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  This might be just what I’ve been looking for in the library
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Google Talk histories available via Google Mail

Gmail is the new Emacs — they’re porting everything to work in/through it. Meanwhile, I worry about dumping my chat histories into the data-mining war chest that is Gmail. Google really is an information technology company perched on the blade side of a knife. They’re able to do some real cool things with all the data they gather — I just worry about how it could be mis-used or mis-applied.

I guess Google’s search function is going to have to learn IM l33t speak: u no whut i mean?

This is an actual spam that got through to my inbox yesterday.

Subject: Former President Bill Klinton uses Voagra!
X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.1 required=4.0 tests=BAYES_50,DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL,
        DNS_FROM_RFC_POST,INVALID_DATE,URIBL_SBL autolearn=no
        version=3.0.4+tcb1

Everybody knows the great sexual scandal known as "Klinton-Levinsky".
After the relations like this Klintons popularity raised a lot!
It is a natural phenomenon, because Bill as a real man in order not to
shame himself when he was with Monica regularly used Voagra.
What happened you see. His political figure became more bright and more attractive.
 It is very important for a man to be respected as a man!

See our Voagra shop to enter upon the new phase of your life.
http://dumbspammerurlhere

Sometimes it’s just eerie how timely and exact the Onion can be. Points 1, 2, and 5 in today’s comic were brought up in today’s LIS 502 lecture. I wonder if Dan (the prof) reads the Onion. Now we just need to keep our nails trimmed and write a three part essay in the Atlantic Monthly.

Uh oh. Here’s another followup-from-lecture post, which I also posted on the class BBs. Let’s see if this one stirs up more conversation than my last one. As a bonus, this one is shorter.

We’ve been talking about other non-Post Industrialist views on how we grew into an information society. More recently, we’re talking about how government sponsors information programs — mostly information dissemination programs such as the post office and such, but also research and scientific advances. These are not necessarily for science itself, but for the advance of government. More interesting to me is how government seems to sponsor these initiatives, and then they’re taken over by private industry who seems to hijack them and hold the government hostage for their profitable gains. It’s like there’s a historical precedent for public service and the good of the community at large blurring and spiraling down into greed, corruption, suppression while still being supported by taxation. (I have a simile/analogy about spiders, but it’s better told in person.)

That’s just an example of a new definition of a “library” I’ve been thinking about. The library is a public tool (rather than a private profit seeking information company.) I think that LIS is larger than that definition, and the private sector can certainly benefit the public, and becoming a librarian should not be a vow of poverty (just as that shouldn’t be true for other public servants that are not necessarily backed by private means — school teachers, for example.) That definition just gives a framework for understanding libraries’ place in the information economy.

But that’s neither here nor there, and not what I posted about to the BB. The following is. As always, give me feedback and give me beer.

I wanted to follow up on my question in class, since Dan’s answer didn’t necessarily go the route I was looking for.

His answer was that individually as librarians we need to acknowledge free speech and do our part to provide and sustain those privledges when called upon. I don’t disagree. (Maybe he didn’t say that, but that’s how I heard it.) However, as he also put it, we are not an island and have to function under the umbrella of society and government. Sometimes, those have very different views on what we can and cannot do. (And going against them can get you labelled fun things, like “terrorist” or “radical militant librarian.” Other times, you look at some of the laws and legislation going through and you wonder if government officials even read the bills (conjuring visions of Michael Moore waving a 4″ PATRIOT Act binder at Congressmen.))

What I hoped to prod out of the question in class was an understanding of how these government groups that attempt to dictate morality came about — or how it was imparted to them to make morality decisions. Dan referenced in the lecture two different purposes for government action as it pertains to information: making the public at large’s needs paramount over individuals, and leveraging information as a tool to sustain the elite and suppress opposition. Those two views can contradict each other.

So, which side lends better to some of more recent cases of moral legislation? Is there some need society as a whole has that is endangered and needs to be protected by laws? Or is more an example of mass suppression to sustain some elite — and if so, who benfits from that?

Examples:

Stem cell research may save lives, but it’s “immoral” and so it’s not funded. And people die.

Gay marriage is “wrong,” but it’s illegal to discriminate so we’ll open up “domestic partner” tax cuts and medical coverage, but ooooooh don’t call it marriage. That’s illegal.

George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words skit comes to mind, and even though society has dramatically changed since he originally performed the skit, there are still language rules in broadcasting.

I’d argue it was more “damaging” to the public at large to see Mic Jager jumping around in a Vioxxed-or-Heroin-induced frenzy than Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the SuperBowl. If you followed the news a few years ago, you’d think her flashing a boob was the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Generally, what force says that government needs to step in and legislate these things. Can’t society regulate itself?