It'll all end in cheers

It's not often I find something to agree with on the opinion page of the Melbourne Age, which increasingly resembles a cross between the campus newspapers of my youth and Green Left Weekly, but today was an exception.

The writer makes the point that increased ease of communication is paradoxically leading to a decline in the basic skills of written communication. I see this all the time at work, where it's not uncommon for me to receive an email enquiry which is so garbled, ungrammatical and a-syntactical as to be literally incomprehensible. I often have to write back and say, as politely as possible, What the hell are you asking me? And these emails usually come from people who went through school before the education system fell apart, and who often are holding down professional jobs.

Unfortunately I'm not in the lucky position of the person who told me he automatically deletes unread any email that begins with 'Hi' or ends in 'cheers'.

My own suspicion is that the real problem is simple selfishness, which we used to try to minimize by teaching people manners. Why bother to write legibly? If someone can't read you, that's their problem. You know your own phone number, so of course you're going to gabble it at top speed when leaving a message on my phone. So I have to play the tape three or four times over to reconstruct the message, like some CIA agent manning a wiretap operation.

Somewhat related is the near-extinction of the salutation 'Dear...' I suspect that most modern illiterates consider this either overly familiar or effeminate.

Cheers!

Race to the finish

Okay, the pressure is on to finish the '23 things' agenda. So let's see:

Number 16: Wikis. I'm sorry to say that I didn't seem to find any "innovative ways libraries are using wikis". All I can see is that some librarians are using wikis to replace online bulletin boards and discussion lists, which is hardly a quantum leap.

Number 19: Explore an award-winning Web 2.0 site. I checked quite a few sites from the list, and didn't find any of them interesting enough to "play" with. I looked in the toybox and what I wanted wasn't there. By the way, wouldn't you think a site as successful as Craigslist wouldn't be quite so, well, ugly?

Number 20: Discover YouTube. Done, long ago. Here's a favourite.

Number 21: look at a tool for finding podcasts. I did, put in "Glenn Gould" and got no hits. I put in "Glenn Miller" and got no hits. I put in "Glenn Campbell" and got no hits.

Number 22: Look at the World eBook Fair site. I did. The really scary thing is the number of amateur writers self-publishing on the Net. As the old saying goes, Everybody has a book inside them, and in most cases, that's where it should stay.

Number 23: summarize my thoughts about the programme. Here goes:

Firstly, I have to pay tribute to the considerable amount of work which obviously went into planning this programme, so full credit to the organisers.

A few thoughts about possible changes: make it shorter. I found my interest, and that of others, petering out by week 5-6.

Ditch the "play" angle. Most of the people doing this programme are middle-aged, with at least two degrees, a mortgage, and a few decades of mostly unfashionable life-experience. They can learn things without it needing to be made 'FUN' and 'PLAY'.

Ditch 'Library 2.0' as the overall label. One of the things I learned in this course is that there is no such thing as Library 2.0 It's a marketing term that works very well for people like Stephen Abrams, and has about as much meaning or validity as "NEW, IMPROVED!". By all means include it as one of the elements of the course: just because you don't believe in the tooth fairy or flying saucers or astrology doesn't mean you don't need to know about these things. (And I swear to you, I had already written the above words when I went looking for a generic 'new improved' flash to illustrate this post, and found the image above. I think it speaks for itself.)

Segway: chariot of Karma!

I was planning a follow-up post about that poor boob doomed by his library to not only toodle around on a stupid Segway, but to wear a girly crash-helmet because he was going all of 12 miles per hour tops. Actually, Segways are more dangerous than you might think. Brit newspaper editor Piers Morgan, who had earlier mocked George W. Bush for falling off a Segway, has himself fallen off one, breaking three ribs. Mock the Segway at your peril.