LISNews: Librarian News

How We Will Read: Clay Shirky
“Social reading,” the way I’ve always interpreted the phrase, is reading that recognizes that you’re not just a consumer, you’re a user. You’re going to do something with this, and that something is going to involve a group of other people. Read a book. The very next thing you’re going to do, if it was at all interesting, is talk to someone about it. Book groups and discussion lists are social reading. Because so much of our media in the 20th century was delivered in real-time, with very little subsequent ability to share, save, shift, store, we separated the consumption from the reproduction and use of media. We don’t actually think of ourselves as users of media, when in fact we are.

Details here.

Specific discussion of a LISNEWS post in this issue. See- Public Library Closures:
On Not Dropping Like Flies

Deep Thought is Dead, Long Live Deep Thought

‘Where are these jobs that will require such rapid “searching, browsing, assessing quality, and synthesizing the vast quantities of information”? We don’t need those skills to drive a truck or manage company accounts or sell clothes or do IT customer service or write novels or write code or give inoculations to patients or teach seven-year-olds how to read … so what do, or what will, need them for? And how many of us will need them?’

Revealed: How China censors its social networks
The way the Chinese government censors and deletes politically-sensitive terms online has been revealed for the first time.

As expected, the communists are hypersensitive to criticism of the state - but also to people slating the so-called 'Great Firewall', the network blocking technology that prevents Chinese people browsing the internet freely.