Paper and string

Cady Gray is in an origami phase these days. I keep her regularly supplied with paper (ordered from Amazon in various patterns), and she fills our house with animals, objects, and geometric figures. She was introduced to string figures by a beloved babysitter, and practices the movements carefully.

I remember spending hours in the same pursuits when I was her age. I checked out every book in the various libraries to which I have access, creased them open, and crouched over them on my floor trying to interpret the various arrows and dotted lines in the line drawings.

It wasn't long before I (a) ran out of origami and string figure books, and (b) ran into frustration with directions I couldn't squint into clarity. And that was that. There was no place for me to go to make progress. And eventually, all those skills faded. I can't even remember how to make a teacup with a loop of string anymore.

Cady Gray is in a much more favorable position to keep learning and keep developing those habits in her hands. The reason is the internet. Origami sites -- not to mention paper planes, string figures, whatever you want to make out of those simple materials -- are plentiful. Best of all, you can follow along with illustrative photographs or videos (even better!) not limited in number or size by a paper publication.

I love to watch her create. And just by trying so many things, and practicing the basic skills over and over, she's able to develop a sense of the craft that helps her understand and attempt more advanced maneuvers. Who knows whether she'll outgrown paper and string like I did, or at about the same time? The important thing is that while her interest remains high, she has so many more options, so much better instruction, and is able to accomplish so much more.

A tough lesson

Cady Gray loves playing on Tinkatolli, a great online world for kids that encourages offline creativity.  A few weeks ago, she decided to make a toy bed in response to a Tinkatolli challenge.  I helped her find materials and put some of the parts together (although she'd completed a lot of it before I got involved.  Then I took some pictures of it for her, and she uploaded it into her scrapbook and entered it in the Tinka Fair.

Yesterday she came to me with a plan to delete her project, use another photo, and resubmit it, because she thought that she had submitted too early to be a part of the Tinka Fair.  Then she returned excited and thrilled because she found that her project had been accepted and had garnered several votes already.  The conversation for the rest of the day was about her competition, the votes she'd gotten, and her chances of getting more.

Just a few minutes ago Cady Gray walked into the living room with the crumpled face of a seven-year-old about to burst into tears.  When I asked what was wrong, she said that she actually had deleted her project yesterday before she discovered the Tinka Fair acceptance, and that her bed and all its votes had disappeared from the Fair.  She was crushed.  The idea that site users she didn't know had looked at the picture and thought enough of it to give it a vote had been a huge revelation to her the day before.  She had been looking forward to finding out if her position had improved.  And now it was all gone, with no chance to get it back that she could see.

Anybody who's accidentally deleted work or lost something irreplaceable or missed a chance long hoped for will understand how she felt.  I haven't seen her this bereft in ages.  I told her I understood her disappointment and was sorry, but that there would be other chances.  And just now, about 10 minutes later, she came out with dry eyes to ask for a little more time on the computer, and told me she felt better.  Tinkatolli had a new challenge she'd just discovered, and she was focused on trying to accomplish it.

We've all had those days or weeks when one downer after another has us wondering if we'll ever start back up.  My kids -- and my whole family, really -- have so much going for them.  Most of our time is spent in a really happy place.  That makes me treat setbacks with anxiety and fear; is this negative incident the start of a avalanche?

The message to a kid weeping over a deleted file and a lost contest is that she has plenty of creativity left to make more things, and plenty of other contests to enter.  Archer responded to Cady Gray's distress in typical fashion -- by asking about the limits of the situation.  "Could there ever be a problem that has no solution?" he asked, after I reminded him that there's always another chance to do better.  "Yes," I said as honestly as I could, "but they're rare. Almost always we can try again and work to improve." The message to myself when things don't go my way is the same: Tomorrow is another day.

You feel me on your cheek and on your sleeve

Today's post about my newest tool, and the uses to which I hope to put it, is at Toxophily.



The sewing bug appears to have bitten several of my students at the same time as me; my Twitter and Facebook feeds are blowing up with 20-somethings spending the whole day quilting.  Someday I'll write a post about how that reality -- unthinkable without the internet, mind you -- provides an important but rarely noticed counterpoint to the handwringing about how "digital natives" are a different species that will doom our treasured art forms like the novel or the cricket match.

