once. Why is it so easy for us to forget what it was like? Or are we actually contemptuous of our younger selves, the ones trying to sneak a better grade in any way possible, rejoicing at every holiday and snow day, sleeping through morning lectures and drinking into the wee hours? Is it a form of self-flagellation to assume that all students are lazy and need to be controlled through our obscure and pointless policies?

Or is it just that we get so used to answering the same questions over and over, or dealing with bad behaviour every day, that we assume everyone is stupid and/or malicious? Relentless familiarity? Do we see faces we classify as “students” so often that they all start to look the same, and become some giant annoying creature who just never learns? I guess that’s where my call for compassion comes in.

But then I’m an optimistic sort, I don’t tend to imagine the worst of people. Quite the opposite, I think everyone is basically good and wants to do the right thing. (I suppose this may not actually be true, but I struggle to completely accept that.) I don’t usually deal with the same questions every day, but when I do, I generally remember that this is the first time this particular person has asked that question. When I will try to remember is that if they’re asking this question at the very last possible minute, there may be for very good reasons for that which are none of my business.

So my word of the day/week/year is compassion. And I will go on trying to hone my skills in that department.

Prince William’s Epic Honeymoon

[Via Metafilter]

Academic Fandom: Collaborative Doctoral Work

I really miss school.

I work at a school, yes. But I miss being a student in one. Many people think I’m crazy, but I love being in school. I love the reading, the writing, and most of all the discussion. I’m a Harvard graduate, I know what it can be like to sit in a room full of extremely bright people and wrestle with a thorny problem. I love not knowing and struggling to understand, throwing ideas at the wall and seeing if any of them work.

But I’m a drop-out. I dropped out of a phd program at the very institution at which I am currently employed, in fact. It’s simultaneously the hardest thing I’ve ever done, the smartest decision I ever made, and the decision I am most likely to feel regret about. I don’t regret it because I want the life that would have come with finishing; I think I’m far better off as a librarian, playing with tech and managing projects and helping faculty with their courses, than I would be with a load of research and teaching to do. I adore my job, and I feel very lucky to have found this particular path. I only regret it because I’d like to do the work.

There’s nothing stopping me from going back. Not to that program, or that topic, or that department, though. I think I’ve moved into a new area now. If I were to go back, it would be in a very different way. And I wouldn’t do it in order to become an academic in the end. Not as job training. Just to improve the person that I am, and to enrich the work I’m already doing.

But you couldn’t drag me back to that style of PhD program. I was lonely, bored, confused about the purpose behind anything I was doing. I felt lost. I have discovered over time that my motivation comes from interacting with other people. This wasn’t immediately apparent all through graduate school because I was de facto surrounded by others. I didn’t realize how much my enthusiasm depended on the community. As soon as I lost that community, I seriously lost my way.

So I was thinking about it a bit, and talking to some doctoral students about the issues they’re facing, I think I’m actually on to something. I think I’ve figured out what kind of doctoral program I’d want to enter. It would go something like this.

You start a doctoral program with a group of like-minded people, interested in working together. In fact, I think the group should actually apply to a program together, be upfront about their collaboration. It’s not a huge group, maybe 4-5 people. Those 4-5 people have agreed beforehand that they want to work on an area of mutual interest. But each of them comes to the subject from a different angle, maybe even a different discipline altogether. They’re looking at maybe the same data, or the same subjects, or at historical data from the same decade, or the same region. Something ties them together, makes each other’s work interesting and appealing to each of them. It gives them a common language and common heroes.

They would all have their own advisers, potentially their own departments to turn to for support and guidance. But the group goes through their programs together, sometimes off doing their own courses and conferences, sometimes working closely together. If they’re doing data collection, the data is shared among the group. They may actually gather data together, and work from the same starting point. Sharing data isn’t plagiarism, after all; the insights you draw from it are the key part.

They discuss approaches and revelations, they have people to turn to when they are wrestling with a thorny problem. They influence each other; they also resist being influenced, or deliberately buck the trend. They read some books in common, but not all. Each brings a lot of unique insights and perspective from their own perspective, or discipline, or area. Comps would be a course (or set of courses, really) where the reading lists are created in an order that will allow all the participants to gain from each other’s thinking along the way. You read your own comps reading list, but you get insight from four others at the same time. Maybe they bring in speakers to talk to them. People to come inspire them or challenge them.

