This library removed most of its books and replaced them with Kindles.
BY Greg Toppo
USA Today
27 October 2009
ASHBURNHAM, Mass. — Cushing Academy is the very model of a modern New England boarding school.
Clock tower? Check.
Maples and meandering footpaths? Check.
Flags representing the 193 home countries of its alumni? Check.
But in the past few years, the old library was in danger of becoming a relic. Its 20,000-book collection was barely used, administrators say. Spot checks last year found that, on some days, fewer than 30 books, or about .15%, circulated. And it was becoming rather lonely down there.
"I'd come in here during a free period, there'd be no one in here," says junior Caitlin Forest.
So the venerable boarding school west of Boston — the first in the USA to admit both boys and girls — last summer undertook another first: It began getting rid of most of the library's books. In their place: a fully digital collection.
Library watchers say it could be the first school library, public or private, to forsake ink and paper in favor of e-books. It also represents the first time a school has placed its students' intellectual lives so fully into the hands of a few online publishers and makers of electronic devices.
Researching the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919? Use your laptop (handed out to students on financial aid) or a library PC to access the 13 databases to which Cushing now subscribes.
Reading David Copperfield in English class? A librarian will gladly download it onto one of 65 Kindle handheld electronic book readers from Amazon.com, which circulate like library books.
Three big-screen TVs now greet visitors at the entrance, and the old circulation desk is now a coffee bar. Officially it's called Cushing Cyber Cafe, but students quickly nicknamed the spot "12K Cafe" after its $12,000 espresso machine.
An angry backlash
Naturally, the blogosphere flipped.
After reading about the plan last month in the Boston Globe, bloggers and commenters worldwide have called headmaster Jim Tracy a snob, a spendthrift and a book burner and even compared him to Adolf Hitler. One commenter on the blog parentdish.com urged, "Save the books, fire the instigator of the book-burning. Let Hitler stay dead."
All very curious when you meet Tracy, a soft-spoken, painfully polite guy who's a bit bewildered that so few people get it: His tiny school's collection is growing from 20,000 books to millions.
"It was really to save libraries five, 10, 15 years down the road," he says. "What the students are telling us is: 'We're not using the print books. You can keep giving them to us, but they're just going to collect dust.' So we're saying, 'Let's be honest: Let's give them the best electronic information available.' "
Actually, he says, he has hired more librarians to help students navigate the electronic stacks and tell "what is valuable information or reliable from what is junk."
He concedes that the $12,000 coffeemaker has become a distraction, but he says the real idea behind the cafe was to create "a new commons, a new agora, where people in a convivial setting exchange ideas and socially interact around ideas with culture and literature at their fingertips."
Many book-loving bloggers gave Tracy grief for telling the Globe, "When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books." But he says he was talking about books' usefulness for research, not for pleasure reading
"If I look out the window and I see a student reading Chaucer, to me it's utterly immaterial whether it's a paperback or a Kindle. I'm just glad that they're reading Chaucer."
Tom Corbett, Cushing's director of Media and Academic Technology, says the new research system "does a much better job than this," pointing to the remaining 10,000 books on shelves, which will be gone by next September — the first 10,000 disappeared last summer, donated to staff and other schools. All that's left of that half of the collection is a series of elongated dark carpet areas where the shelves once stood.. Donated books will stay — as will a group of Cushing-related books and a tiny children's collection kept for staff members' kids.
New Kindles run from $200 to $500, but Corbett says he can purchase many e-titles much more cheaply than traditional books. Often he pays just $5 apiece, so for the price of a $30 hardback, he now orders six e-books.
History teacher Peter Clarke says that makes the Kindle project "a no-brainer."
"There's this emotional attachment to books," he says. "But on the other hand, there's this possibility."
Last year, when he assigned a research project on the Industrial Revolution, he says students scrambled to the library for reference books, but few found what they needed. "We had a real access problem," he says.
All the same, doesn't Cushing risk becoming beholden to Amazon.com and its editorial decisions? Doesn't it risk becoming, in essence, Amazon High School?
"We have to work with what we have," Corbett says.
While he's bound, for now, to the selection that Amazon offers — as of this week, that totaled around 366,000 titles — Corbett says he anticipates that the Kindle itself will "become less important" in a few years. He notes, for instance, that students can now buy Kindle titles on their iPhones and iPod Touch players.
Though if you really want to talk about corporate dominance, just ask Clarke about the USA's textbook adoption process and what that does for academic freedom.
"I'm looking for something, as an educator, that's going to break that donkey's back," he says.
A model for other schools?
Critics see the value — and inevitability — of increasing libraries' digital collections but say that to remove virtually all printed materials is a mistake.
"This is not necessarily a model for other school libraries," says American Library Association President Camila Alire. "It's a private prep school, it's a residential campus, and they also have the funds to do things like this."
Actually, Tracy says, that's the point: The school can afford it, so why shouldn't it? He wants to share what he learns with other schools — and is partnering with Oxford University to offer any materials it develops as a free, open-source guide.
As for the students' ability to pay for the gadgets, Tracy says, that's an even stronger argument. Though many are on financial aid, his students, for better or worse, are "going to have disproportionate influence" on the world. What better place than Cushing to teach them how to navigate the world wisely and with "humanizing values?"
Cassandra Barnett, president of the American Association of School Librarians, says most reference materials are going online, but she wonders how Cushing librarians will attract kids to books they might not otherwise seek out. "I can't display … a whole bunch of Kindles with the covers of books."
Ron Hogan, senior editor at Galley Cat, a New York-based news blog about the publishing industry, says he has less discomfort than most about the shift to digital materials but worries about constantly changing technology that could make today's cutting-edge Kindle worthless in 10 years. "I've got a drawer full of 7-inch floppy discs here," he says. "That data is lost to me."
Ink on paper, by contrast, hasn't changed much in hundreds of years. "It's an amazingly easy technology to get access to the material from," he says. "You can pick up a book from today, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100, 200 years ago, and they all function perfectly fine — you open up the book and you start to read."
Most students love the new library, but a few remain skeptical.
On a recent afternoon, three days after it opened, the Cushing library was anything but lonely. Caitlin and her friend Terra Barton, 17, sat in a pair of upholstered chairs overlooking a bank of full-length windows (on the other side is a brick courtyard that's still being built). On either end of the long, narrow library, teachers taught classes with the aid of computerized Smartboards.
A constant stream of backpack-toting students filed in and out of the 12-K Cafe, ordering cappuccinos, smoothies and snacks. The scene resembled an after-school malt shop more than a library.
Nearby, Gaby Skok, 18, a senior, sat with two friends. Her blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail, the painter Frida Kahlo staring out from an oversized ring on her finger, Skok says the idea that the library is now "some hip, trendy place" bugs her. She likes that it was once quiet and rarely used, actually.
And don't get her started on the coffee.
"People shouldn't have to be encouraged by frothy beverages to hang out in a library," she says.
Asher Chase, 16, a junior, says anyone who thinks digital books are the future should read a digital book. He remembers his English class last year being assigned Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol on their laptops.
Taking notes on the text? Forget it. "It was terrible: 'Shade, file, edit, highlight.' We were like, 'Wow, reading books on computers is awful.' "
Then there are the giant TVs on the wall greeting library patrons as they enter — tuned that afternoon to a C-SPAN congressional hearing, a big-think TED conference session and some sort of NASA feed from space — all with the sound turned down. Skok simply can't believe that Tracy has let flickering TV monitors, à la George Orwell's 1984, invade the library.
"Dr. Tracy, I love him, I respect him," she says. "But has he read a dystopian novel?"
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Coming to Terms with your Inner Redneck?
Coming To Terms With His Inner Redneck
Dreher pivots off Ta-Nehisi's post on race, class, obesity and shame:
Reading Coates's piece made me reflect on the love-hate relationship I have with the South, which is my native culture. It's not that I carry around with me a burden of shame and an "I've got to show them" competitive mentality, as Coates does with reference to blackness. Living in the North for so long -- and culturally speaking, Washington DC and South Florida are the North -- made me appreciate what was deeply good about the South. That's something I didn't see when I was a young man, and could only see its flaws. Maybe I came to terms with my inner redneck; in any case, I came to see rednecks with a lot more nuance than I did before.
And being around Northern white people, so many of whom were full of self-congratulation about their social progressivism, not realizing how provincial and bigoted they were, made me profoundly identify with Randy Newman's famous satirical song "Rednecks." It really is true, I think, that the only kind of person its perfectly safe to piss on in smart company is white working-class Southerners. "Sweet Home Alabama" is the classic, anthemic f-you by people who don't think they have a damned thing to be ashamed of. I love this song because it makes me forget that I chose to leave, and am something of a fraud and a poseur because of it.
And yet, when the South keeps coming up last in many quality of life measures -- health, education, unwed births, etc. -- it's hard to deny that there's something particularly wrong with us. It's redneck culture -- white rednecks and black rednecks both, people who live chaotic lives, dwell on grievance and resentment, and despise boring bourgeois standards of sobriety, order and respectability. It seems like we can't overcome it.
Dreher pivots off Ta-Nehisi's post on race, class, obesity and shame:
Reading Coates's piece made me reflect on the love-hate relationship I have with the South, which is my native culture. It's not that I carry around with me a burden of shame and an "I've got to show them" competitive mentality, as Coates does with reference to blackness. Living in the North for so long -- and culturally speaking, Washington DC and South Florida are the North -- made me appreciate what was deeply good about the South. That's something I didn't see when I was a young man, and could only see its flaws. Maybe I came to terms with my inner redneck; in any case, I came to see rednecks with a lot more nuance than I did before.
And being around Northern white people, so many of whom were full of self-congratulation about their social progressivism, not realizing how provincial and bigoted they were, made me profoundly identify with Randy Newman's famous satirical song "Rednecks." It really is true, I think, that the only kind of person its perfectly safe to piss on in smart company is white working-class Southerners. "Sweet Home Alabama" is the classic, anthemic f-you by people who don't think they have a damned thing to be ashamed of. I love this song because it makes me forget that I chose to leave, and am something of a fraud and a poseur because of it.
And yet, when the South keeps coming up last in many quality of life measures -- health, education, unwed births, etc. -- it's hard to deny that there's something particularly wrong with us. It's redneck culture -- white rednecks and black rednecks both, people who live chaotic lives, dwell on grievance and resentment, and despise boring bourgeois standards of sobriety, order and respectability. It seems like we can't overcome it.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Putting Cheney in his Place
Here's Rep. Alan Grayson's money comment on Hardball last night, where the loudmouthed freshman congressman compares former Vice President Dick Cheney to a vampire:
REP. ALAN GRAYSON: “By the way, I have trouble listening to what [Cheney] says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking, but my response is this: he’s just angry because the president doesn’t shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?”
REP. ALAN GRAYSON: “By the way, I have trouble listening to what [Cheney] says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking, but my response is this: he’s just angry because the president doesn’t shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?”
Saturday, October 24, 2009
On E-Reading
I gather that the theory is that e-reading will cause the human brain to rewire itself over time.
Auto E-Reading
Jonah Leher explains the brain's reading pathways and applies this to e-reading:
This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image.
(One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years - they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.
The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
Auto E-Reading
Jonah Leher explains the brain's reading pathways and applies this to e-reading:
This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image.
(One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years - they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.
The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
Phone, Computer, and eReader All in One?
The Atlantic Home
« Paying For Hulu | Main | Existing Home Sales Soared In September »
Oct 23 2009, 11:45 am by Derek Thompson
Where is the E-Reader Revolution Leading Us?
Just days after Barnes & Noble announced that its new e-reader Nook would allow book-sharing across e-readers and personal computers, Amazon announced -- surprise! -- the exact same thing.
Amazon.com is putting out a free application that lets people read Kindle electronic books on their Windows personal computers. Microsoft demonstrated the new Kindle for PC app at the Windows 7 launch in New York City. It's the latest move by Amazon to extend its vast store of electronic books, magazines and newspapers to other devices beyond its Kindle readers.
The company is expected to expand Kindle book access to Macs and BlackBerrys in the next few months. Now I've followed the smoldering e-reader revolution for a while now, but something is only now coming into focus.
Once upon a time, personal electronics were designed to be single-function. Cameras were cameras, only. Phones were phones, only. The computer was a heavy stationary thing. But engineers slowly figured out how to build smaller chips, store greater memory and consolidate functions. Today a single smart phone can do all of these things: Take pictures, make calls, go online. It's the Swiss Army Knife theory of technology.
Today it seems to me that there are at least three major classes of popular personal technology that have yet to be fully consolidated into a modern Swiss Army Knife: cell phones and computers and I think e-readers will soon fill that trio. The arc of personal tech history dictates that functions don't remain separate for very long. Someday the idea of an e-reader designed merely to read will seem as limiting as the cell phone that doesn't receive emails or the desktop that won't fit in your satchel. It will still have an consumer audience, but it will be seen as behind the wave.
Returning to today's news: B&N and Amazon's offer to access e-books on computers, iPhones, BlackBerry's and future hybrid devices, means that anything with an internet connection is functionally an e-reader. We don't need an e-reader to "e-read." I think that means Amazon and Barnes & Noble are inherently handicapped in the e-reader arms race. They're building e-readers that can go online. That's nice, but the upcoming Apple Tablet is so much more: a ultra-portable netbook/entertainment center that can also read books. The Tablet isn't merely designed for today's e-reader technology. It's designed with the expectation that consumers want their personal technologies integrated. It's not just another awesome corkscrew. It's a Swiss Army Knife.
