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The title of Lawrence Lessig’s recent essay in The New Republic, “Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government,” is a bit of a misnomer. Lessig isn’t unequivocally against openness and transparency in government. Instead, he says we shouldn’t see transparency as “just a big simple blessing,” or a silver bullet solution to political problems, and he makes the case for a more nuanced view.
Tomorrow, Nora will interview Lessig about openness, transparency, and government. Do you have a question for Lawrence Lessig? Leave it in the comments below.
From time to time on Spark, we hear from listeners who are frustrated with the fact that they’re stuck on dial-up, and don’t inhabit the downloading, video-watching, world we describe on Spark. Now, the digital divide is a serious problem, and one we’re keen to look into more, but while we were thinking about how to cover it, we realized that “rural broadband” is a bit of a tongue twister! As we started thinking of it: “rural broadband: it’s hard to say, and even harder to get!”
We’d love it if you’d help us make a ’sting’ for our show. Just call in to our toll-free (in Canada) hotline, 1-877-34-SPARK, and say “rural broadband” five times fast. We’re not asking you to do this out of the goodness of your heart, either. We’ll pick one name at random and give that person a snappy SPARK re-usable grocery bag. Just say your name, phone number and ‘rural broadband’ five times fast. (We won’t put phone numbers on the air).
Earlier this afternoon, I visited the Richview branch of the Toronto Public Library to see the Digital Bookmobile, which was in town to promote the TPL’s Overdrive collection of downloadable eBooks, audiobooks, videos, and music.
Jamie Kelly from Overdrive (one of the companies the TPL uses to distribute DRMed digital content) gave me a tour of the 74-foot long tractor trailer-turned-bookmobile. Here’s a YouTube video:
I also spoke with librarian Joanne Lombardo about eBooks, scarcity, rights issues, and Canadian Content. You’ll hear from Joanne in an upcoming episode of Spark.
In the meantime, I’d love to know what you think. Have you borrowed digital books from your local public library? What was the experience like? Please, leave your comments below.
I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation. I give it a little help in the form of a .procmail file that sends everything directly to /dev/null. The effect is very simple. You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX.
After I heard that interview, I immediately wondered if it’s possible to switch off email permanently. Sure, I know a handful of people who don’t use email at all (mostly older relatives), but that’s because they’ve never used email. So, once you’ve started using email, is it possible to go back?
I know, you can call me crazy now! You can say I am out of my mind, but the truth is that I am now on the 5th day of taking such a radical approach to my daily workload and the overall experience has been tremendous!! In all of those 5 days I have received a total number of 45 e-mails. Yes, you are reading it right!! 45 e-mails!! When normally on a daily basis I would be getting, on busy days, between 30 to 45! A day!! But this time around, things have been different. I have been telling people I will no longer be responding to e-mails, because the more I respond, the more I get.
Since then, Luis has been documenting his attempt to remove corporate email from his life on his blog. He regularly publishes updates showing the number of email messages he gets:
Now, Luis isn’t some sort of neo-Luddite. Rather, he’s a social software evangelist for IBM, and has replaced much of what used to happen via email with social tools like Facebook, Twitter, and other internal tools.
I have decided that if I want to demonstrate how powerful social computing is within the corporate world, and beyond, I am going to make a complete shift to it and try to provoke as many conversations as possible out in the open space of social software.
You can get a very good introduction to Luis’s goals is in this video from the Web 2.0 Expo Europe: Thinking Outside the Inbox:
This week, Nora will interview Luis Suarez about his world without email. Do you have a question for Luis? Do you think you could simply stop getting email in your workplace? Leave your comments below.
Yesterday, on my walk home, I passed a young girl who was taping “lost dog” posters to trees and lampposts near the park in our neighbourhood. And it got me thinking: There are still a lot of things that still work best offline.
Sure, the girl could have posted on Craigslist, or added her dog to LostYourPet.net, but postering near the neighbourhood park is still probably the most effective way to get relevant eyeballs on her poster.
So then, I’m hoping to make a list of things that still work best in offline form, and I’d love your help. Here’s what we’ve come up with to start:
Lost dog posters
Yard sale direction signs
Trying on clothes at a clothing store
Buying fresh produce
Hailing a taxicab
I’d love to know what you think should be on the list. Leave a comment below, email it in, or dial 1-877-34-SPARK (1-877-347-7275 toll free in Canada). Let’s see how long a list we can make together.
Over at Spirits Dancing, Hilary Talbot wonders if the realtime web should be able to forget:
In real life forgetting is a way of filtering out what is not important, or that which we don’t care to remember. We act on the assumption that much of what we say and do will not be remembered either by us or others. Forgetting seems to me to be both a filter to enable us to remember what is important, and a kind of safety valve. Our heads would likely burst if we were able to search and remember everything.
Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all.
Viktor argues that the web should forget, and his proposed solution is “expiration dates on information.” Later next month, Nora will interview Viktor Mayer-Schönberger about how this might work, and what gets lost when digital technology allows us to have perfect recall. We’ll post the interview here then, but in the meantime, what do you think?
How long should the web remember? Have you been haunted by the digital skeletons in your internet closet? Leave your comments below.
College and university textbooks are notoriously expensive. As a Toronto Star story from earlier this year explains, “engineering and medical textbooks are particularly expensive and can range from $150 to $300 for a single book. It’s not unusual for students in other areas of study to spend more than $1,000 annually on textbooks.”
So how is digital technology affecting on the textbook business? According to a New York Times story from this past weekend:
many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
That kind of free courseware may come in the form of “freemium” products, like the textbooks from Flat World Knowledge, a company profiled by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson in his recent book FREE. Flat World Knowledge publishes “‘open textbooks,’ free works that can be edited, updated, and remixed into custom course materials.” These open textbooks are free to read online, with printed copies and audiobook versions available as paid options.
Another way to get textbooks is to steal them. Like music, movies, and television shows, digital versions of physical textbooks are easy to share online with little regard for copyright. Though the world’s largest textbook BitTorrent site, TextBook Torrents, shut down last fall, you don’t have to look hard to find questionably legal copies of textbooks on various file sharing networks.
What about you? Are you a student (or the parent of a student)? Where do you get your textbooks? Would you consider buying a digital textbook?
Spark 92 – November 22 & 24, 2009: FloH club, new media literacy, and getting the old age you deserve. Click to listen (runs 54:00):
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