Posted by alexandra_k on May 19, 2018, at 18:30:10
In reply to Re: library books, posted by rjlockhart37 on May 19, 2018, at 16:17:52
> google has become the main seach engine for many things
yes. and google scholar for academic research. only the quality of google scholar rapidly spirals down as we get more and more and more and more post-modernist generated research papers that often aren't worth the paper they're not even printed on.
you aren't supposed to read any of it, anyway.
you are supposed to go to the subject librarian who will construct search terms for you to feed into google scholar. you will be shown increasingly specific search terms until you get a set of papers that you use as data for your meaningless piece of research. you see how a contribution to research is an equally meaningless piece of research that might be included in someone elses search in future...that's the increasing way of it.
> this may be silly thing, do you remember that book fahrenheit 451?
i actually don't. i haven't seen any of his movies.
> it had a prophecy about books being removed.....
i see...
that is what has happened, historically. books are burned when you have some kind of totalitarian society where certain opinions or perspectives or options are not allowed to be spoken of.
it used to be that... 'hate speech' against a race of people was banned. holocaust denial. there was a case at my undergraduate university where a PhD student was kicked out because someone thought he was denying the holocaust. All i know about it was that an academic resigned because he thought that the work should be accepted or rejected on the basis of it's academic merit (whether it was biased or unbiased, suitably referenced, suitably supported by evidence etc) and to effectively ban the topic was not good practice. he actually thought that one couldn't really deny the holocaust without producing an obviously biased piece of work that would be obvious... other people didn't seem to have such faith that it would so obviously turn out to be an atrocity... Or maybe that was the point of the work... I don't know. Things like yelling 'bomb' in public places are banned. all these things have in common this idea of riling people up and agitating them to commit acts of violence against groups of people. i guess that is why they are banned. Holocaust denial because it is often associated with hatred and acts of violence against Jewish people and other groups of people, too. Our speech is not totally free there are some limits.
but burning books... i think maybe the Romans did that when they conquered the Greeks? Not sure. it's thought to be a mark of the more barbaric. limiting peoples access to books. by limiting access to literacy (e.g., the church leaders read and interpret the bible) or by limiting access to the actual book (e.g., certain leaders have access only) or by attempting to annihilate the book entirely.
I think the books are being vanished. Only the trajectory is more like 5 - 10 - 2. By which I mean some number of people have access to books (5). And then the books are fed into scanners and so on so you can access them online. And things seem great because more people have better access (10). I mean, before, you had to send away for a bunch of books and articles. It could take weeks for a book or article to come through loan from a different university or a different country. But often the book or article would be accessible online.
But then what happens is the phyiscal stuff goes away. The paper copies are trucked off to the fires of storage. But people don't mind. The people say / think it is nothing like book burning because people have MORE access to books now that everything is online accessible. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an outdated technophobe!
And then...
That's when the logins go away (2).
That was my first thought. You make people pay constant subscription for access. Once you leave university your employer pays for you to access the stuff otherwise you have no access. It is a way of locking people out. You can't walk into a public library anymore. No public access.
But now I think that actually the hierarchy people think that the above is too obvious. People would notice sooner. And it isn't about whether one has access to books it's only upsetting when you see other people accessing books (I want that grape!) Really, the thing to do is all this 'personalised search' stuff susch that different people have different access but they don't even know they have different access or they have been conned into believing that the access they have is the best access for them. It is most responsive for their needs and so on.
And then you think about other software systems, too. Software systems that have been designed for use with business financial reports. Software systems that have been designed for use with hospital patient records. And you think about the different information that is accessable to different people... The researchers keeping things tagged... Or, this or that group of researchers. Different versions for different people. What information is accessible to the patient... What information is accessible to this or that doctor... What information is accessible to insurance companies. And so on...
And then to think that the game that some people like to play is 'just how badly can we oppress just how many people'?
Though, I suppose, it is more of an experiment, really.
NZ has long been an experimental subject for the free world. A nationwide test of NZ has been taken as a good predictor of uptake in other countries... England, Whales, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, USA, Canada... Our laws and least developed. Nobody has access to lawyers even if you volate the laws. And people are getting better at violating the laws without people even knowing.