« Paying For Hulu | Main | Existing Home Sales Soared In September »
Oct 23 2009, 11:45 am by Derek Thompson
Where is the E-Reader Revolution Leading Us?
Just days after Barnes & Noble announced that its new e-reader Nook would allow book-sharing across e-readers and personal computers, Amazon announced -- surprise! -- the exact same thing.
Amazon.com is putting out a free application that lets people read Kindle electronic books on their Windows personal computers. Microsoft demonstrated the new Kindle for PC app at the Windows 7 launch in New York City. It's the latest move by Amazon to extend its vast store of electronic books, magazines and newspapers to other devices beyond its Kindle readers.
The company is expected to expand Kindle book access to Macs and BlackBerrys in the next few months. Now I've followed the smoldering e-reader revolution for a while now, but something is only now coming into focus.
Once upon a time, personal electronics were designed to be single-function. Cameras were cameras, only. Phones were phones, only. The computer was a heavy stationary thing. But engineers slowly figured out how to build smaller chips, store greater memory and consolidate functions. Today a single smart phone can do all of these things: Take pictures, make calls, go online. It's the Swiss Army Knife theory of technology.
Today it seems to me that there are at least three major classes of popular personal technology that have yet to be fully consolidated into a modern Swiss Army Knife: cell phones and computers and I think e-readers will soon fill that trio. The arc of personal tech history dictates that functions don't remain separate for very long. Someday the idea of an e-reader designed merely to read will seem as limiting as the cell phone that doesn't receive emails or the desktop that won't fit in your satchel. It will still have an consumer audience, but it will be seen as behind the wave.
Returning to today's news: B&N and Amazon's offer to access e-books on computers, iPhones, BlackBerry's and future hybrid devices, means that anything with an internet connection is functionally an e-reader. We don't need an e-reader to "e-read." I think that means Amazon and Barnes & Noble are inherently handicapped in the e-reader arms race. They're building e-readers that can go online. That's nice, but the upcoming Apple Tablet is so much more: a ultra-portable netbook/entertainment center that can also read books. The Tablet isn't merely designed for today's e-reader technology. It's designed with the expectation that consumers want their personal technologies integrated. It's not just another awesome corkscrew. It's a Swiss Army Knife.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Banned Books and Challenges
The following link has a map detailing where books have been either banned or challenged. The data comes from the American Library Association. Most seem to be in the South and Northeast.
http://bannedbooksweek.org/Mapofbookcensorship.html
http://bannedbooksweek.org/Mapofbookcensorship.html
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
What Would Palin Do?
President Obama has to make a hugely important decision: whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. I have no idea what the correct decision should be. Can you imagine Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee having to make this decision? Well, neither can I. The IDIOTS who support such unqualified people to be our President simply defy my understanding.
The Facts Favor Progressive Health Reform
by Paul Krugman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Times Blog
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 21, 2009, 10:26 am
The facts have a liberal health-care bias
A quick thought: now that Congress is getting close to actually passing health-care reform, the question is not so much whether to do anything, and more how to pay for whatever it is we do. As a result, sound-bites and slogans are mattering less, and CBO estimates are mattering more.
And this is pushing reform in a progressive direction.
Serious students of health care have known for a long time that the magic of the marketplace doesn’t work in health care; the United States has the most privatized health-care system in the advanced world, and also the least efficient. The pale reflection of this reality in the current discussion is that reform with a strong public option is cheaper than reform without — which means that as we get closer to really doing something, rhetoric about socialism fades out, and that $100 billion or so in projected savings starts to look awfully attractive.
It has also been clear from international evidence that universality is cheaper than leaving a few people expensively without care. That’s reflected now in the projected savings from a strong employer mandate.
The point is that reality is pushing for a more progressive reform than the Baucus bill. Truly, the facts have a liberal bias.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Times Blog
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 21, 2009, 10:26 am
The facts have a liberal health-care bias
A quick thought: now that Congress is getting close to actually passing health-care reform, the question is not so much whether to do anything, and more how to pay for whatever it is we do. As a result, sound-bites and slogans are mattering less, and CBO estimates are mattering more.
And this is pushing reform in a progressive direction.
Serious students of health care have known for a long time that the magic of the marketplace doesn’t work in health care; the United States has the most privatized health-care system in the advanced world, and also the least efficient. The pale reflection of this reality in the current discussion is that reform with a strong public option is cheaper than reform without — which means that as we get closer to really doing something, rhetoric about socialism fades out, and that $100 billion or so in projected savings starts to look awfully attractive.
It has also been clear from international evidence that universality is cheaper than leaving a few people expensively without care. That’s reflected now in the projected savings from a strong employer mandate.
The point is that reality is pushing for a more progressive reform than the Baucus bill. Truly, the facts have a liberal bias.
Actually, I like Pat Buchanan
The reason is that his racism is honest, unlike the tea-baggers, the Becks, and the Palins, who are obviously dishonest. Traditional Americans = White Americans. Any questions? It's no wonder these people have economic and status anxiety and are afraid Obama is going come door-to-door and take their precious guns.
Traditional Americans ARE losing their nation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: October 20, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
by Pat Buchanan
© 2009
In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.
Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be?
Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia."
Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.
"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.
"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."
Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.
And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them "un-American," "Nazis" and "evil-mongers," one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.
It's not too late to rescue the nation! Read how in "Save America Now! The New Revolution to Save Freedom and Liberty"
As with Jimmy Carter's long-range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.
Yet, the establishment's reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.
Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.
The "dirty, immoral war in Vietnam" explains why the "finest generation we have ever produced" is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the "root causes" of social disorder.
Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:
"Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year's turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry. ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick 'none' – a grim statement."
Is all this due to Obama's race?
Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.
With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.
Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.
They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.
They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.
They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.
and that they are deeply frightened. Their fantasy America IS disappearing.
Traditional Americans ARE losing their nation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: October 20, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
by Pat Buchanan
© 2009
In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.
Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be?
Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia."
Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.
"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.
"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."
Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.
And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them "un-American," "Nazis" and "evil-mongers," one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.
It's not too late to rescue the nation! Read how in "Save America Now! The New Revolution to Save Freedom and Liberty"
As with Jimmy Carter's long-range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.
Yet, the establishment's reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.
Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.
The "dirty, immoral war in Vietnam" explains why the "finest generation we have ever produced" is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the "root causes" of social disorder.
Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:
"Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year's turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry. ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick 'none' – a grim statement."
Is all this due to Obama's race?
Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.
With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.
Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.
They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.
They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.
They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.
and that they are deeply frightened. Their fantasy America IS disappearing.
An eBook Reader with WiFi Connectivity
Now we're getting somewhere!
The Atlantic Home
Oct 20 2009, 5:04 pm by Derek Thompson
Barnes & Noble Nook Looks Like a Kindle-Killer
The e-reader arms race is on, and Barnes & Noble is the latest manufacturer to unveil its shiny, super-literate weapon. The Nook might not have the razzle-dazzle of the rumored Apple Tablet, but it's got brand name gravitas, WiFi, a color touchscreen -- enough for the Gizmodo boys to gloat that it "eats the [Amazon] Kindle's lunch." But the Barnes and Noble e-reader has another especially interesting twist: Book lending.
Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader, expected to be unveiled on Tuesday at a news conference in Manhattan, features Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability for customers to lend out e-books for 14 days at a time.
This is obviously great for consumers (provided they have a e-reader). Maybe Barnes & Noble's calculus is that the ability to share will encourage more people to buy books because it increases the books' utility. For example, I'm somewhat interested in buying sports writer Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball, but I might be more interested if I knew that I could lend the book to all my friends who read Simmons on ESPN every week so that we could talk about it later. This dream assumes, of course, that e-readers become as common as iPods. We're not there yet, but this explosion of e-readers from Amazon, B&N, Sony and others suggest that somebody smells a market waiting to blow up.
Permalink :: Comments (1) :: TrackBacks (0) :: Share This
No Trackbacks
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://business.theatlantic.com/mt-42/mt-tb.cgi/16596
Comments (1)
Brock C. October 20, 2009 9:55 PM
Derek, you misunderstand how the Nook's lending works. The eBooks B&N is selling can be read on any PC, Mac, iPhone or iPod Touch, not just the Nook; so the universe of people you can lend books too just got a lot bigger.
I also think the most interesting part of the lending thing is that B&N clearly got the publishers and authors' guild to agree to some sort of DRM scheme, otherwise how can the 14 day limit be enforced? What is the limit of this DRM scheme? Can they delete books from the Nook just like Amazon deleted 1984 from the Kindle? What happens if B&N's DRM server goes offline? Can you still read your books?
The Atlantic Home
Oct 20 2009, 5:04 pm by Derek Thompson
Barnes & Noble Nook Looks Like a Kindle-Killer
The e-reader arms race is on, and Barnes & Noble is the latest manufacturer to unveil its shiny, super-literate weapon. The Nook might not have the razzle-dazzle of the rumored Apple Tablet, but it's got brand name gravitas, WiFi, a color touchscreen -- enough for the Gizmodo boys to gloat that it "eats the [Amazon] Kindle's lunch." But the Barnes and Noble e-reader has another especially interesting twist: Book lending.
Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader, expected to be unveiled on Tuesday at a news conference in Manhattan, features Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability for customers to lend out e-books for 14 days at a time.
This is obviously great for consumers (provided they have a e-reader). Maybe Barnes & Noble's calculus is that the ability to share will encourage more people to buy books because it increases the books' utility. For example, I'm somewhat interested in buying sports writer Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball, but I might be more interested if I knew that I could lend the book to all my friends who read Simmons on ESPN every week so that we could talk about it later. This dream assumes, of course, that e-readers become as common as iPods. We're not there yet, but this explosion of e-readers from Amazon, B&N, Sony and others suggest that somebody smells a market waiting to blow up.
Permalink :: Comments (1) :: TrackBacks (0) :: Share This
No Trackbacks
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://business.theatlantic.com/mt-42/mt-tb.cgi/16596
Comments (1)
Brock C. October 20, 2009 9:55 PM
Derek, you misunderstand how the Nook's lending works. The eBooks B&N is selling can be read on any PC, Mac, iPhone or iPod Touch, not just the Nook; so the universe of people you can lend books too just got a lot bigger.
I also think the most interesting part of the lending thing is that B&N clearly got the publishers and authors' guild to agree to some sort of DRM scheme, otherwise how can the 14 day limit be enforced? What is the limit of this DRM scheme? Can they delete books from the Nook just like Amazon deleted 1984 from the Kindle? What happens if B&N's DRM server goes offline? Can you still read your books?
Are People Reading More Because of eBook Readers?
Good question. An open question as far as I'm concerned. This might be a good research area.
Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times
Shayna Englin, left, and Nikki Enfield compare reading lists. Ms. Englin bought a Kindle and said she reads more than ever.
Readers' Comments
Are you reading more because of e-books?
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (3) »
Sales are down this year, despite prominent books by Dan Brown and Edward M. Kennedy. Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in a war for e-commerce dominance, creating new worries among publishers and authors about dwindling profits.
But amid the gloom, some sellers and owners of electronic reading devices are making the case that people are reading more because of e-books.
Amazon for example, says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December 2008. So a reader who had previously bought eight books from Amazon would now purchase, on average, 24.8 books, a rise from 21.6 books.
“You are going to see very significant industry growth rates as a result of the convenience of this kind of reading,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.
Sony, maker of the Reader family of devices, says that its e-book customers, on average, download about eight books a month from its online library. That is far more than the approximately 6.7 books than the average American book buyer purchased for the entire year in 2008, according to Bowker, a publishing industry tracking firm.
The e-reader market also has a new competitor, the Nook, introduced by Barnes & Noble on Tuesday. It will sell for $259.
The book-buying numbers at Amazon and Sony may not by themselves indicate a new interest in reading. Owners of Kindles may be shifting all their book purchases to Amazon. Owners of e-book devices tend to be among the most passionate book buyers, so their behavior may not be reflective of the overall market.
Even so, fans of the reading devices suggest that the convenience of using these products, which offer a sense of control and customization that consumers have come to expect from all their media gadgets, has created a greater interest in books.
Patti Howard is among the converted. “It’s been a long time since I felt this way about books,” said Ms. Howard, a medical transcriptionist from Birmingham, Ala., who for years confined her book reading to 10 minutes before bed until she got an Amazon Kindle in August.
Ms. Howard now buys books any time she wants. She recently downloaded a fantasy novel at 2:30 a.m., immediately after finishing the previous book in a series. She reads during her snippets of daily downtime, like during the wait to pick up her 9-year-old son from school. Her new reading pace is one novel a week.
Other fans praise the benefits of e-book devices. The Kindle and Sony Reader, with their gray-and-white screens and adjustable type sizes, offer a satisfying experience with few of the distractions of other technologies.
Multiple books can also be carried in a slender device, so a reader can easily switch from Kate Morton’s “The Forgotten Garden” to Blake Bailey’s “Cheever: A Life.”
E-books can also be bought quickly and from any location, with one or two clicks on devices like the Kindle and the Nook, which use wireless networks to download books.
Brandon Watson, a researcher at Microsoft and the father of three, says he has gone from reading about a book a month to recently polishing off a book the size of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” every weekend.
He is taken by the ease of one-handed reading on the Kindle. Last month he bought the digital version of “The Bourne Identity,” even though he had the actual 500-page book in his home, because “for whatever reason, it feels cumbersome to read,” he said.
That point resonates with Candy Yates, a loan officer assistant in Newland, N.C. Ms. Yates owns a computer, a BlackBerry, and an iPod Touch and calls herself a “gadget person.” She says that paper books just feel strange to her, even though she was an avid reader as a child.
