Social Implications of Technology | 34 comments (34 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 0)

I was nodding my way through your list 'till I came to this one.

Knowledge Store

the web:

libraries:

Libraries operate differently to the web, I think. I prefer your web/newspaper (or journals etc.) suggestion. Any reason in particular why you chose libraries? (Free to use, nowadays I can choose books--unless the issue is "the book" in and of itself...?--anyways, I can choose books from around the country. Libraries also have the web in them--also free to use, so I'm not sure they act...what's the word...not opposition...hmmm...in contradistinction?)

I suppose you could argue that libraries are buildings and we have to get to them, while the web is a bunch of servers (small storage space=cheap...etc...), but in fact I think I would have put it like this:

ACCESS TO INFORMATION

Libraries
Book stores

Well, I mean that's what comes to mind right now.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 12:22:30 PM EST

Re: Social Implications of Technology (4.00 / 1)

It's the cost of copy.

Information storage

websites
books

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 01:06:40 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (4.00 / 2)

And cost of access. Public libraries in the UK are full of crap. And access to university libraries is strictly controlled, and often costs money.

Web access - if you can afford it - is patchy. Arxiv.org is open. Phys Rev, Nature and the rest charge a subscription.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 02:10:26 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 0)

I can tell you nobody uses journals any longer for physics/math research, because of the arXiv.org, except when an old source is required. Nowadays, the only reason to publish in a journal is to pad one's CV. Those who want their work to be widely available use the web.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 02:26:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (4.00 / 2)

I was only using physics as an example. There are journals that I'd love to read regularly - Leonardo, Computer Music Journal, some of the art photography journals - but I don't, because they're

Not available locally
Too damn expensive

or
3. Both.

And Phys Rev and the rest still matter to journalists, if maybe not so much to scientists, because the content is easier to filter through if you're looking for a story. Arxiv.org is a sprawling free for all in comparison. You might find a story in there, if you're lucky. But it'll probably take you half a day of sifting through abstracts.

One problem with limited public access to information is that often you don't know that you're interested in a publication or book until you fall over it by accident.

Google may be a kludge, but at least you can search for things easily and have a decent chance of finding something relevant.

Not so with paper, where it's not only expensive, it's also inaccessible in the more practical sense of being invisible until you discover it. And your chances of discovering it depend on where you live and how rich you are.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 07:44:37 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 1)

Search engines suck noise. They suck because they return same results, the most popular results and not the most informative results. The quality and marginal cost of information available online is low: conversely, the search costs of specificity are high.

We come to judge the reliability, or integrity, of information by how many different publishers repeat the same news.

Over time though even this metric becomes unstable.

The upside of www distribution, besides low reproduction cost, is that many publications maintain searchable archives. These are not cached by search engines. For the price of registration (0), one can retrieve the digital copy of an article for a fraction of it's original cost -- $4 or $6 is about market rate -- bundled in the annual subscription price valued which may be 1000x more.

That seems a small price to pay for specificity and convenience.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

by Cat on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 11:03:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 0)

funny, i just learned that in umbertide (italia), a smallish market town half an hour's drive away, has free library broadband and free printing in colour.

commies!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 08:53:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (4.00 / 3)

If we go by access to information then the cost of just going to a library can be prohibitive. Especially so if you nurture a few lazy bones in your body. Libraries are rarely up to date when compared to web archives of fiction. Searching through a library always takes more time and is vastly more difficult since there's no way to search by a book's contents. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to get a book you found. And having borrowed a book, you've committed yourself to returning it within a specified timeframe.

But this isn't what I meant when I wrote this essay a year ago. But before we get to that, keep in mind that libraries' patrons are consumers of libraries but they aren't its customers. The customers of a library are the municipal council, private backers and taxpayers. And in that sense, libraries are extremely expensive to build, own, operate and maintain, while providing very limited services to a small clientele.

So back to the question of what's a knowledge store. A knowledge store doesn't merely store information, otherwise it would be an archive. Nor does it provide access without providing storage, otherwise it would be a daily. A knowledge store is something that provides storage and organized access to knowledge. So you really can't separate the two.

Finally, the web is far from being the ultimate knowledge store. For one thing, it's extremely poorly organized with very limited searching capability. Google is a hack and a clunky one at best. There have been several proposals for knowledge stores far more powerful than the web will ever be. If the kind of knowledge store I have in mind ever got online, it would put out the publishing industry like a wet match.

by richardk (richard kulisz gmail) on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 06:41:17 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (4.00 / 2)

Searching through a library always takes more time and is vastly more difficult since there's no way to search by a book's contents.

There are these nifty new things called 'databases' and when combined with another recent invention known as 'subject headings' make it fairly easy to search through a library.

There's no guarantee that you'll be able to get a book you found.

One word, or rather acroynym - ILL

And having borrowed a book, you've committed yourself to returning it within a specified timeframe.

Computer renewals - until someone else requests the book, also from their desk. If I actually had all the books I've ever checked out of libraries my apartment would be wall to wall books.

Major libraries are one of the world's greatest treasures. But you're right, they are expensive.

by MarekNYC on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 06:59:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 1)

The web is poorly organized only if you accept a Top-Down hierarchy - the Relational Data Model being the best known, perhaps - as the paradigm for Knowledge-bases. The web, as Information-Source/Storage, has a high degree of sophistication, nuance and flexibility.

What is wrong with the web are the inane Information Retrieval (sic) methods, as you point-out. Google is barely tolerable and only tolerable because everything else is even worse. Of the vaunted alternatives XML is a joke: a computer-based natural language processing system completely relying on a human to process the natural language input into the system. How's that again? And the great Semantic Web? ... pull-eeze spare me.

Crack the InfoRet problem and the world is gravy.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 07:27:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 0)

What can organization mean if not a means to aid retrieval?

The web is poorly organized because it maintains no distinction between Works and Bullshit. Nor does it have any concept of a Work, only of a "web page" which is a completely artificial construct.

If you put a novel online, there's no way to specify, in its full generality, in a machine-readable manner, that the novel is a single, individual Work. Instead, you must trawl through individual archives to specify this to each one, each in its own unique manner. This is called "posting the novel" and it is tedious.

The inability to search through all, for example, scientific works and ONLY scientific works, is a liability. So is the inability to specify a search through works which you have already read. Nor by their publication dates.

by richardk (richard kulisz gmail) on Sat Jan 27th, 2007 at 04:05:14 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 0)

"...the kind of knowledge store I have in mind..."

Could you say more about this? The nature of knowledge stores is vastly more important to the nature of society than almost anyone understands.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

by technopolitical on Fri Jan 26th, 2007 at 10:23:40 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 0)

Could you say more about this?

I was about to ask the same question.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Sat Jan 27th, 2007 at 12:31:59 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Social Implications of Technology (none / 1)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UniversalCatalog

except I've been told it's not very descriptive

by richardk (richard kulisz gmail) on Sat Jan 27th, 2007 at 04:10:35 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Social Implications of Technology | 34 comments (34 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)