Some technologies really do hit here, first. The ones you want to try out on other peoples babies. I remember my computer trying to pursuade me to train it to identify my face a while back and now we have face recognition software in supermarkets. They say it's about crime prevention but it's not, at all. They want payments to become something that you don't authorise, anymore. I mean, you give your login to everyone - right? My computer wants me to pay for elapsed virus protection software - but after 14 or so days of warning it would expire it's now offering me a cashback if I 'purchase' it. Because it wants my credit card details, you see.
There isn't really the illusion of bank privacy anymore. Something about Amazon... They say you can walk around the supermarket and you will be billed or not billed depending on what you leave with -- you just need to provide your credit card details on entry, you see.
SO you can lock people out of the supermarket. The people who live in this country who don't have access to supermarkets. People increasingly (genuinely) don't know what food looks like. They will never get to see it...
Already I think about the supermarkets I've been to in this city... Where do the elite people in this city shop? Where do the people who sit on councils for local government and university government do their grocery shopping? I suppose they hire people to do their shopping for them... There are signs up about that in supermarkets now... Click and collect...
That way you don't get to see what some people have. You get your box of bug eaten half rotten fruit while someone else gets their box of this or that chemical sprayed while someone else...
This is how people try and make alpha, beta, gamma... Babies these days. They think it would be too hard to see their little alpha baby locked out even though it turned out to be dull and superficial and annoying and so on... As a parent... Your duty is to kick all those other kids back -- right? Feed them toxins and so on so they are happy with their gamma (or whatever) lot in life that they will be happy with because they never got to see anything different. All they know is 'life is so painful i wish i'd never been born'. And somehow this is supposed to be the lesser of evils. The alpha kid who wakes with night terrors later in life because they have some vague inkling of how their incompetence is ruining things but they simply can't see what to do...
> we're in a new generation i guess....old things are done away with
I think it is a passing thing. I think the libraries have gone private. Private collections with private collectors that arent publically accessible.
I think that future generations will look back and learn about atrocities.
I managed to look at some half-baked storage stuff at the University of Auckland. Apparently an entire set of Grey's Anatomy was donated at one point.. Like, all the editions. Only the earliest ones were vanished even though there was a (hard to find) online accessible record for them... Because the TV series clogs up searches, you see. And then there are so many different editions and versions. Anyway, point is, the ones that were valuable weren't there anymore but the head librarian didn't even notice (or care). Sometimes books are valuable. Some of the books in storage had been defaced with highlighter. The librarian was all like 'see - that's what happens when we put them on the shelves for public access'. That was the justification for taking the books away.
Having the right to do something doesn't mean you are at all obliged to exercise that right. For example, I have the right to have a kid. But I also have the right not to have a kid. It is my choice. That is nice.
It is nice to have the choice to read books because they are accessible to one. Books that have been hailed as really very good (and now people will of course set out to undermine that by making a whole bunch of awards to be determined by people who can't tell the difference between a human authored and computer generated work). Books that get people thinking politically... I see that, now... Because of how the free world is receeding, and all.
YOu know, books that people would keep in their private collections if they had money.
Call number systems are interesting, too. Mostly because you see how they aren't so translatable. From Dewey to Libary of Congres... It isn't just that certain sections or chunks are more or less expanded. It is that certain sections or chunks cease to exist. If you look at how the systems have developed over the years... You start to see what is missing. You start to see the gaping holes. The things you would never have thought to have noticed if you didn't know how things used to be...
I read something in the paper about how the hierarchy thing is a bad game because there are more losers than winners. Only, that's not so. Each step up the hierarchy is thought to be more successful than the step below becaue you increase the number of your subjects. That can't be the reason why... I think it is more that good honest intelligent people... People with means and capacity will not do business with you. Because it is tiresome for them to have to watch their back all the time knowing full well you will stab them in it at the earliest available opportunity. It's just not a very nice way to live for anybody. Apparently the hen who is the head of the hierarchy gets pecked at most of all. Nobody in their right mind would want to be that guy. Not for long.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1098573
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20180212/msgs/1098762.html