I am going to try occasionally sharing a roundups of things I’ve been reading. I always enjoy the serendipity of skimming other people’s link roundups, and it was nice reviewing my notes again and finding thing’s i’d forgotten about and links with projects I hadn’t realized yet.
This basically covers the interesting bits that might be of general interest from January 18th until February 18, 2023.
Where are we now and where are we going?
Jackson, Steven J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 221–40. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0011.
“What world does contemporary information technology inhabit? Is it the imaginary nineteenth-century world of progress and advance, novelty and invention, open frontiers and endless development? Or the twenty-first century world of risk and uncertainty, growth and decay, and fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown?”
“Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, an always-almost-falling-apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities—a topic of both hope and concern.”
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
“Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.”
“This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”
Academia etc.
Donna Lanclos – Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote for #APTconf 2019
“We need to stop seeing refusal as evidence that there’s something wrong with the people doing the refusing. We need to see refusal as evidence that there is something wrong that they are communicating about, something wrong with the systems they are being presented with, with the structures in which they are placed. And then we need to take responsibility for changing things. Value the people who refuse, because it is from those people that you can learn, and then work to build a more effective, more powerful set of practices within your institution.”
In Praise of “Slow Librarianship”
“But more deeply than this, being a librarian or information professional means becoming an expert not just in the material, but in the communities that created, gave rise to and that will ultimately use that material. It means understanding and adjusting for the power dynamics that have prioritised some voices over others, and the impact that this has had on the bodies of knowledge in our care.”
ChatGPT: IDGAF (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore the Bot)
“Learning in the way it is constructed is a human trait built on, as Nick Cave so eloquently puts it, emotions, and experiences such as suffering and grief, but also joy, satisfaction, confidence, sociality, ego, and ambition amongst so many others. Learning is not a procedure, it is a sometimes traumatic, sometimes joyous journey of transition from not knowing to knowing, from incompetence to competence and from personal to collective. No generative AI can replicate that.”
Whose Evaluation Is It, Anyway Outsourcing Teacherly Judgement
“We can’t comply our way into values, attitudes, and sensibilities, and we can only partially assess knowledge and skills through compliance. Learning is something more, something harder. And understanding the learning that takes place is often a function of the relationship between the learner, the educator, the class as a whole, and the material being learned. There’s no ticky box to assess it. “
Lave, Jean. 1991. “Situating Learning in Communities of Practice.” In Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition., edited by Lauren B. Resnick, John M. Levine, and Stephanie D. Teasley, 63–82. Washington: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10096-003.
The process of becoming a full practitioner in a community of practice involves two kinds of production: the production of continuity with, and the displacement of, the practice of oldtimers (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Newcomers and oldtimers are dependent on each other: newcomers in order to learn, and oldtimers in order to cany on the community of practice. At the same time, the success of both new and old members depends on the eventual replacement of oldtimers by newcomers-become-oldtimers themselves. The tensions this introduces into processes of learning are fundamental.
Makerspaces
Hunter, John. 2017. “Reifying the Maker as Humanist.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6wq.
““Rather than reifying the digital humanities (DH) maker as a (usually male, usually white, usually economically and socially advantaged) creator, we argue that the DH maker is uniquely positioned to subvert paradigms of class, race, gender, and ableist privilege.1 Furthermore, we assert that as (digital) humanists, we (with our students) have an opportunity and a responsibility to reclaim the centrality of making to the humanities and its histories. Since the humanities is defined by the production of historically situated critique, critical making deserves prominence in the rhetoric of today’s makerspaces. Such prominence could rescue not only DH from residual claims that it is insufficiently “intellectual” but also the humanities from charges that it does not produce anything “useful.””
Clarke, Rachel Ivy. 2018. “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship.” The Library Quarterly 88 (1): 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.
“The design of information tools and services is an integral component of librarianship, yet American librarianship has self-identified as a social science for more than 100 years. This article suggests an alternative epistemological perspective to the scientific tradition in librarianship: design epistemology. The article discusses key elements that compose design epistemology and presents examples of manifestations of these elements in librarianship. Analysis reveals that librarianship has much in common with design epistemology, yet the field lacks explicit acknowledgment of design as a fundamental epistemological framework. The article concludes with a call to reconceptualize librarianship as a design discipline.”
Vibes
The META Trending Trends: 2023
Me-Maxxxing 🎉
Anti-perfectionistic, feral individualism is our hedonistic self-care
Corp Rank: 2/16 4
AI Rank: 14/16
Keywords: maximalism, me, kidulting, sleaze, goblin, rave, slob
Drivers: faced mortality, exhaustion, trauma, DGAF-ism, neartermism
What If: We normalized quirks and all forms of healthy self-care?
BUT What If: Radical individualism undermines collective progress?
To Play: Drop charades — embrace burnout and uniqueness to heal
Human Needs: freedom, relaxation, catharsis
+ Related Dive: Nihilistic Hedonism
THE ORCHARD by Mary Oliver
I have dreamed
of accomplishment.
I have fed
ambition.
I have traded
nights of sleep
for a length of work.
Lo, and I have discovered
how soft bloom
turns to green fruit
which turns to sweet fruit.
Lo, and I have discovered
all winds blow cold
at last,
and the leaves,
so pretty, so many,
vanish
in the great, black
packet of time,
in the great, black
packet of ambition,
and the ripeness
of the apple
is its downfall.