The nearest bookstore is also 30 miles away in Boone, and the collection at the local library does not interest her, she said. The Kindle cannot pick up a wireless signal in her home town, but she can plug it into her PC and buy books online.
Such testimonials do not persuade everyone. Many book publishing executives say that e-book sellers like Amazon have a strong interest in heralding a new age of reading, because they must persuade skeptical publishers that a higher sales volume of e-books will offset the eventual loss of profit if the most popular digital editions continue to be sold for $9.99. For now, sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble subsidize that price.
Some publishers are also not quite willing to accept the notion that books can make a mainstream resurgence.
“Given the fact that people now have the Internet, almost 24-hour football entertainment in the fall, tennis matches from around the world, TV shows out the wazoo, and movies, do you really believe that people are going to be reading more because they can get it on a screen?” said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, owner of imprints like Farrar, Straus and Giroux and St. Martin’s Press. “I don’t see the scenario.”
The music industry, which stumbled badly during its transition to digital formats, also offers lessons. E-book piracy does not yet constitute a major problem in the United States, but there are warning signs.
Shayna Englin, a political consultant in Washington who purchased a Kindle this year, also says she reads more than ever: a book a week, about three times her old pace.
But she has actually never paid for an e-book. Exploiting a loophole in Amazon’s system, Ms. Englin has linked her Kindle to the Amazon account of some nearby friends, allowing all of them to read books like “The Lost Symbol” at the same time — while paying for them only once.
“I read much more, I tend to read faster for some reason, and I read a greater variety of things,” said Ms. Englin, adding that this is nearly the same as lending a physical book to friends. “We haven’t really looked closely at Amazon’s terms of service. But I do suspect we are breaking the rules.”
Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times
Shayna Englin, left, and Nikki Enfield compare reading lists. Ms. Englin bought a Kindle and said she reads more than ever.
Readers' Comments
Are you reading more because of e-books?
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (3) »
Sales are down this year, despite prominent books by Dan Brown and Edward M. Kennedy. Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in a war for e-commerce dominance, creating new worries among publishers and authors about dwindling profits.
But amid the gloom, some sellers and owners of electronic reading devices are making the case that people are reading more because of e-books.
Amazon for example, says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December 2008. So a reader who had previously bought eight books from Amazon would now purchase, on average, 24.8 books, a rise from 21.6 books.
“You are going to see very significant industry growth rates as a result of the convenience of this kind of reading,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.
Sony, maker of the Reader family of devices, says that its e-book customers, on average, download about eight books a month from its online library. That is far more than the approximately 6.7 books than the average American book buyer purchased for the entire year in 2008, according to Bowker, a publishing industry tracking firm.
The e-reader market also has a new competitor, the Nook, introduced by Barnes & Noble on Tuesday. It will sell for $259.
The book-buying numbers at Amazon and Sony may not by themselves indicate a new interest in reading. Owners of Kindles may be shifting all their book purchases to Amazon. Owners of e-book devices tend to be among the most passionate book buyers, so their behavior may not be reflective of the overall market.
Even so, fans of the reading devices suggest that the convenience of using these products, which offer a sense of control and customization that consumers have come to expect from all their media gadgets, has created a greater interest in books.
Patti Howard is among the converted. “It’s been a long time since I felt this way about books,” said Ms. Howard, a medical transcriptionist from Birmingham, Ala., who for years confined her book reading to 10 minutes before bed until she got an Amazon Kindle in August.
Ms. Howard now buys books any time she wants. She recently downloaded a fantasy novel at 2:30 a.m., immediately after finishing the previous book in a series. She reads during her snippets of daily downtime, like during the wait to pick up her 9-year-old son from school. Her new reading pace is one novel a week.
Other fans praise the benefits of e-book devices. The Kindle and Sony Reader, with their gray-and-white screens and adjustable type sizes, offer a satisfying experience with few of the distractions of other technologies.
Multiple books can also be carried in a slender device, so a reader can easily switch from Kate Morton’s “The Forgotten Garden” to Blake Bailey’s “Cheever: A Life.”
E-books can also be bought quickly and from any location, with one or two clicks on devices like the Kindle and the Nook, which use wireless networks to download books.
Brandon Watson, a researcher at Microsoft and the father of three, says he has gone from reading about a book a month to recently polishing off a book the size of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” every weekend.
He is taken by the ease of one-handed reading on the Kindle. Last month he bought the digital version of “The Bourne Identity,” even though he had the actual 500-page book in his home, because “for whatever reason, it feels cumbersome to read,” he said.
That point resonates with Candy Yates, a loan officer assistant in Newland, N.C. Ms. Yates owns a computer, a BlackBerry, and an iPod Touch and calls herself a “gadget person.” She says that paper books just feel strange to her, even though she was an avid reader as a child.
The nearest bookstore is also 30 miles away in Boone, and the collection at the local library does not interest her, she said. The Kindle cannot pick up a wireless signal in her home town, but she can plug it into her PC and buy books online.
Such testimonials do not persuade everyone. Many book publishing executives say that e-book sellers like Amazon have a strong interest in heralding a new age of reading, because they must persuade skeptical publishers that a higher sales volume of e-books will offset the eventual loss of profit if the most popular digital editions continue to be sold for $9.99. For now, sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble subsidize that price.
Some publishers are also not quite willing to accept the notion that books can make a mainstream resurgence.
“Given the fact that people now have the Internet, almost 24-hour football entertainment in the fall, tennis matches from around the world, TV shows out the wazoo, and movies, do you really believe that people are going to be reading more because they can get it on a screen?” said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, owner of imprints like Farrar, Straus and Giroux and St. Martin’s Press. “I don’t see the scenario.”
The music industry, which stumbled badly during its transition to digital formats, also offers lessons. E-book piracy does not yet constitute a major problem in the United States, but there are warning signs.
Shayna Englin, a political consultant in Washington who purchased a Kindle this year, also says she reads more than ever: a book a week, about three times her old pace.
But she has actually never paid for an e-book. Exploiting a loophole in Amazon’s system, Ms. Englin has linked her Kindle to the Amazon account of some nearby friends, allowing all of them to read books like “The Lost Symbol” at the same time — while paying for them only once.
“I read much more, I tend to read faster for some reason, and I read a greater variety of things,” said Ms. Englin, adding that this is nearly the same as lending a physical book to friends. “We haven’t really looked closely at Amazon’s terms of service. But I do suspect we are breaking the rules.”
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Republican Identity at Low Ebb
Washington Post/ABC Poll: Only 20% Identify As Republicans, Lowest Since 1983
digg Huffpost - Post Poll: Only 20% Identify As Republicans, Lowest Since 1983 stumble reddit del.ico.us ShareThisThe Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner
First Posted: 10-20-09 09:18 AM
Share Print CommentsReporting on the new ABC/Washington Post poll has mostly focused on support for a public health care option. But the poll also shows that, while Republicans have succeeded in stonewalling Democratic initiatives in Congress, they have not managed to rebuild their party.
Only 20 percent of respondents identified themselves as Republicans -- the lowest number since 1983.
"These numbers, coming roughly one year before the 2010 midterm elections, show that any celebration on the GOP's behalf is premature as the party has yet to convince most voters that it can be a viable alternative to Democratic control in Washington today," wrote Chris Cillizza.
George Stephanopoulos adds:
Only 19% trust Republicans in Congress to make the right decisions for the country's future -- compared to 49% trust in Obama. In addition, President Obama outpaces his fellow Democrats on the Hill -- by 15 points -- in this measure, providing some ammunition to the perpetual White House argument to Democratic members that their political success is inextricably linked to the president's. And unlike other recent polls, ABC-Post give Democrats a 51-39 edge in the generic Congressional ballot.
Of course, the poll also has some troubling news for President Obama. Among Democrats, strong approval of the president's handling of health care has dropped 15 percentage points since mid-September.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/20/fewer-people-identify-as_n_326971.html
digg Huffpost - Post Poll: Only 20% Identify As Republicans, Lowest Since 1983 stumble reddit del.ico.us ShareThisThe Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner
First Posted: 10-20-09 09:18 AM
Share Print CommentsReporting on the new ABC/Washington Post poll has mostly focused on support for a public health care option. But the poll also shows that, while Republicans have succeeded in stonewalling Democratic initiatives in Congress, they have not managed to rebuild their party.
Only 20 percent of respondents identified themselves as Republicans -- the lowest number since 1983.
"These numbers, coming roughly one year before the 2010 midterm elections, show that any celebration on the GOP's behalf is premature as the party has yet to convince most voters that it can be a viable alternative to Democratic control in Washington today," wrote Chris Cillizza.
George Stephanopoulos adds:
Only 19% trust Republicans in Congress to make the right decisions for the country's future -- compared to 49% trust in Obama. In addition, President Obama outpaces his fellow Democrats on the Hill -- by 15 points -- in this measure, providing some ammunition to the perpetual White House argument to Democratic members that their political success is inextricably linked to the president's. And unlike other recent polls, ABC-Post give Democrats a 51-39 edge in the generic Congressional ballot.
Of course, the poll also has some troubling news for President Obama. Among Democrats, strong approval of the president's handling of health care has dropped 15 percentage points since mid-September.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/20/fewer-people-identify-as_n_326971.html
Monday, October 19, 2009
Are College Students Adept at Online Searching
a librarian rants
Here:
No sooner do I bristle at the college rankings and decide to ignore them for another year, than along comes the Beloit College Mindset List, guaranteed to make me feel both antediluvian and out of touch with the new clientele. Ouch!, I thought, when I saw item #4 for the Class of 2013: “[Students born in 1991] have never used a card catalog to find a book.” Now that hits home. It’s not the obsolescence that disturbs me—although I’m emotionally attached to anything that measures 3-by-5 inches — but my suspicion: have college freshmen used anything to find a book?
I don’t doubt young students are all literate to some degree (we’ll discuss their writing ability another time) and that they have all read books, but I seriously question where and how they get hold of them. Are they required texts they purchase at a bookstore, or more likely via Amazon? Are they volumes they find at home or receive as gifts? Do they browse shelves in their school or public library, a big box store, used-book shop, or flea market? Do they download a novel to their Kindle? I’m completely in favor of all those tactics, but my experience as a reference librarian tells me that most freshmen and many older students cannot search an online catalog fluently and don’t know how to proceed when they do spot a book they want.
It’s probably true that most students can’t “search an online catalog fluently” — hell, I can’t search an online catalog fluently, largely because library search software is, in my experience, uniformly terrible. I’m always restricting my search more narrowly than I mean to, or opening it up too wide. (For instance, again and again I enter exact titles of book I know are in a library and get no results.) Fifteen years ago I used to telnet into library catalogues and find everything I wanted; now it’s a crapshoot.
But wait, that’s my rant. Back to the librarian . . .
Is it really true that when students find a book in an online catalogue — I still prefer than old spelling — they don't know what to do next? I know high school and college students have poor research skills, but you’re telling me that they don't know how to jot down a reference number and find the book on the shelf? That I find rather hard to believe.
(Also, I don't think too many college students are using Kindles. Am I wrong about that?)
Posted by Alan Jacobs at 5:19 AM 2 comments
Labels: Libraries, research
Here:
No sooner do I bristle at the college rankings and decide to ignore them for another year, than along comes the Beloit College Mindset List, guaranteed to make me feel both antediluvian and out of touch with the new clientele. Ouch!, I thought, when I saw item #4 for the Class of 2013: “[Students born in 1991] have never used a card catalog to find a book.” Now that hits home. It’s not the obsolescence that disturbs me—although I’m emotionally attached to anything that measures 3-by-5 inches — but my suspicion: have college freshmen used anything to find a book?
I don’t doubt young students are all literate to some degree (we’ll discuss their writing ability another time) and that they have all read books, but I seriously question where and how they get hold of them. Are they required texts they purchase at a bookstore, or more likely via Amazon? Are they volumes they find at home or receive as gifts? Do they browse shelves in their school or public library, a big box store, used-book shop, or flea market? Do they download a novel to their Kindle? I’m completely in favor of all those tactics, but my experience as a reference librarian tells me that most freshmen and many older students cannot search an online catalog fluently and don’t know how to proceed when they do spot a book they want.
It’s probably true that most students can’t “search an online catalog fluently” — hell, I can’t search an online catalog fluently, largely because library search software is, in my experience, uniformly terrible. I’m always restricting my search more narrowly than I mean to, or opening it up too wide. (For instance, again and again I enter exact titles of book I know are in a library and get no results.) Fifteen years ago I used to telnet into library catalogues and find everything I wanted; now it’s a crapshoot.
But wait, that’s my rant. Back to the librarian . . .
Is it really true that when students find a book in an online catalogue — I still prefer than old spelling — they don't know what to do next? I know high school and college students have poor research skills, but you’re telling me that they don't know how to jot down a reference number and find the book on the shelf? That I find rather hard to believe.
(Also, I don't think too many college students are using Kindles. Am I wrong about that?)
Posted by Alan Jacobs at 5:19 AM 2 comments
Labels: Libraries, research
Sunday, October 18, 2009
What the Blogosphere Can do
I am the dabbler in many topics.
18 Oct 2009 12:59 pm
Smart People Are Doing Wonderful Things
Tyler Cowen:
[A] way the Web has affected the human attention span is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without at the same time losing touch with the world around you. Some critics don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specialized stories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those who argue that the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in an endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The reality is that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helps specialists keep in touch with general trends.
He also explores how blogging accelerates learning.
