flitting on fiction

So…. homework this week (for my Public Texts course) included the task of buying & reading a book from Lulu.com , and writing an email to the author (no direction given as to what the email was to include).

So …I did. Even though I have purchased other books from Lulu, hey…. that doesn’t count cuz this was HOMEWORK. (Any excuse will do ) 

I cheated a bit though…. rather than just wade through the way too many books they have listed on Lulu …although I did actually look at some….many of which seemed to be categorized in ….ummm…totally illogical categories….  I chose to put my $$ on a work by an author I already know from gather.com . 

Not, of course, that I know her - we’ve never met… but she stands out on Gather as someone who writes well and who is extremely witty, funny, and, on occasion, more than a little caustic. Dame Ruth will never be accused of political correctness… but for an extremely intelligent & entertaining view of the world, reading her work is a no-brainer. 

I loved Life, Death & Other Trivia - particularly the sections about men & their body parts, and about the author’s view of a better way to choose a president. Oh, and the last chapter about religion and… and… and…. 

It was most definitely the most fun I’ve had doing homework in….well…. forever! 

Dame Ruth also has a blog …which you should visit …but really, you should buy the book . 

What is it with these people and using all lower case letters for titles of their books? It is beginning to irk me.

Anyway …. the last couple of days, I talked about Tapcott’s (also all lower-case titled book) grown up digital . Today I stopped by the library and picked up the “recommended reading” for the seminar I am to give on Tuesday.

This book is called the cult of the amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture by andrew keen (yes, all that lower-case stuff is from the book )

Same topic as grown up digital , basically …. just a very different point of view.

keen was, according to Chapter 1, “the great seduction”, involved in the whole Silicon Valley Internet boom … “a pioneer in the first Internet gold rush”.  But somewhere along the way … specifically at a weekend camping retreat… he began to see the whole net phenomenon as, apparently, without value.

He has little to say that is postitive, really.

In fact, much of what he says about those of us on the Internet - and especially about bloggers - is downright nasty & negative… (but of course, he has a book to sell - and the blog and twitter accounts to go with )

He is really quite fond of the monkey metaphor…. you know, the infinite monkey theorem that suggests that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys  an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them would write a Shakespearean play or a Platonic dialog or….

keen writes that

Today’s technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters. Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren’t quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren’t quite monkeys, but rather Internet users. And instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys - many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins - are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity. For today’s amateur monkeys can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels. 

….and then, predictably, he goes on to refer to us - you & I & all of your social networking friends & bloggers - as monkeys throughout the remainder of the book.

I can do a fairly credible monkey sound…. but no idea how to write it, so you will have to make your own monkey noises, I guess…. can I interest you in a banana?

Personally… while both are highly readable, if you were going to read one of these two books, I’d recommend grown up digital (2009)… Tapcott manages to address the issues of authorship and privacy and the need for new business models and all those sorts of things without belittling or insulting his readers. keen needs some new monkeys, methinks.

is that a different enough title, Stephanie ? 

I’ve just been plowing through grown up digital ….  will read it again more slowly once I finish it… but first read through I’m just reading - and enjoying it.

It is highly readable - and also very, very much on topic for what I need for my  research.

While it frames the population(s) I’m working with differently - as “Net Geners” as opposed to “emerging adults”….the book addresses the ways that growing up with the Net and computer technology has impacted - and will continue to impact on both the individuals themselves - and also on business, government, and those who are disadvantaged by not having the technologies the rest have come to take for granted.

The studies have been done are in-depth and fascinating… and while there are some bits I will need to do - directly related to reading, fiction & publishing - a lot of the ~stuff~ I have been reading applies directly to “my” areas of research. Very useful…and very interesting, also.

So …. tonight’s lecture for the course I TA was moved to another location because of a lecture…. I would have liked to attend the lecture… but I am pretty much resigned to never being able to … my Wednesday evenings are reserved for seminars.

ANYWAY….  even though I did not get to go to the lecture, I did get to buy the book. They had a table set up…I stopped on my way out after my seminars (which went really well, btw - even though I had PLANNED to use webspiration and they were down for scheduled maintenance - I just used the Inspiration software instead) and snagged a copy.

It is called grown up digital, by Don Tapscott, the author of growing up digital  and wikinomics…and since I am working on a paper for my Public Texts course - about emerging adults and public texts …. and Tapscott focuses especially on “people between the ages of 11 and 30″ it seemed like a no-brainer to me.

I am looking forward to reading it!  Chances are good that I’ll be doing a review of it sometime soon

So…I managed to get my seminar done, more or less.

The last part is not AS done as I’d like - that’s revisiting the topic of Traill’s portrayal of native Canadians again - I talked about both her and Moodie’s portrayals of natives a couple of weeks ago … so, since this novel is quite different in that respect, seems like it’s worth another look …

will have to wing that part.

But then again, I almost always end up winging my seminars….  no matter how prepared I am. It generally works better to encourage class participation … although from conversations tonight, most people haven’t yet READ the book…so it’s a good thing I don’t necessarily COUNT on class participation.

This class is a very small group - so if even a few haven’t read it, there won’t likely be a whole lot of talking goin’ on. Fortunately the prof likes to talk ….and I can almost always find something to say in a pinch …