Radical Society – Review of Culture & Politics:
THE SKEPTIC IS GENERALLY PORTRAYED AS standing, on purpose, outside the normal flow of life. The skeptic refuses to assent to things that most people take for granted, perceiving the world through a protective lens of doubt and incredulity. The skeptic is the one who pauses just as everyone else jumps in.

The funny thing about this picture is that it characterizes an attitude almost exactly opposite to what some of the earliest skeptics actually proposed. For them, the most important thing to be skeptical about was the very tendency for human beings to worry about knowledge. Once you start worrying about whether you really know things or not, it sets off a whole chain of intellectual moves that, to the skeptic, get you nowhere. Skepticism is not about nay-saying and arch looks; it is about getting us back into the normal flow of life, with, perhaps, a renewed and deeper sense of how flowing that flow really is.
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ahh pyrrho.. an old favorite.

In You More Than Yourself — In These Times:
And the same goes for my partners who I communicate with in cyberspace: I can never be sure who they are. Are they “really” the way they describe themselves? Is there a “real” person at all behind a screen-persona or is the screen-persona a mask for several different people? Does the same “real” person possess and manipulate more screen-personas? Or perhaps I am simply dealing with a digitalized entity that does not stand for any “real” person? In short, interface means precisely that my relationship to the Other is never face-to-face, that it is always mediated by the interposed digital machinery whose structure is that of a labyrinth. I “browse,” I err around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the Whole of it—this immense circuitry of “murmurs”—remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension. The obverse of cyberspace’s direct democracy is this chaotic and impenetrable magnitude of messages and their circuits that even the greatest effort of my imagination cannot comprehend. Immanuel Kant would have called it a cyberspace Sublime.

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zizek on cyberspace

Cult Of 2.0:
Confession: I have my own religious mental picture of librarians and libraries and the primary symbol has always been the monk and the monastery. People driven by and dedicated to structure and fundamentals. That’s not all a library is but in truth I believe the majority of what constitutes a library is fundamentals, basic rules that guide our actions on a day to day basis. We’re a tool for visionaries, not the visionaries themselves.
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I find this to be very problematic. Perhaps I’m an optimist and just think that everyone is a visionary, if they want to be and find a way to be, they can be a visionary. Everyone can contribute and lead elements of the field forward.

There are structures and fundamentals, this is true, but libraries are not monks and monastaries or the homes of servants, they are places that serve the community and there is no better way to serve than to provide leadership and direction in the service of those communities, their informational needs, their cultural needs, and their social needs. The guide is to serve, but not to be be servile.

Paper Daisies: NYC:
These things happen all the time

I’ve always said (well, since I moved here 4 months ago) that NYC smells like a toilet. Apparently, though, these things happen all the time. I didn’t notice this today, but I guess many others did.

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This is an interesting post… for those interested in attending Pratt for a graduate degree in library science.

Peter Suber, Open Access News
:
Is China blocking OA to Chinese Marxist texts?

Noam Cohen, Who’s Attacking an Online Marxist Archive? China Is Suspected of Trying to Block Access to Texts, New York Times, February 5, 2007. Excerpt: …According to the Marxist Internet Archive, an online community that produces and organizes an ever-growing [open access] Marxist library…computer attacks primarily from China are jeopardizing its ability to provide Marxist texts, perhaps forcing the library to stop providing material in Chinese.

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The NYT covered the Marxist Archive of which the CDDC is now one of the main hosting providers. We have not had as much problems with Chinese, but that is probably because of the excellent infrastructure that Virginia Tech provides.

$21,280 starting salary in a Virginia public library system:
There is really no need for a study. The study will, however, provide quantitative evidence to support the self-evident–that $21,280 is a paltry starting salary for a professional with a master’s degree (who may be carrying sizeable student debt incurred while earning that degree). A study of salaries in other libraries in the region won’t, however, tell the whole story.
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this makes me wonder…. I mean the willingness to take on debt to me is a private matter and has much to do with personal choices. But… the low salary, that speaks to the merit the local people assign to the role of librarians… it is problematic.

YouTube – A Librarian’s 2.0 Manifesto:

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This is an interesting library 2.0 manifest from the standpoint of a librarian.

i broke one of my favorite mugs this morning…. one my sister got me i think in undergrad… suxxors. those are the little things in life that can change a day from weeee, to bleh.

33 reasons librarians are still extremely important:
A no-nonsense list, good for any sort of situation. My favorites are 24) The internet is subject to manipulation, and 32) Libraries are a stopgap to anti-intellectualism. [thanks forrest]
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i know several anti-intellectual and more sinister anti-academic oriented librarians in training. they seem to have a strong negative feeling for anything they see as not immediately applicable, and or ‘academic’, ‘theoretic’. This is a tragedy of the ‘professional’ school certification and training, i think.