18 Oct 2009 12:59 pm
Smart People Are Doing Wonderful Things
Tyler Cowen:
[A] way the Web has affected the human attention span is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without at the same time losing touch with the world around you. Some critics don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specialized stories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those who argue that the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in an endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The reality is that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helps specialists keep in touch with general trends.
He also explores how blogging accelerates learning.
Does the Brain Like eBooks?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 14, 2009 , 6:24 pm
Does the Brain Like E-Books?
By The Editors
Writing and reading — from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines — are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones. Traditional book publishers are putting out “vooks,” which place videos in electronic text that can be read online or on an iPhone. Others are republishing old books in electronic form. And libraries, responding to demand, are offering more e-books for download.
Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?
Alan Liu, English professor
Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
David Gelernter, computer scientist
Gloria Mark, professor of informatics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A New Metaphor for Reading
Alan Liu is chairman and professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he researches the relation between literature and information culture. He is head of the Transliteracies U.C. Multi-Campus Research Group on online reading practices and technologies.
Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment.
Current forms of digital media behave nothing like ‘books’ or ‘libraries,’ and cause users to swing between two kinds of bad reading.
Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.
My research group on online reading (the University of California Transliteracies Project) has come to realize that we need a whole new guiding metaphor. So many of today’s commercial, academic and open-source reading environments are governed by metaphors of what I call “containing structures.”
Read more…
For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.” Such structures are supposed to make intuitive the relation between individual documents and other documents. But, frankly, many of those structures didn’t work too well even in the golden age of print.
(Show me one person who has made a serendipitous discovery while wandering the library stacks, and I will show you a thousand whose eyes glazed over at the sheer anomie, inefficiency, and meaninglessness of it all.) They especially don’t work well now when stretched to describe online technologies that actually behave nothing like a book, edition, library and so on.
My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate.
The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Test of Character
Sandra Aamodt is a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience. She is co-author of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”
Electronic reading has become progressively easier as computer screens have improved and readers have grown accustomed to using them. Still, people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Fifteen or 20 years ago, electronic reading also impaired comprehension compared to paper, but those differences have faded in recent studies.
Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.
Reading on screen requires slightly more effort and thus is more tiring, but the differences are small and probably matter only for difficult tasks. Paper retains substantial advantages, though, for types of reading that require flipping back and forth between pages, such as articles with end notes or figures.
To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character. Distractions abound on most people’s computer screens. The reading speed reported in academic studies does not include delays induced by clicking away from the text to see the new email that just arrived or check out what’s new on your favorite blog. In one study, workers switched tasks about every three minutes and took over 23 minutes on average to return to a task. Frequent task switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read.
Read more…
Electronic book readers like the Amazon Kindle share characteristics with both paper and computers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people may read as quickly on electronic readers as they do on paper. The screen technology, electronic ink, avoids some disadvantages of monitors, such as backlighting and flicker, but it remains awkward to scan through multiple pages.
Electronic readers can be held in a comfortable position, but their contrast is closer to that of a newspaper than to black-on-white print, and illustrations tend to have poor resolution. As technology continues to improve, we can probably expect to see electronic reading become as useful as paper for most purposes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beyond Decoding Words
Maryanne Wolf is the John DiBiaggio Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”
After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read. We learn to do so by an extraordinarily ingenuous ability to rearrange our “original parts” — like language and vision, both of which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion within any nurturant environment. Reading isn’t like that.
Franka Bruns/Associated Press
Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit” afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity.
Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online reading, book, etc) emphasizes.
And that, of course, is the problem at hand. No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain. We do know a great deal, however, about the formation of what we know as the expert reading brain that most of us possess to this point in history.
Read more…
In brief, this brain learns to access and integrate within 300 milliseconds a vast array of visual, semantic, sound (or phonological), and conceptual processes, which allows us to decode and begin to comprehend a word. At that point, for most of us our circuit is automatic enough to allocate an additional precious 100 to 200 milliseconds to an even more sophisticated set of comprehension processes that allow us to connect the decoded words to inference, analogical reasoning, critical analysis, contextual knowledge, and finally, the apex of reading: our own thoughts that go beyond the text.
This is what Proust called the heart of reading — when we go beyond the author’s wisdom and enter the beginning of our own.
I have no doubt that the new mediums will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.
For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).
The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
We can learn a great deal from a similar transition that the ancient Greeks made from orality (Socrates) to literacy (Aristotle). Socrates worried that the young would be deluded by the appearance of truth in seemingly impermeable text to think that they knew something before they had ever begun.
The habitual reader Aristotle worried about the three lives of the “good society”: the first life is the life of productivity and knowledge gathering; the second, the life of entertainment; and the third, the life of reflection and contemplation.
For me the formation of the “good reader” follows a similar course. I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one’s own thoughts and going beyond what is given. Let us bring our best thought and research to preserving what is most precious about the present reading brain as we add the new capacities of its next iteration.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Book Made Better
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, is the author of “Judaism: A Way of Being,” which will be published in November. In a recent conversation at Edge.org he discusses his role in the invention of lifestreaming and “the cloud” in computing.
All reading is not migrating to computer screens. So long as books are cheap, tough, easy to “read” from outside (What kind of book is this? How long is it? Is this the one I was reading last week? Let’s flip to the pictures), easy to mark up, rated for safe operation from beaches to polar wastes and — above all — beautiful, they will remain the best of all word-delivery vehicles.
Technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa.
I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.
Of course, onscreen text will change and improve. But the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens but on the brilliance of the traditional book — sheets bound on end, the “codex” — which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years. Technologists have (as usual) decreed its disappearance without bothering to understand it. They make the same mistake clever planners have made for half a century in forecasting the death of cars and their replacement by spiffier technology. The problem is, people like cars.
Read more…
The most important ongoing change to reading itself in today’s online environment is the cheapening of the word. In teaching college students to write, I tell them (as teachers always have) to make every word count, to linger on each phrase until it is right, to listen to the sound of each sentence.
But these ideas seem increasingly bizarre in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles.
Of course there are great stylists writing in English today (take John Banville or Martin Amis). Of course, word processors could be the best thing that ever happened to prose, and “cloud” computing will soon offer readers the chance to consult any text in any library anywhere.
The tools (as usual) are neutral. It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Effects of Perpetual Distraction
Gloria Mark is a professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. She studies human-computer interaction.
When PC’s first entered the home in the 1980s, a number of studies comparing the effects of reading on an electronic display versus paper showed that reading was slower on a screen. However, displays have vastly improved since then, and now with high resolution monitors reading speed is no different than reading from paper.
When online, people switch activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes.
So what is different? It is not just a matter of comparing reaction times or reading comprehension; it’s the entire experience. Reading a Google book enables the reader to search for words or passages throughout the text. It’s effortless to skip to a juicy section or to go back and reread a memorable part. Contrast how long it takes to skim to a particular passage in a paper book, unless of course it is bookmarked or the page corner is bent.
Hypertext offers loads of advantages. If while reading online you come across the name “Antaeus” and forget your Greek mythology, a hyperlink will take you directly to an online source where you are reminded that he was the Libyan giant who fought Hercules. And if you’re prone to distraction, you can follow another link to find out his lineage, and on and on. That is the duality of hyperlinks. A hyperlink brings you to information faster but is also more of a distraction.
October 14, 2009 , 6:24 pm
Does the Brain Like E-Books?
By The Editors
Writing and reading — from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines — are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones. Traditional book publishers are putting out “vooks,” which place videos in electronic text that can be read online or on an iPhone. Others are republishing old books in electronic form. And libraries, responding to demand, are offering more e-books for download.
Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?
Alan Liu, English professor
Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
David Gelernter, computer scientist
Gloria Mark, professor of informatics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A New Metaphor for Reading
Alan Liu is chairman and professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he researches the relation between literature and information culture. He is head of the Transliteracies U.C. Multi-Campus Research Group on online reading practices and technologies.
Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment.
Current forms of digital media behave nothing like ‘books’ or ‘libraries,’ and cause users to swing between two kinds of bad reading.
Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.
My research group on online reading (the University of California Transliteracies Project) has come to realize that we need a whole new guiding metaphor. So many of today’s commercial, academic and open-source reading environments are governed by metaphors of what I call “containing structures.”
Read more…
For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.” Such structures are supposed to make intuitive the relation between individual documents and other documents. But, frankly, many of those structures didn’t work too well even in the golden age of print.
(Show me one person who has made a serendipitous discovery while wandering the library stacks, and I will show you a thousand whose eyes glazed over at the sheer anomie, inefficiency, and meaninglessness of it all.) They especially don’t work well now when stretched to describe online technologies that actually behave nothing like a book, edition, library and so on.
My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate.
The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Test of Character
Sandra Aamodt is a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience. She is co-author of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”
Electronic reading has become progressively easier as computer screens have improved and readers have grown accustomed to using them. Still, people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Fifteen or 20 years ago, electronic reading also impaired comprehension compared to paper, but those differences have faded in recent studies.
Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.
Reading on screen requires slightly more effort and thus is more tiring, but the differences are small and probably matter only for difficult tasks. Paper retains substantial advantages, though, for types of reading that require flipping back and forth between pages, such as articles with end notes or figures.
To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character. Distractions abound on most people’s computer screens. The reading speed reported in academic studies does not include delays induced by clicking away from the text to see the new email that just arrived or check out what’s new on your favorite blog. In one study, workers switched tasks about every three minutes and took over 23 minutes on average to return to a task. Frequent task switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read.
Read more…
Electronic book readers like the Amazon Kindle share characteristics with both paper and computers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people may read as quickly on electronic readers as they do on paper. The screen technology, electronic ink, avoids some disadvantages of monitors, such as backlighting and flicker, but it remains awkward to scan through multiple pages.
Electronic readers can be held in a comfortable position, but their contrast is closer to that of a newspaper than to black-on-white print, and illustrations tend to have poor resolution. As technology continues to improve, we can probably expect to see electronic reading become as useful as paper for most purposes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beyond Decoding Words
Maryanne Wolf is the John DiBiaggio Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”
After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read. We learn to do so by an extraordinarily ingenuous ability to rearrange our “original parts” — like language and vision, both of which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion within any nurturant environment. Reading isn’t like that.
Franka Bruns/Associated Press
Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit” afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity.
Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online reading, book, etc) emphasizes.
And that, of course, is the problem at hand. No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain. We do know a great deal, however, about the formation of what we know as the expert reading brain that most of us possess to this point in history.
Read more…
In brief, this brain learns to access and integrate within 300 milliseconds a vast array of visual, semantic, sound (or phonological), and conceptual processes, which allows us to decode and begin to comprehend a word. At that point, for most of us our circuit is automatic enough to allocate an additional precious 100 to 200 milliseconds to an even more sophisticated set of comprehension processes that allow us to connect the decoded words to inference, analogical reasoning, critical analysis, contextual knowledge, and finally, the apex of reading: our own thoughts that go beyond the text.
This is what Proust called the heart of reading — when we go beyond the author’s wisdom and enter the beginning of our own.
I have no doubt that the new mediums will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.
For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).
The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
We can learn a great deal from a similar transition that the ancient Greeks made from orality (Socrates) to literacy (Aristotle). Socrates worried that the young would be deluded by the appearance of truth in seemingly impermeable text to think that they knew something before they had ever begun.
The habitual reader Aristotle worried about the three lives of the “good society”: the first life is the life of productivity and knowledge gathering; the second, the life of entertainment; and the third, the life of reflection and contemplation.
For me the formation of the “good reader” follows a similar course. I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one’s own thoughts and going beyond what is given. Let us bring our best thought and research to preserving what is most precious about the present reading brain as we add the new capacities of its next iteration.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Book Made Better
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, is the author of “Judaism: A Way of Being,” which will be published in November. In a recent conversation at Edge.org he discusses his role in the invention of lifestreaming and “the cloud” in computing.
All reading is not migrating to computer screens. So long as books are cheap, tough, easy to “read” from outside (What kind of book is this? How long is it? Is this the one I was reading last week? Let’s flip to the pictures), easy to mark up, rated for safe operation from beaches to polar wastes and — above all — beautiful, they will remain the best of all word-delivery vehicles.
Technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa.
I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.
Of course, onscreen text will change and improve. But the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens but on the brilliance of the traditional book — sheets bound on end, the “codex” — which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years. Technologists have (as usual) decreed its disappearance without bothering to understand it. They make the same mistake clever planners have made for half a century in forecasting the death of cars and their replacement by spiffier technology. The problem is, people like cars.
Read more…
The most important ongoing change to reading itself in today’s online environment is the cheapening of the word. In teaching college students to write, I tell them (as teachers always have) to make every word count, to linger on each phrase until it is right, to listen to the sound of each sentence.
But these ideas seem increasingly bizarre in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles.
Of course there are great stylists writing in English today (take John Banville or Martin Amis). Of course, word processors could be the best thing that ever happened to prose, and “cloud” computing will soon offer readers the chance to consult any text in any library anywhere.
The tools (as usual) are neutral. It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Effects of Perpetual Distraction
Gloria Mark is a professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. She studies human-computer interaction.
When PC’s first entered the home in the 1980s, a number of studies comparing the effects of reading on an electronic display versus paper showed that reading was slower on a screen. However, displays have vastly improved since then, and now with high resolution monitors reading speed is no different than reading from paper.
When online, people switch activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes.