Work in progress

One of the reasons I wanted to build myself a new crafting area is to make it easier for me to undertake sewing projects.  Right now if I want to sew, I do it on the dining room table, and it better be something I can complete in a few hours.  I'd like to leave my sewing machine set up on my new desk and have everything already at hand when I have time to work.

Denizens of Ravelry frequently ask whether there are similar sites for their other hobbies -- needlepoint, cross-stitch, rug-hooking, tatting, etc.  The answer is no, at least with the features that make Ravelry so powerful and unique.  But at least one group has attempted to apply a self-consciously Ravelry-esque model to sewing, and the result is mysewingcircle.com.

Ravelers will find the site familiar, from the "notebook" where they can link their projects to patterns and fabrics, to the lower-case sans-serif typeface used throughout.

Right now it's small, but growing.  Evidence that things are going right is easy to come by.  I entered my projects yesterday, and for one of them, the pattern (an internet freebie) wasn't yet in the database.  As I would on Ravelry, I created the pattern entry myself, entering all the information, then linking it to my project.

When I went back to the site today and took a look at my notebook, I saw that the pattern now had an official picture in the database.  Somebody scanning the newly entered patterns had gone to the site where it appears and found a picture they could attach to the database record for the pattern.

What that says to me is that the site is already populated by people who care about making it useful.  They tend the garden, water and weed what's planted by the whole user population, keep everything tidy, and jump in to contribute where they see a need.

That's what's made Ravelry so successful -- a combination of site design that makes user contributions easy and rewarding, and a community that quickly evolved folkways of service.  Seeing those same attributes at mysewingcircle.com gives me confidence that the site has what it takes to become the elusive "Ravelry for sewing" that so many are looking for.  And just as Ravelry has made me a better, more prolific, and more adventurous knitter -- by leaps and bounds -- I'm hoping mysewingcircle.com will improve my skills and inspire my efforts.

Information cascade

When it rains it pours, and when there's a drought you can't buy a break. Noel and I have been without laptops since the middle of last week. Mine got to the repair shop today, which was expected -- I sent it ground and decided to live with the slow pace. Noel was hoping to have his back the same day, but ended up having to leave it over the weekend and retrieve it today.

We were muddling through, dealing with things that don't work so well (posting to the AV Club content management system, chiefly), until I screwed up our network connection in a misguided affort to refurbish an old computer. We had a tense couple of hours of no internet at all while I tried to either put things back the way they should be, or create a new configuration that would work.

Then this morning Noel stopped receiving e-mail, and when I tried to send him something I got back a "user quota exceeded" error. Turns out our local ISP isn't too generous with the amount of e-mails it will let you keep on its server; the 500 or so that Noel had gotten over the last several days was too much for them. When he was able to get his laptop back and actually take the e-mails off the server, everything got back to normal.

It always seems to be that way -- when you're down, the universe kicks you, and when you're trying to work around less than optimal circumstances, your window gets narrower and narrower.

But in a good sign for thinking and acting sensibly about networks, online community guru and personal hero of mine Derek Powazek has started a new project to counter skeptical, doomsaying, or downbeat assessments of the internet and our interactions through it. Amusingly, it was inspied by a particularly off-the-mark tweet by a respected commentator. I like where Derek is going with this -- especially as foreshadowed by his Declaration of Principles. Follow his progress on this tumblr, and enjoy the counter-narrative that's so badly needed.

Sharing time

A few links of recent interest:

- As our kids begin to use the internet more, we wonder whether we've given them enough guidance to keep them safe and help them use good judgment. This online curriculum on digital literacy looks like it might improve their understanding of online communication, which I think is more important than a collection of rules.

- After my freshmen focused on spontaneity, altruism, and community pride in their service project last semester, I'm intrigued by this study of heroism. I wonder whether it might spark ideas among a future group of students about what conditions lead to individuals doing extraordinary things.

