Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Social Media in the 16th Century: How Luther Went Viral

Published on December 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist…

It is a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.

That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.

Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation. More…

Books and Band Saws: the Future of Libraries

Published on December 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Jon Kalish at NPR on Mind/Shift…

As information becomes more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create “hackerspaces,” where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise.

The Allen County Public Library, which serves the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., has a modest hackerspace inside a trailer in its parking lot. Library director Jeff Krull says hosting it is consistent with the library’s mission.

“We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business,” he says. “We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own.”

The 50-foot trailer is known as the Maker Station and belongs to TekVenture, an educational nonprofit that had struggled to find a building it could afford before it was approached by the library. TekVenture signed an agreement with the library to operate in its parking lot for a year. TekVenture President Greg Jacobs says this partnership made sense. More…

George Whitman, owner of Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, dies at 98

Published on December 19, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

(Credit: Miguel Medina/Agence France-Press/Getty Images)

From Matt Schudel at The Washington Post, Post Local…

George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop that became the center of English-language literary life in Paris and might be the most famous and beloved bookstore in the world, died Dec. 14 in his apartment above the store. He died two days after his 98th birthday.

According to the store’s Web site, he had had a stroke two months ago.

Mr. Whitman was an American expatriate who found his way to Paris after World War II and never left. He opened the bookstore, directly opposite Notre Dame cathedral, in 1951.

In time, Mr. Whitman’s jumbled shop, with its sloping shelves and teetering stacks of books, became something of a cathedral in its own right and a required stop for Americans in Paris. More…

Jefferson’s Taper: A National Digital Library

Published on December 8, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

(Christophe Boisvieux/Corbis)

From Robert Darnton at The New York Review of Books…

In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of ideas to the way people light one candle from another: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

The eighteenth-century ideal of spreading light may seem archaic today, but it can acquire a twenty-first-century luster if one associates it with the Internet, which transmits messages at virtually no cost. And if Internet enthusiasm sounds suspiciously idealistic, one can extend the chain of associations to a key concept of modern economics—that of a public good. Public goods such as clean air, efficient roads, hygienic sewage disposal, and adequate schooling benefit the entire citizenry, and one citizen’s benefit does not diminish that of another. Public goods are not assets in a zero-sum game, but they do carry costs—up-front costs, usually paid through taxation, at the production end of the services and facilities that the public enjoys as users. The Jeffersonian ideal of access to knowledge as a public good does not mean that knowledge has no cost. We enjoy freedom of information, but information is not free. Someone had to pay for Jefferson’s taper. More…