When it comes time to start writing, they have a structured plan, with key milestones and deadlines. They arrange to write their sections with commonalities at the same time, like writing a research paper for a seminar course. The writing process for the collaborative group might look like another set of courses, in fact: they take a “course” together to get each section or chapter finished, with a common deadline and requisite celebrations. They can get a mental tick mark as they complete each step, move through the process like an undergraduate moves through first, second, third, fourth year, graduation. The path of progression would be clear, manageable, collegial. The group could work together along the way to publish collected essays revolving around a theme or element of their collective work. They would meet weekly to discuss their work, their ideas, to be inspired and influenced by each other. They would work collaboratively toward independent goals that are inter-related and complementary. When they’re finished, their dissertations could be published together as a series of books, all related and referencing each other.

Chemistry already works this way, in collaborative units. I think if the humanities started doing the same, the work would be richer. And less tedious to produce.

After I thought it all through, I realized what I was considering: creating a fandom. A fandom in academia, around a topic/theme/group/region. A fandom with it’s language, traditions, communities, familiar cast of characters all re-written and re-imagined by each member. As long as it’s a fandom, it comes with a built in audience of people who are actually interested in your take on the very familiar subject. The conversations are deeper, the details and differences are more obvious. The process gains some meaning, even if that meaning is entirely about finding something to contribute to the group. Flagging enthusiasm can be bolstered up by someone else’s reinvigoration.

It’s not that it’s easier than the traditional PhD; it wouldn’t be. You’d still have to do the reading, pass your comps, do your languages if you have to, collect your data and compose your dissertation. It’s just that it wouldn’t have to be such a solitary task. I think this is the kind of PhD that could actually be fun to do. And wouldn’t the work be richer, with constant insight from others? It wouldn’t prevent you from doing solitary work. Solitary work is the foundation of most academic work, and, ironically, most fandom work too. But what is the benefit of solitary work? Don’t we learn better and think better when challenged and supported and listened to by others? Why do we cut so much of that out of the doctoral process? Doesn’t the solitary work gain meaning when it’s in aid of the collaborative? Isn’t academic inherently collaborative, with academics building on each other work, just at a relatively slow pace? From the slow process of getting an article published and the long wait for meaningful citations in future published work, it’s still highly collaborative. Just crazy slow. Would it be terribly wrong to speed it up a bit?

The Last Airbender: I See You’ve Added a Rainbow

We went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender tonight. I had heard bad things (bad like the rotten tomatoes freshness rating, pictured). I had heard about the racebending problem, wherein characters presumed to be Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan or Inuit are portrayed by white or Indian actors. I knew all this, but had to see it for myself.

Walking into the theatre today was prefaced by spending the last week forcing my spouse Jeremy to watch the entire three seasons of the Nickelodeon tv series not two weeks after watching the entire series by myself. We were primed. I absolutely love the series; it’s brilliant, well-constructed, thoughtful, complex, and peopled with three-dimensional, lovable, and sometimes terrifying characters. When I saw the last frames of the last episode, it killed me that I wouldn’t get see an adult Aang (the series ends when he is 13, presumably, since a calendar year passes and Aang is 12 when we first meet him), or know more about his adventures. I’m a sucker for magic, heroes, and heroes with exceptional, world-changing powers, so naturally Avatar: The Last Airbender is now one of my favourite shows of all time. This afternoon I felt an Aang-shaped hole in my evening, so I convinced Jeremy to come with me to the theatre.

On the way in, I said to Jeremy: “I fear that when we get in there and the movie starts, I’m going to see a kid up on the screen dressed like Aang and pretending to be Aang. But I am very very certain that I know Aang, I know who he is and what he’s about, and I will look up and see someone who is not Aang.”

Jeremy said: “We’ll call him Ian.”

Well it turns out I didn’t need to worry. Aang (pronounced “ang” in the series) is now called AW-ng, so my dearest Aang is safely protected from defilement from my experience in the theatre. Sokka, the goofy, bad-joke-telling “normal guy” in team avatar tells no jokes and is earnest and angsty. But that’s not my Sokka (sock-a)! That’s now Soe-ka, so that’s a different guy, right? (The primary antagonist through most of the series is Prince Zuko, and I swear to you at one point I thought someone said “Zuko” instead of “Sokka” and I was all turned around.) And Zuko’s uncle, the kindly, sweet, Pai Cho playing, tea-obsessed former war lord, Iroh (EYE-ro) is suddenly called Ear-Ro. And only once does he even mention tea! Why does a director make decisions like this? Why rename everyone so audibly? For fans of the series, it’s jarring and sounds all wrong. Does M. Night Shyamalan want to alienate the fan base? Jeremy suggested he wanted to “make it his own”, which frankly just angers me.

