Going Local

I have moved my blogging activities to http://ils.unc.edu/~jweis/wordpress. Please update your feeds accordingly.

Clearing the Air

This week's "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" had a caller from UNC's School of Information and Library Science. When the host Peter Sagal asked the caller, "What exactly is Information Science?", he got the response, "I'm still trying to figure it out myself."


I get the same question about my chosen field of study, and for a while I was also hard-pressed for a good explanation of just what IS is. Aside from UNC's page on the undergraduate program, it wasn't until grad school that I was exposed to another good paper that explains the fundamentals of IS. Marcia Bates's "The Invisible Substrate of Information Science" summarizes the science as "the study of the gathering, organizing, storing, retrieving, and dissemination of information." Bates then quotes another article from 1968 that reiterates this idea. We've had at least forty years to assert our presence as a scientific field, and yet some students of the field are unclear about what they are actually studying. What can be done to define the identity of IS? Hopefully, a new course entering SILS's curriculum next semester, INLS 101, will better elucidate the field to prospective students, as well as the general population.


Bates, M. J. (1999). The invisible substrate of information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(12), 1043-1050.

E-mail or personal messages?

One of the discussions the LinkedIn Information Overload Research Group is having is whether social network sites are increasing the e-mail load of Internet users. One of the respondents questioned whether it was e-mail volume or the communication load in general that increases with the use of SNS. When 19% of Internet users say they use Twitter or other services to broadcast their status, bloated Facebook feeds and Twitter rolls can be provoke some anxiety for the already overwhelmed. A preliminary data crunch shows that e-mail usage increases as social media consumption increases. The positive correlation is not that surprising, but another survey found that, at least in the Generation Y respondents, they would rather go without SNS than e-mail. Which interpretation sounds more plausible, the respondents perceive e-mail as more essential than SNS, or are SNS so much more rich in information that paring them down is the only way for users to alleviate overload they perceive from such sites?

Rheingold Medal

I sat in on Paul Jones's JOMC 449 class on Wednesday, as they were having Howard Rheingold as a guest speaker by Skype. During the call we discussed Rheingold's five essential literacies of the 21st century. To recap, they are:

1. Mindfulness: Paying attention to what we are actually doing in the moment. Distractions and multitasking impede our efficiency.
2. Participation: Being technically adept with the tools that are gaining common acceptance in society. We should not be able to just work a word processor, we should be able to blog, take photos, shoot and edit video, make audio recordings, communicate through any medium that is available.
3. Cooperation: Working well with others.
4. Network Awareness: Leveraging the tools of status updates, RSS, and social filters to know the current events of your social and professional world.
5. Critical Consumption: Or, as Rheingold calls it, "crap detection." Being able to gauge the authority and veracity of what we encounter in the new media.
   

I asked Howard if he perceived a tension between network awareness and participation. Being perpetually plugged in can cause stress and information overload, but there are immense pressures, as well as payoffs, in knowing what one's friends and family are doing at any given second. Howard could only reply that norms will evolve to allow for off time. He suggests that people perceive the information flows from feeds as different from e-mails. E-mail has the perception of being a queue of tasks, items which must be acted upon in some way or another. Feeds are not necessarily so. When you see a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand articles in your feed reader, it's not too urgent to get through every item on the list. I've clicked on "Mark all as read" countless times on my Netvibes home page. Personal information management practices will have to be developed through personal experience. Still, knowing basic tactics like filtering, categorizing, and subscribing can help immensely in cutting down on the overload.

IP, IO, and the RNC

About two weeks ago Jamie Boyle, author of The Public Domain, came to UNC to talk about the "20th Century Black Hole" of works entering the public domain. [talk here] Not much new ground covered for those already familiar with Lessig, Boyle, and Doctorow, though the post-talk discussion concerning Google Books was enlightening.

Speaking of intellectual property, Shepard Fairey, the designer of the iconic Obama "HOPE" poster, admitted to using an AP photo for the work, which is a bit of a no-no under current copyright law. After the campaign, Fairey could have used the government photos; just an issue of bad timing.

And boy, have I been having a bad time at new RNC web site. ZING!

For those of you feeling overloaded by Twitter, Wired has some tips.

Forrester Findings

Recent data from the Forrester Research consultancy report an 80 percent adult participation rate in social media. Blogs and SNS are becoming a staple of information habits, just like e-mail, and I would like to know about the perceptions and attitudes of people as they are adopting this trend. Are they psyched about it? Is there resentment about changing habits? Does visiting social media sites supplant anything when it comes to securing a person's finite time and attention, like is this time that was more typically spent watching television only a few years ago? Seeing how governments, businesses, and other organizations adapt to these behaviors would also be an interesting study. Some other things I liked about the Forrester post was its typology of social media behaviors and the embeddable widget. The iframe is a little too wide to embed here, so take this link.

Digging it

About two weeks back I wrote about the value of serendipitous browsing, and Digg has pulled through for me in this regard. An article alerted me to a survey by USC's Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. I was actually unaware of the CDF, and this bit of link surfing has been particularly fruitful in surveys and resources I can keep tabs on now.

Back to the aforementioned survey, 71% of respondents claimed the Internet has improved their productivity at work, while 5% said that their productivity has deteriorated since the arrival of the 'Net. Could it be the easier access to innumerable relevant resources. One study suggests it's being able to slack off that has improved worker productivity. Correlations...