But what is a magazine?
If you’re holding one, you can turn the page. But it’s very possible that you’re nowhere near a turnable page now. You’re reading on a computer or a hand-held device, even though this column was intended for a magazine — a Sunday newspaper supplement that started in 1896. Like hardcover books in Kindle editions and “Daily Show” clips on the Web, this column is produced in large part for a medium other than the one in which it is consumed.
That creates some dissonance. Magazine-making is a 20th-century commercial art, with time-honored conventions, protocols and economics. But the effort that goes into making a print magazine — lighting photo shoots, designing layouts, affixing page numbers — produces little value for those who find its elements deracinated on the Web. If you’re reading these words online, why should you know, or care, that they are meant to follow an illustrated cover, a table of contents and some feuilleton pieces? You don’t expect it to precede a “well” of reported stories. Nor do you anticipate a first-person essay or a crossword puzzle.
Full piece in the NYT Magazine
Code
In the book Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0
by Lawrence Lessig he argues that in the future you may be controlled more by computer code that by the legal codes. He mentions in his book that your ability to cut and paste can be taken away by programmers. He mentions this to raise the awareness that if computer code is made more restrictive it may not matter what the law says on the issue. You are controlled by what the computer code allows you to do.
I thought of this as I was being restricted by the coding in the NYT website that would not allow me to highlight a word and right click it so that I could look up the definition in Google. I have Google toolbar installed so that if I highlight a word and right click I get a menu that has a choice to “search Google for” whatever word I had highlighted. NYT restricts this so that you can only look the word up in their dictionary. Many times they do not have the term or phrase that I am looking for so you are taken to a useless page if you use their option.
The word I was looking up was feuilleton. This word was in the dictionary that the NYT allows you to link to but I wanted to get to the more comprehensive Wikipedia entry. Clearly the restriction could be worked around by opening another window, going to Wikipedia, and manually typing in the 10 letters of the word.
As librarians it is important to watch how we are restricted by our digital masters. I for one welcome our new digital overlords. I’d like to
remind them that as a trusted library personality, I can be helpful
in rounding up others to toil in their underground information caves.*
Lessig makes his book available under a Creative Commons license. Chapter One of the book is titled “code is law”. The entire book is available as a PDF.
* “Deep Space Homer” is the source of the “Overlord meme”, which is lifted from Kent Brockman’s line “And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords” and is commonly used on internet forums to express mock submission, usually for the purpose of humor or when a “participant vastly overstates the degree of oppression or social control expected to arise from the topic in question”
Full Brockman quote can be found at http://insectoverlords.org/
ctrl-c is not disabled, just right-clicking
last week I had to do a couple of print screens to capture a google news archive story… luckily, I was able to print it, but I wonder if I could have just opened it in my scanner software and convert the image to text… the content of the internet won’t always be convenient to collect, but I’m sure there will always be a way to get the job done…