So what is different? It is not just a matter of comparing reaction times or reading comprehension; it’s the entire experience. Reading a Google book enables the reader to search for words or passages throughout the text. It’s effortless to skip to a juicy section or to go back and reread a memorable part. Contrast how long it takes to skim to a particular passage in a paper book, unless of course it is bookmarked or the page corner is bent.
Hypertext offers loads of advantages. If while reading online you come across the name “Antaeus” and forget your Greek mythology, a hyperlink will take you directly to an online source where you are reminded that he was the Libyan giant who fought Hercules. And if you’re prone to distraction, you can follow another link to find out his lineage, and on and on. That is the duality of hyperlinks. A hyperlink brings you to information faster but is also more of a distraction.
Books, eBooks, and Rewiring our Brains
From The Atlantic
Lane Wallace
The Uncommon Navigator
Oct 16 2009, 2:45AM
Culture / Media
Brains, Books and the Future of Print
Are print books really about to disappear, overtaken like horse-drawn carriages in the age of Detroit and the Ford Model T? Truth is, nobody knows. Nobody ever really knows what the future is going to hold, no matter how sure they sound in their predictions.
Certainly, for all the fuss made about the Kindle, more than 95% of book buyers are still opting for the print version ... except, possibly, in the hot romance and erotic fiction categories. Earlier this year, Peter Smith, of IT World, noted that "of the top 10 bestsellers under the 'Multiformat' category [of Fictionwise ebooks sold], nine are tagged 'erotica' and the last is 'dark fantasy.'"
That's only one list, but it's an interesting side-note that makes sense: just as with the internet and cable television, there's a particularly strong appeal to getting access to what Smith calls "salacious" content without having to face the check-out clerk with the goods in hand.
Nevertheless, the point remains that a greater number of readers are switching over to ebooks in one format or another. So beyond the basic question of "will print books go away" (which I personally doubt, but again, nobody really knows the answer to), the questions I find more intriguing relate to if or how digital reading changes the reading experience and, perhaps, even the brains that do the reading.
Electronic readers like Kindle are too recent a development to have generated much specific, targeted research yet. But a montage of essays titled "Does the Brain Like Ebooks?" that appeared on the New York Times website this week offered some fascinating information and viewpoints on the subject. The collection had contributions from experts in English, neuroscience, child development, computer technology and informatics. And while the viewpoints differed, there was some general consensus about a few points:
1. Clearly, there are differences in the two reading experiences. There are things electronic books do better (access to new books in remote areas of the world, less lugging around, and easier searching for quotes or information after the fact). There are also things print books do better (footnote reading, the ability to focus solely on the text at hand, far away from any electronic distraction, and--oh, yeah. No battery or electronic glitch issues.)
To those factors, I would add two more: First -- I think it's important to remember that Kindle doesn't actually give you a book. It gives you access to a book. For people who don't want to cart around old volumes or make multiple trips to the library, that might be considered a good thing. But at least one potential downside to this feature became painfully clear to many Kindle readers this summer when Amazon reached into its customers' Kindle libraries and took back two books for which the company realized it did not possess the copyright. Ironically, the books were by George Orwell -- including 1984, his book about the perils of centralized information control. Access goes both ways.
Second ... one of the writers of the Times essays, Prof. Alan Liu at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that he didn't think anyone really made serendipitous discoveries while browsing the shelves of a physical library (so losing a physical library wouldn't be a loss, at least in that sense). Perhaps not, because most people go to libraries with specific search goals in mind. But bookstores, on the other hand ... there I'd disagree. I often browse the aisles of my local bookstores, just to see what's new and what might catch my eye. Most of the books I buy, in fact, are items I discovered while browsing ... something that, ironically, electronic "browsers" do not allow.
Browsing, to my way of thinking, is what I do in Filene's Bargain Basement. The clothes there are a jumbled mass. So even if you go in looking, potentially, for a shirt, you might end up with a pair of slacks that just happened to be hanging nearby. Same with a bookstore. Same, in fact, with the print version of the New York Times I get every morning. I scan the pages just seeing what might catch my eye to read. Sometimes it's a photo that catches my eye, sometimes it's a leading paragraph, sometimes it's a headline, and sometimes it's a callout. Or, sometimes, I'll be reading one article and another on that same page will catch my attention--one I never would have sought out on my own. And my knowledge and understanding of the world is far better and broader for all those serendipitous juxtapositions.
Electronic media and browsers have many good qualities, but they're lousy for that kind of unspecific window shopping. Browsers don't browse. They help you do specific searches. Looking for a black coat, or that article Sam Smith wrote two months ago on synthetic sneaker soles? The internet is great. Not sure what you want? Heaven help you. So to lose physical collections of books, either in stores or on individual bookshelves, would make it harder to make those delightful side discoveries that take us out of our narrow fields of focus and interest and, potentially, broaden our minds.
2. In the case of adults, we probably process information similarly in both electronic and print formats ... with two important distinctions. The first distinction is that electronic books, with hyperlinks and connections to a world web of side-roads, offer far more distractions to the reader. In doing a research paper, this can be useful. But it also offers temptations to divert our attention from a deeper immersion in a story or text that our brains are poorly equipped to resist. (Apparently we change tasks, on average, every three minutes when working in an internet-connected environment.)
"Frequent task-switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read," cautioned Sandra Aamodt, the former editor of Nature Neuroscience and another of the Times essayists.
The second feature of electronic reading, which may compound this first effect, is that there is evidently something about an electronic medium, with its "percentage done" scale and electronic noises or gizmos, that makes us crave and focus on those rewards. Which is probably why electronic games are more addictive than board games. After a couple of rounds of solitaire with real cards, I'm done and ready to move on to something else. But I removed the solitaire software from my computer almost 20 years ago when I realized that I couldn't seem to tear myself away from it, once I started playing.
Is our comprehension and, more importantly, what Proust apparently called "the heart of reading"--"when we go beyond the author's wisdom and enter the beginning of our own," as one of the essayists, put it, impacted by a heightened drive to make progress through a text? If so, that would be a bad thing. So it seems a point worth studying further.
3. Most adults, however, at least have the ability to process longer and deeper contemplative thoughts from what we read, even if we don't always exercise that ability. But according to Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and child development specialist at Tufts University, that ability to focus attention deeply and for a concerted length of time is learned, not innate. Children apparently have to develop neural pathways and circuits for reading, and those circuits are affected by the demands of the reading material. Chinese children learning a more symbolic and visual language, for instance, develop different circuits than English-speaking children.
So electronic reading ... especially with hyperlinks and video embeds and other potential distractions, could potentially keep young readers from developing some important circuits. As Wolf put it in her essay:
"My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps videos (in the new vooks). The child's imagination and children's nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. the attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."
Interesting enough, the one computer scientist in the group was of the opinion that the best use of electronic books and capabilities was to enhance print books, not to replace them. But it's all interesting food for thought ... and, hopefully, more research as electronic readers find their way into more households and hands.
(Photo: Flickr/oskay)
Permalink :: Comments (3) :: TrackBacks (0) :: Favorites (0) (Vote) :: Share This
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/mt-42/mt-tb.cgi/16421
Comments (3)
SmithPM October 18, 2009 3:00 AM
This article make some good points. One idea not explicitly mentioned is that publishers are certainly also affected by the temptation to "sex-up" what they publish, with videos, etc. I fear however, that by doing so, they often wind up paying less attention to the text, and ultimately, the ideas, which they are publishing, attracted by the "a picture is worth a thousand words" philosophy.
A case in point is Microsoft's now defunct Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia - I bought one when it first came out, as I was attracted by the idea of being able to effortlessly search such an amount of information, which before Google came along, was attractive to me. I was puzzled even then however by their marketing, which in my opinion gave the impression that the most important part of the whole product were the (dozens of? - I can't remember) multimedia additions. I suspect that too much attention was paid to these in comparison to writing and editing the encyclopedia entries themselves.
Reply
swatbolish October 18, 2009 5:25 AM
It will become a trend.
Cleaner Reviews
Reply
Chris October 18, 2009 7:46 AM
It’s scintillating to think of the possibility to have the entire library of congress in one’s pocket. But, people’s psychology is thus that the mere fact of books being so easily available will somehow make them less valuable. People will browse more and read less. On the other hand books will be able to contain videos and pictures, as well as hyperlinking, etc. A great discussion on the kindle and the future of reading: http://www.pandalous.com/topic/is_the_world_ready_for
Reply
Post a comment
Sign in to comment.
Lane Wallace
The Uncommon Navigator
Oct 16 2009, 2:45AM
Culture / Media
Brains, Books and the Future of Print
Are print books really about to disappear, overtaken like horse-drawn carriages in the age of Detroit and the Ford Model T? Truth is, nobody knows. Nobody ever really knows what the future is going to hold, no matter how sure they sound in their predictions.
Certainly, for all the fuss made about the Kindle, more than 95% of book buyers are still opting for the print version ... except, possibly, in the hot romance and erotic fiction categories. Earlier this year, Peter Smith, of IT World, noted that "of the top 10 bestsellers under the 'Multiformat' category [of Fictionwise ebooks sold], nine are tagged 'erotica' and the last is 'dark fantasy.'"
That's only one list, but it's an interesting side-note that makes sense: just as with the internet and cable television, there's a particularly strong appeal to getting access to what Smith calls "salacious" content without having to face the check-out clerk with the goods in hand.
Nevertheless, the point remains that a greater number of readers are switching over to ebooks in one format or another. So beyond the basic question of "will print books go away" (which I personally doubt, but again, nobody really knows the answer to), the questions I find more intriguing relate to if or how digital reading changes the reading experience and, perhaps, even the brains that do the reading.
Electronic readers like Kindle are too recent a development to have generated much specific, targeted research yet. But a montage of essays titled "Does the Brain Like Ebooks?" that appeared on the New York Times website this week offered some fascinating information and viewpoints on the subject. The collection had contributions from experts in English, neuroscience, child development, computer technology and informatics. And while the viewpoints differed, there was some general consensus about a few points:
1. Clearly, there are differences in the two reading experiences. There are things electronic books do better (access to new books in remote areas of the world, less lugging around, and easier searching for quotes or information after the fact). There are also things print books do better (footnote reading, the ability to focus solely on the text at hand, far away from any electronic distraction, and--oh, yeah. No battery or electronic glitch issues.)
To those factors, I would add two more: First -- I think it's important to remember that Kindle doesn't actually give you a book. It gives you access to a book. For people who don't want to cart around old volumes or make multiple trips to the library, that might be considered a good thing. But at least one potential downside to this feature became painfully clear to many Kindle readers this summer when Amazon reached into its customers' Kindle libraries and took back two books for which the company realized it did not possess the copyright. Ironically, the books were by George Orwell -- including 1984, his book about the perils of centralized information control. Access goes both ways.
Second ... one of the writers of the Times essays, Prof. Alan Liu at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that he didn't think anyone really made serendipitous discoveries while browsing the shelves of a physical library (so losing a physical library wouldn't be a loss, at least in that sense). Perhaps not, because most people go to libraries with specific search goals in mind. But bookstores, on the other hand ... there I'd disagree. I often browse the aisles of my local bookstores, just to see what's new and what might catch my eye. Most of the books I buy, in fact, are items I discovered while browsing ... something that, ironically, electronic "browsers" do not allow.
Browsing, to my way of thinking, is what I do in Filene's Bargain Basement. The clothes there are a jumbled mass. So even if you go in looking, potentially, for a shirt, you might end up with a pair of slacks that just happened to be hanging nearby. Same with a bookstore. Same, in fact, with the print version of the New York Times I get every morning. I scan the pages just seeing what might catch my eye to read. Sometimes it's a photo that catches my eye, sometimes it's a leading paragraph, sometimes it's a headline, and sometimes it's a callout. Or, sometimes, I'll be reading one article and another on that same page will catch my attention--one I never would have sought out on my own. And my knowledge and understanding of the world is far better and broader for all those serendipitous juxtapositions.
Electronic media and browsers have many good qualities, but they're lousy for that kind of unspecific window shopping. Browsers don't browse. They help you do specific searches. Looking for a black coat, or that article Sam Smith wrote two months ago on synthetic sneaker soles? The internet is great. Not sure what you want? Heaven help you. So to lose physical collections of books, either in stores or on individual bookshelves, would make it harder to make those delightful side discoveries that take us out of our narrow fields of focus and interest and, potentially, broaden our minds.
2. In the case of adults, we probably process information similarly in both electronic and print formats ... with two important distinctions. The first distinction is that electronic books, with hyperlinks and connections to a world web of side-roads, offer far more distractions to the reader. In doing a research paper, this can be useful. But it also offers temptations to divert our attention from a deeper immersion in a story or text that our brains are poorly equipped to resist. (Apparently we change tasks, on average, every three minutes when working in an internet-connected environment.)
"Frequent task-switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read," cautioned Sandra Aamodt, the former editor of Nature Neuroscience and another of the Times essayists.
The second feature of electronic reading, which may compound this first effect, is that there is evidently something about an electronic medium, with its "percentage done" scale and electronic noises or gizmos, that makes us crave and focus on those rewards. Which is probably why electronic games are more addictive than board games. After a couple of rounds of solitaire with real cards, I'm done and ready to move on to something else. But I removed the solitaire software from my computer almost 20 years ago when I realized that I couldn't seem to tear myself away from it, once I started playing.
Is our comprehension and, more importantly, what Proust apparently called "the heart of reading"--"when we go beyond the author's wisdom and enter the beginning of our own," as one of the essayists, put it, impacted by a heightened drive to make progress through a text? If so, that would be a bad thing. So it seems a point worth studying further.