If you really, really love the original, is it ever really possible to love a film remake? Peter Jackson showed us that yes, yes we can. I am a big Lord of the Rings fan (I can recite the first 3 pages to you by heart; too many rereads as a teenager, I guess), but I adored Peter Jackson’s movies. And my heart melted all over the new Narnia movies…even the opening sequence of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie, which is not in the book at all, swayed me in a positive direction; it wasn’t in the book, but it could have been. It was entirely in keeping with the characters and the world, and only served to show the story I love in the best possible light on screen. A film adaptation made with love can be embraced by the most ardent fan. The Last Airbender doesn’t feel like something created with love. It feels like Shyamalan profoundly misunderstood the series and tried to “fix” it.

There has been a great deal of discussion around the casting of these characters, and I agree with the critics. This was an opportunity to make a big, beautiful movie with the kinds of faces we rarely see on screen. I would have loved to see Inuit actors play Katara and Sokka. If they couldn’t manage that, they could at least have gotten native Canadians or Americans to play them. I think Inuit would have been the best fit (couldn’t this be Katara?) but imagine how beautiful Katara would have been portrayed by an Aneshnabe woman. What, someone who looks like this couldn’t play Katara? I can’t imagine why Shyamalan thinks only a white girl could fit the bill.

The Fire Nation is portrayed in the film as Persian or Indian, for the most part, a decision which appears to have been driven by the casting of Zuko. In the film he seems to have mostly lost his character-defining scar, his ponytail and his severe hairdo, which served as an important metaphor for his rigid stance (which softens over time, highlighted by his hair growing back). I’m sure the actor in question is very good, but I think we all understand Zuko and his family to be Japanese. Jarring!

Aang. (Oh my dear Aang!) Played by a white American boy, when we generally understand him to be Tibetan. You know what? I could have lived with this casting, and I think people are too hard on him. (I’m always a sucker for the protag.) The script seems to have sucked all the fun out of this character, leaving him doing nothing but wide-eyed trembling and lots of (well-performed) martial arts. I think the poor thing did a great job with what he was given. I read tonight that Noah Ringer is a fan of the original series, and was a fan before auditioning, so I can imagine all the criticism of him as an actor and the film as a whole must be breaking his heart. In all honesty: I think physically he makes a great Airbender. There were moments (very, very short moments) where you hear his voice lift in a vaguely happy tone and you can hear the Aang that might have been. In the hands of a better director and script-writer, I think he would have portrayed a very likable and true-to-the-original Aang. He certainly has the martial arts chops for the job.

In sum: what a tragedy. Maybe some things just aren’t meant to be recreated or so radically embellished. Yep, sometimes you really shouldn’t add that rainbow. Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko: I salute you.

Valleywag: Home of Useless Perspectives

So Valleywag has put Second Life on deathwatch. I was sort of intrigued when I heard about this, because I thought they might have something interesting to say. Instead it contains some jabs about how it’s all digital dancing and sex, and then suggesting that linden labs saw SL as a kind of “online schoolhouse”. As usual, those with lots of cynicism and precious little imagination wait until someone tells them what a technology is for, and then merely attempts to half-heartedly evaluate how well that goal is met from their own rather jaded perspective.

While they’re claiming SL is dying, the population seems to have grown rather dramatically in the last few months. I used to see the logged in population sitting somewhere between 42 and 56K, where now it’s rarely below 72K. Just yesterday I was part of a panel of cancer survivors in Second Life talking about the impact of having a survivor community in world; of course I pointed out my own means of expressing myself in Second Life, my Cancerland build, and how the community helped shape it and me through their support and feedback. Others talked about finally being allowed to speak out loud about what they’re going through without having to shape their words based on the feelings of devastated friends and family who only want to see a happy, positive cancer patient. (This same topic was covered in the current issue of Harvard Divinity Bulletin in Mark U. Edwards’ Ways of ‘Knowing’ Cancer: How can we reason about illness?.) We talked about the impact of running in the Relay for Life without having to have the physical strength to do so.

While I quite like the idea of Linden Labs being bought out by an academic consortium, that hardly seems likely.

Having been so deeply impressed by the Second Life article, I nipped over to see what they had to say about twitter. They quote folks saying that twitter is for the insecure seeking out an identity, which I find quite bizarre. I wonder if they say that about everyone who puts their words or work into the public eye, like, say, journalists, novelists, or artists. Not that tweets are novels or art, per se, but I find the rationale behind their judgment quite baffling. Have they never heard of the value of presence awareness? Do they not understand that connection can be reached both through depth of contact and through regular, small acts of communication? Do they not have singular ideas throughout the day, short ones, that bear sharing and storing?