- How about this craft to do with your kids this summer? Klutz has a new book with everything you need to make bouquets of papercraft flowers. And Craftzine posted a free rose project from it to whet your appetite. I think Cady Gray would love to try this with me.

Safety first

A few days ago, Ravelry announced that its user database had been breached. The hackers got encrypted passwords that they could potentially (given enough time, computing power, and determination) decode the passwords. Ravelry's owners and programmers forced everyone to change their Ravelry passwords, and advised them to change passwords as well on any other site where they might have used the same password.

I've written about internet security before, but I'm certainly no fanatic about it. Like most frequent users of online services, however, I've gradually become aware that the practices that seemed just fine when the 'net was young and one's user accounts were in the single digits are now profoundly unhealthy. In particular, the problem of the "usual password" has become acute.

I have a usual password. I'll bet you do, too. It's something meaningful only to me. I stick a number or two on the end sometimes (usually only if the site forces me to have a password of a certain length). Whenever I'm creating an account to buy one thing, or to get access to something free, or to try out a service, I use it. Usually I give a fleeting thought to whether my profile contains sensitive information, but only in the cases of banks and insurance and such do I feel the need to be extra careful and have a unique password.

Ravelry was one of those places where I used the standard password. It was just yarn and projects and chat, after all -- no credit cards or social security numbers. But the break-in revealed how foolish it is to use a site-by-site judgment. If a hacker can get that password in one place, he can crack all the places where you've used it. That goes double if, like many of us, you have a standard username that you use all over the internet (it just so happens that my Rav username is unique).

Once you start thinking about the amount of information that might be found when you put all those sites together, it's overwhelming. My cavalier attitude toward keeping my financials "extra safe" with unique passwords isn't enough.

Thank goodness I've been a user of LastPass for some time now -- that has enabled me to have unique random passwords for a lot of my sites. But I ran their security check program after the Rav break-in and was stunned to find that I had dozens of sites with my standard password. Dozens. The list went on and on.

As of yesterday, I changed every single one to a random string, stored in LastPass. I kept my e-mail login meaningful only to me, using a phrase with substitutions and transpositions; I want to be able to store that one in my biological memory bank, since it's what I'll need to access the "forget password" processes of all the other sites if I can't get to my LastPass vault for some reason.

I've been lucky rather than secure. I'm still not inconveniencing myself unduly with the 2-factor authentication schemes and the like that are available, but at least I've gotten myself to the point that I should have reached several years ago. Without password management tools, though, keeping track of strong, unique passwords for every login would be inconceivable. With such software, it becomes simply a matter of overcoming inertia and complacency to do what's right.

Daily reading

You'll find a lot of folks out there decrying the dumb stuff to be found on the internet.  Absolutely -- like everything, 90% of the internet is crap.

But what people miss when they talk about the idiocy of Twitter or blogs or whatever is that you get to choose what you read therein.  You could send a Martian into any bookstore and they'd conclude that books are mostly awful, because awful dominates in terms of sheer volume -- self-help, diet, celebrity, cash-ins, etc.  We don't think of books as a sewage pit because we know we don't pick a random sampling to read, but make informed choices based on what we want to read.  And within the range of things we might want to read are more wonderful books than we could consume in a lifetime, even though that range constitutes only a small sliver of the pie chart of books the market produces.

If, like me, you experience in the internet mostly through a feed reader, the internet looks very different than it does to the doomsayers.  I subscribe to interesting sources through Google Reader, then flip through the hundreds of documents it serves up daily for me using the fantastic iPad app Reeder.  In thirty minutes I can discover two essays I want to use in class, useful advice, cogent perspective on current affairs, inspiring and sobering personal stories, and a good laugh.  If I see something I think deserves wider attention, I hit a button to share it with folks who have chosen to follow me; similarly, many of the items I read are those my friends have passed along by hitting that same button.