3. Most adults, however, at least have the ability to process longer and deeper contemplative thoughts from what we read, even if we don't always exercise that ability. But according to Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and child development specialist at Tufts University, that ability to focus attention deeply and for a concerted length of time is learned, not innate. Children apparently have to develop neural pathways and circuits for reading, and those circuits are affected by the demands of the reading material. Chinese children learning a more symbolic and visual language, for instance, develop different circuits than English-speaking children.
So electronic reading ... especially with hyperlinks and video embeds and other potential distractions, could potentially keep young readers from developing some important circuits. As Wolf put it in her essay:
"My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps videos (in the new vooks). The child's imagination and children's nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. the attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."
Interesting enough, the one computer scientist in the group was of the opinion that the best use of electronic books and capabilities was to enhance print books, not to replace them. But it's all interesting food for thought ... and, hopefully, more research as electronic readers find their way into more households and hands.
(Photo: Flickr/oskay)
Permalink :: Comments (3) :: TrackBacks (0) :: Favorites (0) (Vote) :: Share This
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/mt-42/mt-tb.cgi/16421
Comments (3)
SmithPM October 18, 2009 3:00 AM
This article make some good points. One idea not explicitly mentioned is that publishers are certainly also affected by the temptation to "sex-up" what they publish, with videos, etc. I fear however, that by doing so, they often wind up paying less attention to the text, and ultimately, the ideas, which they are publishing, attracted by the "a picture is worth a thousand words" philosophy.
A case in point is Microsoft's now defunct Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia - I bought one when it first came out, as I was attracted by the idea of being able to effortlessly search such an amount of information, which before Google came along, was attractive to me. I was puzzled even then however by their marketing, which in my opinion gave the impression that the most important part of the whole product were the (dozens of? - I can't remember) multimedia additions. I suspect that too much attention was paid to these in comparison to writing and editing the encyclopedia entries themselves.
Reply
swatbolish October 18, 2009 5:25 AM
It will become a trend.
Cleaner Reviews
Reply
Chris October 18, 2009 7:46 AM
It’s scintillating to think of the possibility to have the entire library of congress in one’s pocket. But, people’s psychology is thus that the mere fact of books being so easily available will somehow make them less valuable. People will browse more and read less. On the other hand books will be able to contain videos and pictures, as well as hyperlinking, etc. A great discussion on the kindle and the future of reading: http://www.pandalous.com/topic/is_the_world_ready_for
Reply
Post a comment
Sign in to comment.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Deranged 20%
Here is a great article from Jonathan Chait on the roughly 20% of the electorate who live in their own world completely divorced from reality---the white, racist, libertarian, entertained by crying Glenn Beck, politically led by "I can see Russia from my house" Palin, part of the electorate that are so loony that I personally find them incomprehensible.
Who You Calling Deranged?
Jonathan Chait
Jonathan Chait
Democracy Corps has a very interesting survey about the worldview of conservative Republicans. The focus group interviews show that the Republican right, which consists of about a fifth of the electorate, is held together by a set of beliefs that goes well beyond small government and traditional values. "Our groups showed that they explicitly believe [Obama] is purposely and ruthlessly executing a hidden agenda to weaken and ultimately destroy the foundations of our country," reports the survey. Conservatives further believe that Obama’s policies are not merely misguided but "purposely designed to fail."
Conservatives pundits tend to be extremely touchy about the subject of right-wing paranoia. In response to a typically measured column by E.J. Dionne early this week ("Middle-income men, especially those who are not college graduates, have borne the brunt of economic change bred by both globalization and technological transformation," he sensibly observed), George W. Bush’s former minister of propaganda, Peter Wehner, exploded at Dionne’s "condescension." Wehner lashed back:
"[D]uring virtually the entire tenure of Obama’s predecessor, E.J. was part of a group, Angry White Men Inc., whose membership included the likes of Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Jonathan Alter, Jonathan Chait, Bill Maher, Michael Moore, and many others. This homogenous crew was, to a person, afflicted with a condition diagnosed as Bush Derangement Syndrome, one that has effects on its victims long after the cause of the condition has left the stage."
Of course, the group mentioned above is not "homogenous" in any rational sense of the word. (It lumps together, among other splits, supporters of the Iraq war with Michael Moore!) The only homogeneity is a strong disapproval of George W. Bush’s presidency. To Wehner, of course, this remains the one salient fact. Wehner is still trying to use the propaganda technique from 2003, acting as if the only people who think Bush did a horrible job as president are wild-eyed left-wing radicals who suffer from some unusual derangement. In reality, by the last few years of the Bush administration, more than half the public strongly disapproved of Bush as president. If "Bush Derangement Syndrome" existed, it afflicted most of America. Those Americans still convinced of Bush’s brilliance long ago dwindled to a tiny remnant. Perhaps they represent the small hardy few who were able to resist B.D.S., but Wehner really ought to stop speaking from the perspective of the majority.
Wehner, hilariously, sneers, "Very few columnists have a degree in psychology. E.J. Dionne is not one of them. He should therefore leave the psychological explanations to others who are better equipped to deal with such matters." This was two paragraphs after diagnosing numerous figures with Bush Derangement Syndrome!
The most interesting conclusion from the Democracy Corps survey is the degree to which the GOP conservative worldview stands completely apart from the rest of America. Conservatives do not have a slightly more radical version of the same beliefs as other Americans. They have a completely sealed-off belief system. Even the most right-leaning independents find the right-wing worldview, with its conspiracies and persecution complex, unrecognizable:
"By comparison, the independent voters expressed clear concerns about Obama – especially that he is doing 'too much, too fast,' that he is spending too much, that they do not understand his health care reforms, and that he does not have a clear plan for bringing jobs back to the US – some of which certainly touched on the conservative Republicans' concerns. But they still fundamentally like and respect him on several levels and are very clearly rooting for him to succeed. …
The Republican base voters are not part of the continuum leading to the center of the electorate: they truly stand apart. For additional perspective, Democracy Corps conducted a parallel set of groups in suburban Cleveland. These groups, comprised of older, white, non-college independents and weak partisans, represent some of the most conservative swing voters in the electorate, and they demonstrated a wholly different worldview from Republican base voters by dismissing the fear of "socialism" and evaluating Obama in very different terms."
Conservatives, giddy at rising public discontent, have repeatedly portrayed a public somehow "waking up" to the reality of Obama that they have seen to clearly all along. But the right remains fundamentally as isolated today as it was in the final dying spasms of the Bush cult.
Who You Calling Deranged?
Jonathan Chait
Jonathan Chait
Democracy Corps has a very interesting survey about the worldview of conservative Republicans. The focus group interviews show that the Republican right, which consists of about a fifth of the electorate, is held together by a set of beliefs that goes well beyond small government and traditional values. "Our groups showed that they explicitly believe [Obama] is purposely and ruthlessly executing a hidden agenda to weaken and ultimately destroy the foundations of our country," reports the survey. Conservatives further believe that Obama’s policies are not merely misguided but "purposely designed to fail."
Conservatives pundits tend to be extremely touchy about the subject of right-wing paranoia. In response to a typically measured column by E.J. Dionne early this week ("Middle-income men, especially those who are not college graduates, have borne the brunt of economic change bred by both globalization and technological transformation," he sensibly observed), George W. Bush’s former minister of propaganda, Peter Wehner, exploded at Dionne’s "condescension." Wehner lashed back:
"[D]uring virtually the entire tenure of Obama’s predecessor, E.J. was part of a group, Angry White Men Inc., whose membership included the likes of Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Jonathan Alter, Jonathan Chait, Bill Maher, Michael Moore, and many others. This homogenous crew was, to a person, afflicted with a condition diagnosed as Bush Derangement Syndrome, one that has effects on its victims long after the cause of the condition has left the stage."
Of course, the group mentioned above is not "homogenous" in any rational sense of the word. (It lumps together, among other splits, supporters of the Iraq war with Michael Moore!) The only homogeneity is a strong disapproval of George W. Bush’s presidency. To Wehner, of course, this remains the one salient fact. Wehner is still trying to use the propaganda technique from 2003, acting as if the only people who think Bush did a horrible job as president are wild-eyed left-wing radicals who suffer from some unusual derangement. In reality, by the last few years of the Bush administration, more than half the public strongly disapproved of Bush as president. If "Bush Derangement Syndrome" existed, it afflicted most of America. Those Americans still convinced of Bush’s brilliance long ago dwindled to a tiny remnant. Perhaps they represent the small hardy few who were able to resist B.D.S., but Wehner really ought to stop speaking from the perspective of the majority.
Wehner, hilariously, sneers, "Very few columnists have a degree in psychology. E.J. Dionne is not one of them. He should therefore leave the psychological explanations to others who are better equipped to deal with such matters." This was two paragraphs after diagnosing numerous figures with Bush Derangement Syndrome!
The most interesting conclusion from the Democracy Corps survey is the degree to which the GOP conservative worldview stands completely apart from the rest of America. Conservatives do not have a slightly more radical version of the same beliefs as other Americans. They have a completely sealed-off belief system. Even the most right-leaning independents find the right-wing worldview, with its conspiracies and persecution complex, unrecognizable:
"By comparison, the independent voters expressed clear concerns about Obama – especially that he is doing 'too much, too fast,' that he is spending too much, that they do not understand his health care reforms, and that he does not have a clear plan for bringing jobs back to the US – some of which certainly touched on the conservative Republicans' concerns. But they still fundamentally like and respect him on several levels and are very clearly rooting for him to succeed. …
The Republican base voters are not part of the continuum leading to the center of the electorate: they truly stand apart. For additional perspective, Democracy Corps conducted a parallel set of groups in suburban Cleveland. These groups, comprised of older, white, non-college independents and weak partisans, represent some of the most conservative swing voters in the electorate, and they demonstrated a wholly different worldview from Republican base voters by dismissing the fear of "socialism" and evaluating Obama in very different terms."
Conservatives, giddy at rising public discontent, have repeatedly portrayed a public somehow "waking up" to the reality of Obama that they have seen to clearly all along. But the right remains fundamentally as isolated today as it was in the final dying spasms of the Bush cult.
Paranormal Activity
Thanks to Fred's post, I went to see this movie last night. I do not like horror genre, so I have not seen many horror movies, but this is probably the best I have seen. Anyone who likes horror should see this movie. As Fred's article explains, there is little gore. The film instead ratchets the dread and suspense. The audience was continually on edge, with shrieks at the scary moments. It gets its potency from showing little: a moving door here, footprints there. But the realism sucks you in, and you feel right there inside the house with Katie and Micah as they encounter the unexplainable.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Palin is the Dividing Line
Forget about Beck and Limbaugh. They are entertainers who are only in it for the ratings to make money. No one with any sense takes their views seriously. Palin is more important. If someone tells me they like Palin, I immediately lose all respect for that person. There's the Palin Line. You're either on one side or the other. I have NO USE for anyone who likes this loony woman.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
If Gobbels were Alive Today
If Joseph Gobbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, were alive today, he'd be working for Fox News. GEORGE ORWELL WOULD LOVE FOX NEWS.
Thursday, Oct 15, 2009
Fox News isn't even pretending anymore
Want proof that journalism has devolved into entertainment? Watch "the communications arm of the Republican Party"
By Gene Lyons
Oct. 15, 2009 In theory, the national news media function in a free market of ideas: a self-regulating, relentless quest for what the old Superman comics called “Truth, Justice, and the American way.” (Actually, Clark Kent’s newspaper-reporter disguise strikes contemporary audiences as a sentimental anachronism. Today, he’d be a rogue cop or a CIA operative.)
In practice, Washington political journalism has become a subdivision of the entertainment industry: its best-known practitioners are second- and third-tier TV stars, and news itself a form of politicized “infotainment.” Even lowly print reporters and pundits can greatly improve their incomes by appearing on programs like “Hardball” and copping an attitude.
Chasing audiences and advertising dollars, corporate media seek to tell target demographics the kinds of stories those audiences want to hear. Nobody who watched CNN cover Michael Jackson’s death 24/7, for example, could imagine otherwise. For weeks at a time, only BBC America provided a halfway reliable window on the outside world — a hell of a note.
The boldest innovator, however, has been Fox News. Since President Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity. Billing itself as “fair and balanced,” Fox has turned itself into what White House communications director Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”
Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” Fox openly promotes “Tea Parties” and other political demonstrations; it portrays every perceived White House defeat, such as Chicago’s failure to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, as a victory for something called “Fox Nation.”
“Obama Triples Budget Deficit to $1.4 Trillion,” reads a typical headline on the Fox Web site. In reality, the Congressional Budget Office projected the fiscal 2009 deficit at $1.2 trillion before Obama took office. Media Matters for America has compiled an encyclopedic list of similar absurdities.
“Doublethink,” Orwell called it: the ability to “hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” So it is with “Fox Nation” and “fair and balanced.”
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, “72 percent of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.”
Almost needless to say, all of these things are categorically false. The “death panels” falsehood, for example, was invented by serial misinformer Betsy McCaughey (financed by the right-wing Manhattan Institute with money from tobacco giant Philip Morris), amplified by Sarah Palin, and then broadcast day and night by Fox News. And so it goes, day after day.
Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” the White House’s Dunn made it clear that the Obama administration intends to deal with the network as a political enemy. “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” she subsequently told The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
As feckless and cowardly as the so-called “mainstream” media have grown in the face of conservative propaganda about “liberal media bias,” this strikes me as very good news. Something like it ought to have been done as long ago as President Clinton’s first term. For the better part of a generation, Democrats have conducted themselves as if they expected Superman himself to come flying in the window to save them.