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: nothing frustrates me more than the “what is it for” argument, which appears to be at the heart of both of these articles. It seems perfectly fair to ask someone who’s a fan of, say, Twitter or Second Life: “What’s it for?” but I suggest that it’s not a fair question at all. “What do you use it for,” perhaps. “What’s its appeal to you,” definitely. But “What’s it for?” is just a way to mark yourself as someone with no imagination, no critical faculty, and no interest in the actual answer. “I don’t see an application for this in my current life/online practice,” is just fine. I wouldn’t debate that. Everyone finds niches for things. But to ask other people to find a niche for something in your life, well. That’s lazy, in my opinion.

Not all ideas or applications work for all people. I can understand why del.icio.us is a great thing to many people, but I’m not really a link collector, so I don’t use it. It’s affordances don’t have a particularly important niche in my life. And that doesn’t mean it’s a useless application, it’s just not that useful to me. I have great respect for the gaming industry, and even have friends who work within it, but I don’t play games other than solitaire and boomshine. I can’t handle the stress. That doesn’t mean I think gaming is pointless. The mixture of personality, imagination, and technology is fascinating and rich; we each carve out our own ways to manage it. If you don’t want to do this, that’s fine; but don’t tell me it’s because there’s something wrong with me, or something wrong with the technology. Turn your high-powered lens of personality probing back on yourself.

What’s so funny about these tirades is that once someone else (with vision and imagination) demonstrates a use for a given application, suddenly those same people who complain loudly about it’s uselessness suddenly become fans. Remember the early days of blogging when everyone told us how bloody pointless and self-indulgent that was? Who doesn’t have a blog these days?

I know, I should get a better sense of humour. But this stuff really grates on me.

The Plight of Future Historians

Today, the Guardian warns:

“Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft,” Brindley states. “I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them. It’s tragic.”

She believes similar gaps could appear in the national memory, pointing out that, contrary to popular assumption, internet companies such as Google are not collecting and archiving material of this type. It is left instead to the libraries and archives which have been gathering books, periodicals, newspapers and recordings for centuries. With an interim report from communications minister Lord Carter on the future of digital Britain imminent, Brindley makes the case for the British Library as the repository that will ensure emails and websites are preserved as reliably as manuscripts and books.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this imaginary plight of future historians, in spite of being a librarian. And it’s not because I don’t see the value in content that’s on the web. There are two sides of the question that I take issue with.

First: “everything should be archived”. This is simply impossible, and is actually misunderstanding what the internet is. If you understand it as a vast publication domain, where things are published every day that just don’t happen to be books, then this desire to archive it all makes sense. But is the stuff of the internet really published? Well, what does “published” really mean?

To be honest, I think the term has no meaning anymore. At one point, “published” meant that a whole team of people thought what you wrote was worth producing, selling, and storing. It comes with a sense of authority, a kind of title. It’s a way we divide the masses into those we want to listen to and those we don’t, in many different arenas. It connotes a sense of value (to someone, at least). Many people object to the idea that there’s value of any kind of the wild open internet, because just anyone can “publish”. I learned in my reference class at library school that one should always check the author of a book to see who they are and what institution they’re associated with before taking them seriously; if you fall outside our institutions, why, surely you have nothing of value to say, and you’re probably lying! Wikipedia: case in point. We have our ways to determine whether we ought to consider what you’re saying not based on the content, but on who and what you are. Apparently this protects us from ever having to have critical reading skills. We are afraid of being duped, so we cling to our social structures.

So many people just turn that “publish” definition on its head and say everything on the internet is “published”, everyone has a pulpit, everyone can be heard in the same way. I object to this as well. Turning an ineffective idea upside down doesn’t get us any closer to a useful definition of a term, or a practice.

Currently, this is how I define “publication”: blocks of text that are published by a company have been vetted and determined to be sellable to whatever audience the company serves. This holds for fiction, for academic work, etc.

Is content on the web “published”? What does that even mean? I think we start shifting to turn that meaning into “available”. If I write something and post it online, it’s available to anyone who wants to see it, but it’s not “published” in any traditional sense. If I take it down, does it become unpublished? Can I only unpublish if I get to it before it gets cached by anyone’s browsers, before Google gets to it? What if I post something online, but no search engine ever finds it and no one ever visits the page? Was it published then? If I put something online but lock it up and let no one see it, is it published?

I think we need a more sophisticated conception of publication to fully incorporate the way we use and interact with the web. I don’t think the traditional notion is helpful, and I think it presumes a kind of static life for web content that just isn’t there. Web content is read/write. It’s editable, it’s alterable. Rather than dislike that about the content, we should encourage and celebrate that. That’s what’s great about it.

