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Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

stevenberlinjohnson.com

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Re: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

#11

Post by Goladus »

I don't actually think of books so much as I think of browsing stores for actual goods. On the one hand, I have too much stuff (http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html) on the other hand, I'm far more likely to unexpectedly encounter a useful and actually buy a thing (say a cooking tool) at the mall than online (even something simple, like a quality spatula).

I wouldn't even look at cooking items online. No AI recommendation engines have ever recommended cooking utensils to me that I can remember, and certainly nothing that I was interested in. I've never made a conscious decision to outfit my kitchen, so I've never gone on an online shopping spree for that sort of thing. However, if I walk by Williams-Sonoma in the mall, I may stop in and check out what they've got.

Re: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

#12

Post by nostrademons »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #10
derefr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A book aficionado perhaps, but not a [real, graduated in L/IS] librarian. Library and information science is basically the study of all the stuff hackers like arguing about—what information is, what is or is not important/redundant information, what metadata is needed to efficiently find something, the value of information in different contexts, the best ways to guarantee the preservation or distribution of informati…

Yes, you must remember that you might think of a library as a building full of books, but to a librarian it's always been a means to an end. A librarian's job is to archive and retrieve information. For them, having to physically unshelve and reshelve books is not an act filled with nostalgia and romance -- the novelty has long since worn off. Moving books around is a tedious cost of doing business. It's what they ma…

Curiously, I don't think I know of any librarians working at Google. I wonder what they'd think of the zillions of documents at every engineer's fingertips here.

Re: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

#15

Post by joeyo »

paulgb wrote: post #9
lsb wrote: post #8

There's quite a bit of serendipity on Wikipedia: http://xkcd.com/214/ Almost all Wikipedia articles are within 4 hops of each other. You can open as many tabs as you like, but now you have the choice.

> Almost all Wikipedia articles are within 4 hops of each other. Neat fact, do you happen to have the source? I'd be interested in hearing more on this.

I couldn't find anything definitive, but here are some papers on the topic:

http://mint.typepad.com/mypapers/pp017-lizorkin.pdf

http://www.fran.it/articles/wikimania_bellomi_bonato.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=arnumber=4...

Re: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

#17

Post by ikkiv »

AmericanOP wrote: post #6

People use the net to find a wider array of information than they did before, but they don't go as deep. On the other hand, book readers are much pickier in choosing the topics they delve into. I could probably go through my entire cycle of sites in the time it takes me to pick out a book at Borders. I'll never forget stumbling across the 17th century tulip craze in a book from my public library. I never heard anothe…

Interestingly, the tulip craze was one of the early and more memorable things I've found stumbling the web. I believe some people were comparing it to the dot-com bubble.

Re: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

#18

Post by jamesbritt »

grellas wrote: post #7

The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning. I have an 1850s 5-volume set of the complete works of Aristotle in 2-column format with the original Greek in the left…

"The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning."

I find the serendipity bandwidth of wandering around a bookstore much higher than the Web. The Web, however, is more more available to me. But wandering around the real world has a lot going for it.

Re: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

#19

Post by jamesbritt »

makmanalp wrote: post #3

This is a pet peeve of mine. A fun pastime is to tell a book aficionado, or maybe a librarian how in 20 years all their favorite medium will be obliterated completely and how the likes of them will be dismissed as luddites. Just sit back and relax for the next hour while you listen to an ad-lib essay on why books are so great and how they have "life" and how computers are "mechanical and lifeless", and how staring at…

"If you don't like where everything is heading, that's fine, you're free to keep your old ways but if you're going to grumble on about it, then you better stop swimming upstream and start learning the other way too"

On the other hand, the so-called paperless society was supposed to be here something like 20 years ago.

If people are skeptical about the end of books, I don't blame them.

Re: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

#20

Post by maxwell »

kingkawn wrote: post #14

There is something fantastic though to being stuck listening to crap on the radio and suddenly a wonderful song comes on. Pleasure through forced deprivation.

At least in Maine, on commercial stations, I statistically find less moving new music than on, say, thesixtyone. But I tend to appreciate a song most after a few listens, on the album or a mix, and view the radio and (contemporary) web as mainly just a means of discovery.
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