Instead, they got Clark Kent: timorous poltroons like Newsweek’s former editor Evan Thomas, who last week acknowledged in a book review that “the media’s obsession with Whitewater seem(s) excessive in retrospect.” This 16 years after Jeff Gerth’s incoherent New York Times articles kicked off the longest-running shaggy-dog story in the history of American journalism. So how many cover stories did Newsweek run touting Kenneth Starr’s fruitless investigation
The facts were available back then, but the fearless crusaders of the so-called liberal media mostly played follow-the-leader or ran and hid. For an irreverent take on CNN’s performance, read John Camp’s raucous memoir “Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger.” The veteran investigative correspondent tried to persuade his superiors that Whitewater was a hoax but got nowhere.
Providentially, the Obama administration appears to grasp that Rupert Murdoch’s minions may inadvertently have done them a big favor. By taking sides so brazenly, Fox has gained audience share at the expense of turning itself into a big fat political target. The establishment political press is far too timid and clubby to have made this discovery on its own.
But if the White House says something, they have to cover it.
Thursday, Oct 15, 2009
Fox News isn't even pretending anymore
Want proof that journalism has devolved into entertainment? Watch "the communications arm of the Republican Party"
By Gene Lyons
Oct. 15, 2009 In theory, the national news media function in a free market of ideas: a self-regulating, relentless quest for what the old Superman comics called “Truth, Justice, and the American way.” (Actually, Clark Kent’s newspaper-reporter disguise strikes contemporary audiences as a sentimental anachronism. Today, he’d be a rogue cop or a CIA operative.)
In practice, Washington political journalism has become a subdivision of the entertainment industry: its best-known practitioners are second- and third-tier TV stars, and news itself a form of politicized “infotainment.” Even lowly print reporters and pundits can greatly improve their incomes by appearing on programs like “Hardball” and copping an attitude.
Chasing audiences and advertising dollars, corporate media seek to tell target demographics the kinds of stories those audiences want to hear. Nobody who watched CNN cover Michael Jackson’s death 24/7, for example, could imagine otherwise. For weeks at a time, only BBC America provided a halfway reliable window on the outside world — a hell of a note.
The boldest innovator, however, has been Fox News. Since President Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity. Billing itself as “fair and balanced,” Fox has turned itself into what White House communications director Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”
Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” Fox openly promotes “Tea Parties” and other political demonstrations; it portrays every perceived White House defeat, such as Chicago’s failure to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, as a victory for something called “Fox Nation.”
“Obama Triples Budget Deficit to $1.4 Trillion,” reads a typical headline on the Fox Web site. In reality, the Congressional Budget Office projected the fiscal 2009 deficit at $1.2 trillion before Obama took office. Media Matters for America has compiled an encyclopedic list of similar absurdities.
“Doublethink,” Orwell called it: the ability to “hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” So it is with “Fox Nation” and “fair and balanced.”
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, “72 percent of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.”
Almost needless to say, all of these things are categorically false. The “death panels” falsehood, for example, was invented by serial misinformer Betsy McCaughey (financed by the right-wing Manhattan Institute with money from tobacco giant Philip Morris), amplified by Sarah Palin, and then broadcast day and night by Fox News. And so it goes, day after day.
Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” the White House’s Dunn made it clear that the Obama administration intends to deal with the network as a political enemy. “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” she subsequently told The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
As feckless and cowardly as the so-called “mainstream” media have grown in the face of conservative propaganda about “liberal media bias,” this strikes me as very good news. Something like it ought to have been done as long ago as President Clinton’s first term. For the better part of a generation, Democrats have conducted themselves as if they expected Superman himself to come flying in the window to save them.
Instead, they got Clark Kent: timorous poltroons like Newsweek’s former editor Evan Thomas, who last week acknowledged in a book review that “the media’s obsession with Whitewater seem(s) excessive in retrospect.” This 16 years after Jeff Gerth’s incoherent New York Times articles kicked off the longest-running shaggy-dog story in the history of American journalism. So how many cover stories did Newsweek run touting Kenneth Starr’s fruitless investigation
The facts were available back then, but the fearless crusaders of the so-called liberal media mostly played follow-the-leader or ran and hid. For an irreverent take on CNN’s performance, read John Camp’s raucous memoir “Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger.” The veteran investigative correspondent tried to persuade his superiors that Whitewater was a hoax but got nowhere.
Providentially, the Obama administration appears to grasp that Rupert Murdoch’s minions may inadvertently have done them a big favor. By taking sides so brazenly, Fox has gained audience share at the expense of turning itself into a big fat political target. The establishment political press is far too timid and clubby to have made this discovery on its own.
But if the White House says something, they have to cover it.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Thom Gossom, Jr. - Walk-On (2)
I conclude this marvelous book. Thom Gossom writes of growing up in mostly segregated Birmingham, going to John Carrol HS when it was on the Southside, and then walking on the football team at Auburn. He was reshirted his first year and played from 1971 to 1974. He earned his scholarship after walking on, which is hard to do.
I especially enjoyed reading about the 1972 team, the Amazin's they were called, because after the Sullivan-Beasley years, Auburn wasn't to supposed to have anything in 1972 yet that team lost only one game. We beat Alabama 17 to 16 in the famous two-blocked-punt game.
In what seems comically antique now, Coach Jordan came down hard on facial hair in 1974, but finally relented somewhat. The few black players were ready to quit the team over not being allowed to sport facial hair. The Coach had his rules dating from 1951 and he was slow to change.
Gossom is remembered for that touchdown catch in the 1974 Alabama game which would have won the game for the Tigers (Alabama won 17 to 13), but the score was nullified when an official all the way across the field said that Gossom has stepped out of bounds and came back on the field to catch the pass, which was illegal in 1974. Two years later, the rule was changed which would have made the catch legal. It was a tough loss for that team. In this book, Gossom doesn't really say much about it---I think he's not sure if he stepped out of bounds or not---he only plays up the referee way away from the play making the call while the official closest to the catch ruled touchdown.
Thom Gossom has gone on to do acting jobs in various TV shows and movies. He has done well for himself.
I especially enjoyed reading about the 1972 team, the Amazin's they were called, because after the Sullivan-Beasley years, Auburn wasn't to supposed to have anything in 1972 yet that team lost only one game. We beat Alabama 17 to 16 in the famous two-blocked-punt game.
In what seems comically antique now, Coach Jordan came down hard on facial hair in 1974, but finally relented somewhat. The few black players were ready to quit the team over not being allowed to sport facial hair. The Coach had his rules dating from 1951 and he was slow to change.
Gossom is remembered for that touchdown catch in the 1974 Alabama game which would have won the game for the Tigers (Alabama won 17 to 13), but the score was nullified when an official all the way across the field said that Gossom has stepped out of bounds and came back on the field to catch the pass, which was illegal in 1974. Two years later, the rule was changed which would have made the catch legal. It was a tough loss for that team. In this book, Gossom doesn't really say much about it---I think he's not sure if he stepped out of bounds or not---he only plays up the referee way away from the play making the call while the official closest to the catch ruled touchdown.
Thom Gossom has gone on to do acting jobs in various TV shows and movies. He has done well for himself.
Monday, October 12, 2009
A Horror Movie to See?
Paranormal Activity: A Horror Phenomenon
By Richard Corliss Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009
Oh, sweet Jesus, that nice couple Kate and Micah are about to go to sleep again! But they already suspect that their house is haunted. Micah has propped up his video camera in their bedroom, to record any unusual phenomena, so they know what awful thing happened last night, while they were sleeping. The bedroom door moved a couple inches, and then... moved back!
The All-TIME Top 25 Horror Movies
Big hairy deal, say cynics who've been bred on gross-out horror movies. Show us heads exploding, chests busting, legs sawed off. Yet the packed audience at a late-night screening of Paranormal Activity on Times Square this week didn't need gore effects to be scared witless.
Yes, they knew it was only a movie — one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and endured by actors Micah Stoat and Katie Featherston (using their real names). But when that door moved, the crowd's collective gasp just about sucked all the oxygen out of the theater. (See the top 25 horror movies of all time.)
The campaign to bring Paranormal Activity to the public is already a movie industry legend.
Shot three years ago by Peli, an Israeli-born videomaker, for $11,000, in a week, in his own house, the picture played a few fright festivals in 2007. While DreamWorks considered buying the rights to do a remake with stars, Steven Spielberg took PA home to watch; and when he'd finished screening it... he found his bathroom door inexplicably locked. (He thought the DVD was haunted.) Two weeks ago, Paramount started playing Peli's film at midnight in 16 college towns.
Many showings were sold out. Sorry, come back next week, if you dare. No tickets created a hot ticket — the movie grossed $1.2 million in its early, limited engagements — and Paramount stoked the fever by urging fans to go online and "demand" a wider release. More than a million such requests came in, allowing its web site to brag that PA is "the first-ever major film release decided by You."
This weekend, PA has expanded to all-day runs on 159 screens in 44 cities, and according to early reports, it's headed for a box-office breakout — perhaps the highest three-day gross of any films showing in fewer than 200 venues. "Look out cuz there's a freight train coming," an executive from a rival studio told Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke, "and Paramount is going to make a TON of cash on this pickup. Cuz they ain't spending anything on it, and who knows where the ceiling is!" The box-office figures will make headlines, give the movie more free publicity and lure bigger crowds eager to learn what all the screaming is about. (See the 100 best movies of all time.)
Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about Paranormal Activity is that it's not just a fun thrill ride, but an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy; he knows that waiting for the big scary jolt does more damage to the nervous system than getting it. The tension builds slowly, as the very apprehensive Katie, a student, and the skeptical Micah, a day trader, feel the first little emotional tremors. The movie keeps us in its grip — because we never leave the couple's haunted property, and because all we see is what the camera has recorded when held by Micah or Katie, or left on at night to monitor their bedroom. That claustrophobia creates a bond between the couple and the audience; they can't escape, and neither can we.
Peli downplays shock, emphasizes suspense: a shadow creeping across a wall, or the ripple of an unseen form under the bedsheets. The gore scenes in splatter movies carry a sadistic punch, but those are outside most moviegoers' experience. What Peli's interested in is dread, a feeling everyone is familiar with. (Will I lose my job? Has she found someone else? Why hasn't our kid come home yet? What's that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it and, because fiction demands an ending, resolve it. The threat is provided, the fear made flesh, the monster confronted. All gone — feel better? Horror movies provide vicarious psychotherapy in an hour and a half. PA is different: at the end, it doesn't let viewers off the hook. It leaves them hanging there, and dares them to turn that last shiver into a laugh of relief that the delicious ordeal is over. (See 10 lessons from the summer box office.)
PA really has less in common with modern gore movies than with certain avant-garde films of the late '60s, like Michael Snow's Wavelength, a murder mystery in the form of a single, slow, 45-min. zoom shot through a room, and Morgan Fisher's Phi Phenomenon, an 11-min. shot of a wall clock without a second hand. In Fisher's film, viewers were meant to concentrate so intently that they can see the minute hand move. PA uses a similar strategy: the stationary camera in the overnight bedroom scenes has a time code at the bottom right of the frame. Sometimes the clock spins like mad to show the passing of hours between phenomena — or, in one super-creepy scene, the image of Katie standing motionless, as if still asleep, for two hours straight. It's even more chilling a few nights later, when Katie, clearly the more haunted of the two, again stands still for hours but this time on Micah's side of the bed.
If you're a horror-movie fraidy cat, know that most of the spooky stuff occurs in the bedroom, so — as with The Exorcist back in 1973 — you can steel yourself when the couple goes to sleep.
Then too, you may not be scared at all by Paranormal Activity; but as you sit in a movie house you should feel some fraternal pleasure in noticing that the folks around you are preparing or pretending to be scared. And you should be heartened to realize that — in an age of YouTube, iPod and DVR, where people get their visual media one by one — watching a fictional narrative can still be a communal activity. A thousand people sit as one in the dark, as fretful and enthralled as a child hearing a bedtime story, and wondering, What happens next? No, I can't bear it! No, I have to see!
By Richard Corliss Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009
Oh, sweet Jesus, that nice couple Kate and Micah are about to go to sleep again! But they already suspect that their house is haunted. Micah has propped up his video camera in their bedroom, to record any unusual phenomena, so they know what awful thing happened last night, while they were sleeping. The bedroom door moved a couple inches, and then... moved back!
The All-TIME Top 25 Horror Movies
Big hairy deal, say cynics who've been bred on gross-out horror movies. Show us heads exploding, chests busting, legs sawed off. Yet the packed audience at a late-night screening of Paranormal Activity on Times Square this week didn't need gore effects to be scared witless.
Yes, they knew it was only a movie — one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and endured by actors Micah Stoat and Katie Featherston (using their real names). But when that door moved, the crowd's collective gasp just about sucked all the oxygen out of the theater. (See the top 25 horror movies of all time.)
The campaign to bring Paranormal Activity to the public is already a movie industry legend.
Shot three years ago by Peli, an Israeli-born videomaker, for $11,000, in a week, in his own house, the picture played a few fright festivals in 2007. While DreamWorks considered buying the rights to do a remake with stars, Steven Spielberg took PA home to watch; and when he'd finished screening it... he found his bathroom door inexplicably locked. (He thought the DVD was haunted.) Two weeks ago, Paramount started playing Peli's film at midnight in 16 college towns.
Many showings were sold out. Sorry, come back next week, if you dare. No tickets created a hot ticket — the movie grossed $1.2 million in its early, limited engagements — and Paramount stoked the fever by urging fans to go online and "demand" a wider release. More than a million such requests came in, allowing its web site to brag that PA is "the first-ever major film release decided by You."