There has always been ephemera. Most of it has been lost. Is that sad? I suppose so. As a (former) historian-in-training, I would have loved to get my hands on the ephemera of early modern women’s lives. I would love to know more about them, more about what drove them, what they’re lives were like. But I don’t feel like I’m owed that information. Ephemera is what fills our lives; when that ephemera becomes digital, we need to come to terms with our own privacy. Just because you can record and store things doesn’t mean you should.

And this comes to the heart of the matter, the second element of the desire to archive everything that irks me. The common statement is that we are producing more information now than ever before, and this information needs archiving. The reality is this: we are not producing “more information” per capita. We simply are not, I refuse to believe that. Medieval people swam in seas of information much as we do, it’s just that the vast majority of it was oral, or otherwise unstorable (for them). These are people who believed that reading itself was a group event, they couldn’t read without speaking aloud. (Don’t be so shy if you move your lips while reading; it’s a noble tradition!) Reading and listening were a pair. In our history we just stored more of that information in our brains and less of it in portable media. If you think surviving in a medieval village required no information, consider how many things you’d need to know how to do, how many separate “trades” a medieval woman would need to be an expert in just to feed, clothe, and sustain her family. Did she have “less” information? She certainly knew her neighbours better. She knew the details of other people’s lives, from start to finish. She knew her bible without ever having looked at one. Her wikipedia was inside her own head.

Today we have stopped using our brains for storage and using them for processing power instead. Not better or worse, just different. We use media to store our knowledge and information rather than remembering it. So of course there appears to be more information. Because we keep dumping it outside ourselves, and everyone’s doing it.

Not to say that a complete archive of everyone’s ephemera, every thought, detail, bit of reference material ever produced by a person throughout their life wouldn’t make interesting history. I think it would, but that’s not what we think libraries are really for. We do generally respect a certain level of privacy. It would be a neat project for someone out there to decide to archive absolutely everything about themselves for a year of their lives and submit that to an archive. Temperature, diet, thoughts, recordings of conversations, television programs watched, books read, everything. We you want to harvest everything on the web, then you might as well use all those security cameras out there to literally record everything that goes on, for ever, and store that in the library for future historians. Set up microphones on the street corners, in homes, in classrooms, submit recordings to the library. A complete record of food bought and consumed. Everything. That’s not what we consider “published”, no matter how public any of it is. We draw the line. Somehow if it’s in writing it’s fair game.

But that’s not what people are generally talking about when they talk about “archiving information”. I know this is true because the article ends with this:

“On the other hand, we’re producing much more information these days than we used to, and not all of it is necessary. Do we want to keep the Twitter account of Stephen Fry or some of the marginalia around the edges of the Sydney Olympics? I don’t think we necessarily do.”

There’s “good” information and then this other, random ephemera. I will bet you that Stephen Fry’s twitter feed will be of more interest to these future historians than a record of the official Sydney Olympics webpage. And that’s the other side of this argument.

This isn’t about preserving information for those sacred future historians. This is about making sure the future sees us the way we want to be seen; not mired in debates about Survivor, or writing stacks and stacks of Harry Potter slash fanfiction, or coming up with captions for LOLcats. Not twitter, because that is too silly, but serious websites, like the whitehouse’s. We’re trying to shape the way the future sees us, and we want to be seen in a particular light.

I object to that process.

Help a Friend

I’m not sure where to start.

She posted this. Her friend, her ex, her roommate, key part of her life since she was a kid; Jon died. She watched it all happening, helpless to do anything. She made the key phone calls. Death is hard on the living.

Then some other things happened. I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say that lawyers are having to become involved, she is feeling trapped and bullied, and the door to her apartment is opened by people who have never lived there, at odd hours of the night. (You can read some more details here.)

In Jason‘s eloquent words:

I’ve been down here the whole time, and other friends have rallied around from Queens and New Jersey, and California and Toronto.

Aleja has lost everything except her bed, electric wheelchair, some of her clothes, a TV, and some books. No table or chair, lights, cups, plates, cutlery, basic cleaning goods, and the list goes on. We’d normally offer stuff from our homes, but she can’t use normal plates, due to weight, or tables due to height and chair access; you get the idea.

Can you help?

Edit: things keep getting worse. I’m scared for this girl. If you’re in New York and have some sympathy for someone in the position of being bullied senseless and want to help out (just physical presence helps a lot), please let me know.

Finally

from here

Don’t Vote

http://content.declareyourself.com/players/dy_videoplayer.swf

These are awesome.