This weekend, PA has expanded to all-day runs on 159 screens in 44 cities, and according to early reports, it's headed for a box-office breakout — perhaps the highest three-day gross of any films showing in fewer than 200 venues. "Look out cuz there's a freight train coming," an executive from a rival studio told Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke, "and Paramount is going to make a TON of cash on this pickup. Cuz they ain't spending anything on it, and who knows where the ceiling is!" The box-office figures will make headlines, give the movie more free publicity and lure bigger crowds eager to learn what all the screaming is about. (See the 100 best movies of all time.)
Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about Paranormal Activity is that it's not just a fun thrill ride, but an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy; he knows that waiting for the big scary jolt does more damage to the nervous system than getting it. The tension builds slowly, as the very apprehensive Katie, a student, and the skeptical Micah, a day trader, feel the first little emotional tremors. The movie keeps us in its grip — because we never leave the couple's haunted property, and because all we see is what the camera has recorded when held by Micah or Katie, or left on at night to monitor their bedroom. That claustrophobia creates a bond between the couple and the audience; they can't escape, and neither can we.
Peli downplays shock, emphasizes suspense: a shadow creeping across a wall, or the ripple of an unseen form under the bedsheets. The gore scenes in splatter movies carry a sadistic punch, but those are outside most moviegoers' experience. What Peli's interested in is dread, a feeling everyone is familiar with. (Will I lose my job? Has she found someone else? Why hasn't our kid come home yet? What's that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it and, because fiction demands an ending, resolve it. The threat is provided, the fear made flesh, the monster confronted. All gone — feel better? Horror movies provide vicarious psychotherapy in an hour and a half. PA is different: at the end, it doesn't let viewers off the hook. It leaves them hanging there, and dares them to turn that last shiver into a laugh of relief that the delicious ordeal is over. (See 10 lessons from the summer box office.)
PA really has less in common with modern gore movies than with certain avant-garde films of the late '60s, like Michael Snow's Wavelength, a murder mystery in the form of a single, slow, 45-min. zoom shot through a room, and Morgan Fisher's Phi Phenomenon, an 11-min. shot of a wall clock without a second hand. In Fisher's film, viewers were meant to concentrate so intently that they can see the minute hand move. PA uses a similar strategy: the stationary camera in the overnight bedroom scenes has a time code at the bottom right of the frame. Sometimes the clock spins like mad to show the passing of hours between phenomena — or, in one super-creepy scene, the image of Katie standing motionless, as if still asleep, for two hours straight. It's even more chilling a few nights later, when Katie, clearly the more haunted of the two, again stands still for hours but this time on Micah's side of the bed.
If you're a horror-movie fraidy cat, know that most of the spooky stuff occurs in the bedroom, so — as with The Exorcist back in 1973 — you can steel yourself when the couple goes to sleep.
Then too, you may not be scared at all by Paranormal Activity; but as you sit in a movie house you should feel some fraternal pleasure in noticing that the folks around you are preparing or pretending to be scared. And you should be heartened to realize that — in an age of YouTube, iPod and DVR, where people get their visual media one by one — watching a fictional narrative can still be a communal activity. A thousand people sit as one in the dark, as fretful and enthralled as a child hearing a bedtime story, and wondering, What happens next? No, I can't bear it! No, I have to see!
These Angry White Men
These angry white men, much commented upon, are of great interest to me. If I were a political scientist, I'd be studying these people with sympathy but with some condescension.
Dionne: Just Because Many Obama Critics Are 'Angry White Men' Doesn't Mean We Should Write Them Off
Why Obama's Nobel Prize will only further inflame the right.
by E.J. Dionne Jr.
It is a sign of our weird political moment that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama will probably hurt him among some of his fellow citizens.
His opponents are describing the award as premature. The deeper problem is that the Nobel will underscore the extent to which Obama is a cosmopolitan figure, much loved in European capitals because he is the change they have been looking for.
Most Americans will probably be happy to have a leader who wins acclaim around the globe. But, paradoxically, a decision made in Oslo to honor Obama's peaceable intentions may make it more difficult for him to reconcile a body politic roiled by years of cultural warfare, partisan animosity and ideological extremism.
The effort to understand where Obama hatred comes from has been one of the few growth areas in the American economy.
There is no doubt that some of the anger is fueled by racial feeling, which is not the same as saying that all opposition to Obama is explained by racism. Most Obama opponents are simply conservative Republicans who disagree with him. But there are too many racist signs at rallies and too many overtly racial pronouncements in the fever swamps of the right-wing media to deny that racism is part of the anti-Obama mix.
Obama can't do much about those against him because of his race. Even a 1 percent unemployment rate wouldn't change the minds most scarred by prejudice. But there is a second level of angry opposition to which Obama needs to pay more attention. It involves the genuine rage of those who felt displaced in our economy even before the great recession, and are now hurting even more.
These Americans are sometimes written off as "angry white men." In analyzing anti Obama feeling, commentators have taken to rummaging around the work of historian Richard Hofstadter during the 1950s and '60s, focusing on his theory that "status anxiety" helps explain the rise of movements on the far right. The idea is that extremism takes hold in groups who feel their "status" is threatened by new groups on the rise in society.
The problem with status anxiety theory is that it focuses on feelings and psychology, thus easily crossing into condescension. It implies that the victims of status anxiety should be doing a better job accepting their new situations and downplays the idea that they might have something real to be angry about.
In fact, many who now feel rage have legitimate reasons for it, even if neither Obama nor big government is the real culprit. September's unemployment numbers told the story in broad terms: Among men 20 and over, unemployment was 10.3 percent; among women, the rate was 7.8 percent.
Middle-income men, especially those who are not college graduates, have borne the brunt of economic change bred by both globalization and technological transformation. Even before the recession, the decline in the number of well-paying jobs in manufacturing hit the incomes of this group of Americans hard. The trouble in the construction industry since the downturn began has compounded the problem.
This is not a uniquely American problem. Last week, I caught up with Australia's deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, who was visiting Washington for a conference on education. Though Gillard diplomatically avoided direct comment on American politics, she said what's happening here reminded her of the rise of Pauline Hanson, a politician who caused a sensation in Australian politics during the 1990s by creating One Nation, a xenophobic and protectionist political party tinged with racism.
Gillard, a leader of Australia's center-left Labor Party, argues that high unemployment, particularly the displacement of men from previously well-paying jobs, helped unleash Hansonism and "the politics of the ordinary guy versus these elites, the opera-watching, latte-sipping elites."
Hansonism collapsed, partly because the Australian economy boomed. Gillard argued that the key to battling the politics of rage is to acknowledge that it is driven by "real problems" and not simply raw feelings.
No doubt some who despise Obama will see the judges in Norway as part of that latte sipping crowd and hold their esteem for the president against him. He can't do much about this. What he can do -- and perhaps then deserve the domestic equivalent of a peace prize -- is reach out to the angry white men with policies that address their grievances, and do so with an understanding that what matters to them is not status but simply a chance to make a decent living again.
Dionne: Just Because Many Obama Critics Are 'Angry White Men' Doesn't Mean We Should Write Them Off
Why Obama's Nobel Prize will only further inflame the right.
by E.J. Dionne Jr.
It is a sign of our weird political moment that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama will probably hurt him among some of his fellow citizens.
His opponents are describing the award as premature. The deeper problem is that the Nobel will underscore the extent to which Obama is a cosmopolitan figure, much loved in European capitals because he is the change they have been looking for.
Most Americans will probably be happy to have a leader who wins acclaim around the globe. But, paradoxically, a decision made in Oslo to honor Obama's peaceable intentions may make it more difficult for him to reconcile a body politic roiled by years of cultural warfare, partisan animosity and ideological extremism.
The effort to understand where Obama hatred comes from has been one of the few growth areas in the American economy.
There is no doubt that some of the anger is fueled by racial feeling, which is not the same as saying that all opposition to Obama is explained by racism. Most Obama opponents are simply conservative Republicans who disagree with him. But there are too many racist signs at rallies and too many overtly racial pronouncements in the fever swamps of the right-wing media to deny that racism is part of the anti-Obama mix.
Obama can't do much about those against him because of his race. Even a 1 percent unemployment rate wouldn't change the minds most scarred by prejudice. But there is a second level of angry opposition to which Obama needs to pay more attention. It involves the genuine rage of those who felt displaced in our economy even before the great recession, and are now hurting even more.
These Americans are sometimes written off as "angry white men." In analyzing anti Obama feeling, commentators have taken to rummaging around the work of historian Richard Hofstadter during the 1950s and '60s, focusing on his theory that "status anxiety" helps explain the rise of movements on the far right. The idea is that extremism takes hold in groups who feel their "status" is threatened by new groups on the rise in society.
The problem with status anxiety theory is that it focuses on feelings and psychology, thus easily crossing into condescension. It implies that the victims of status anxiety should be doing a better job accepting their new situations and downplays the idea that they might have something real to be angry about.
In fact, many who now feel rage have legitimate reasons for it, even if neither Obama nor big government is the real culprit. September's unemployment numbers told the story in broad terms: Among men 20 and over, unemployment was 10.3 percent; among women, the rate was 7.8 percent.
Middle-income men, especially those who are not college graduates, have borne the brunt of economic change bred by both globalization and technological transformation. Even before the recession, the decline in the number of well-paying jobs in manufacturing hit the incomes of this group of Americans hard. The trouble in the construction industry since the downturn began has compounded the problem.
This is not a uniquely American problem. Last week, I caught up with Australia's deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, who was visiting Washington for a conference on education. Though Gillard diplomatically avoided direct comment on American politics, she said what's happening here reminded her of the rise of Pauline Hanson, a politician who caused a sensation in Australian politics during the 1990s by creating One Nation, a xenophobic and protectionist political party tinged with racism.
Gillard, a leader of Australia's center-left Labor Party, argues that high unemployment, particularly the displacement of men from previously well-paying jobs, helped unleash Hansonism and "the politics of the ordinary guy versus these elites, the opera-watching, latte-sipping elites."
Hansonism collapsed, partly because the Australian economy boomed. Gillard argued that the key to battling the politics of rage is to acknowledge that it is driven by "real problems" and not simply raw feelings.
No doubt some who despise Obama will see the judges in Norway as part of that latte sipping crowd and hold their esteem for the president against him. He can't do much about this. What he can do -- and perhaps then deserve the domestic equivalent of a peace prize -- is reach out to the angry white men with policies that address their grievances, and do so with an understanding that what matters to them is not status but simply a chance to make a decent living again.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Thom Gossom, Jr. - Walk-On
This book is a wonderful reading experience for someone who was a student at Auburn during those early years when Auburn athletics was being integrated. I do remember Henry Harris, the first black athlete at Auburn. He was a basketball freshman in 1968-69, also my freshman year. James Owens, whose high school nephew has verbal committed to play at Auburn, was our first black football player a year after Henry. Thom Gossom came along a year after Owens. Thom Gossom claims the distinction of being the first black Auburn athlete to graduate, Gossom collecting his diploma in 1975. More coming.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Alan Grayson
I wish more Democrats are like Rep. Alan Grayson. Listen to this speech on the House floor. He tells the GOP to get out of the way!
Alan Grayson: "If Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon."
Alan Grayson: "If Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon."
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The Damage Done by the Republican Right
From Andrew Sullivan
08 Oct 2009 03:50 pm
The Base Comes ThroughHere's what the Republican party now is: they reward heckling the first black president with funding for the heckler close to $2.7 million. The rage out there is very, very real. They may be a minority, but their passion and volume is so great. They intend to destroy any attempt by Obama to get past the ideological faultlines of the past and seek practical solutions to profound problems; they intend to blame Obama for all he inherited from Bush and Cheney; and there is no responsible Republican leadership that will try to stop them.
08 Oct 2009 03:50 pm
The Base Comes ThroughHere's what the Republican party now is: they reward heckling the first black president with funding for the heckler close to $2.7 million. The rage out there is very, very real. They may be a minority, but their passion and volume is so great. They intend to destroy any attempt by Obama to get past the ideological faultlines of the past and seek practical solutions to profound problems; they intend to blame Obama for all he inherited from Bush and Cheney; and there is no responsible Republican leadership that will try to stop them.
Monday, October 5, 2009
The Good Book (According to Republicans & Libertarians)
Narcissism
Coming Soon: the New International Free-Market Bible
Posted by Amy Sullivan Monday, October 5, 2009 at 10:56 am
111 Comments • Trackback (0)
This is insane. The guys at Conservapedia (aka, "the trustworthy encyclopedia") have decided to retranslate the Bible in what they're calling the Conservative Bible Project, because "liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations."
And you thought liberal bias was limited to the evil mainstream media. Apparently the early Church fathers had their own problems, because the Conservapediacs are particularly intent on scrubbing the Bible of "liberal" passages they say were inserted into the original canon and therefore shouldn't be considered sacred. Passages like the story of the adulteress whom Jesus saved from being stoned with the famous line: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Conservapedia complains that liberals have used this story to argue against the death penalty. Plus, this Jesus character sounds like a radical moral relativist.
Also among the goals of the project: replace liberal words like "labor" with preferred conservative terms; use concise language instead of "liberal wordiness"; and--my favorite--"explain the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning." Jesus talks about economics more than any other secular subject in the Bible, so they've got their work cut out for them. I look forward to learning the free-market meaning of "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/10/05/coming-soon-the-new-international-free-market-bible/#ixzz0T5fqobOQ
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)