Seen through my screen, the internet is a place that enriches, informs, and entertains me every day.  I choose to filter out the crap.  You do, too, every time you watch something you've DVR'd rather than flipping channels, every time you go to your favorite author's shelf in the library, every time you refrain from sweeping everything from the grocery store endcap display into your cart.  More choices always means a gross proliferation of crap, but that's not the important factor on which to focus -- instead, it's that we develop better tools for keeping our personal consumption nourishing, and watch the miniscule sliver of the pie that we want grow along with the part we're happily ignoring.

In the crowd

So much ink has been spilled about how the internet affects us.  Y'all know how I feel -- I think the opportunities afforded by online connection far outweigh the problems or potential losses involved.  One area that is not sufficiently appreciated, in my view, is the creation of crowds.

I think people understand (although may not bring to consciousness often enough) that the internet overcomes isolation and helps people find support groups.  Where you live, there might be no one else with your particular problem -- or no one willing to talk about it.  Online, you can find hundreds -- or hundreds of thousands.  Knowing you are not alone is one of the most powerful steps toward dealing in a healthy way with your challenges, whatever they may be.

But just as important, affecting just many people, is another crowd-creating phenomenon -- that of inspiration and empowerment.  I've written before about the experience of going online and finding that the activity you want to learn isn't beyond your abilities, because you can find example after example of people doing it -- people just like you.

That experience lasts well beyond the novice stage, the hurdle of learning and becoming proficient at your chosen activity.  It remains startling to me, many years on, just how big that crowd can be.  Today is Sew, Mama, Sew's Giveaway Day, a blogosphere-wide holiday for handcrafters.  Hundreds of blogs all over the world are participating; the link above is only one of three master lists of giveaways.  That may not sound impressive until you realize that almost every one of those sites are focused on providing resources for others to participate in the craft.  They host tutorials, provide patterns, and demonstrate the possibilities of the activity.  For every site in the list, there are dozens -- hundreds -- sometimes thousands of followers making things of their own.

And lest you forget that, sometimes those followers appear in a crowd, all together, all at once, their work providing vivid proof that the world is full of more people making and creating and forging their own creative, beautiful environments than you usually let yourself imagine.  Flickr pools collecting multiple versions of a certain design, or all the things people have made out of a certain material, or variations on a motif theme.  Hundreds.  Thousands.  Just in this little corner of all the things you could make, or all the materials you could use.

The internet has this power to aggregate.  And the potential of aggregation is its forceful demonstration of what is possible.  I can no longer pretend that everyone thinks this is hard, that everyone has trouble doing it, that it is a lost art.  In fact, I'm actively annoyed now when people talk to me about my knitting and imply that no one does this anymore.  Open your eyes! I want to say.  There are millions of people knitting, there are thousands of people making and selling yarn and designing patterns.  How can you miss this?  How has it not crossed your consciousness?  Are you blind?

I want to say to them: Look, I am here to prove to you that you could do this, if you chose.  But you could tell yourself, I suppose, that I'm specially talented -- different from you.  If so, please have a look at the hundreds of thousands like me who not only do this but go to the trouble of posting on the internet what they have done.  Imagine that for each of them there are a handful or a roomful or a town-full of people doing it who do not bother to post about it on the internet -- the invisible fellow travelers.  Now do you see that you have no excuse?

Go and look.  Then do.  You may become an exception in your workplace, in your neighborhood, in your suburb.  But you are not an endangered species in the world.  You are part of a massive movement.  People fear that the message of the internet is observe, comment, be above it all, be a parasite.  I disagree.  Open the right door -- the right million doors -- and the message is: Do.  As we are doing.

On assignment

One of the categories I'm supposed to list for my year-end faculty activity report is "community service for which your professional training is essential."  The idea is to show what you do outside of your job that enriches the lives of others through the kind of expertise you bring to the inside of your job.

I always think about that phrase "for which your professional training is essential" when I'm asked to contribute a piece to an online magazine or speak to a Sunday school class.  Those invitations come with a fair amount of regularity, probably due to a combination of the expertise I have to contribute and the avocations and extracurricular interests for which I'm known.

Consider the latest few examples -- two pieces for the recently-launched site Jesus, Jazz, Buddhism and one that will be appearing at the end of the week on Arkansas: Abroad.  The topics I was asked to cover were movies (The King's Speech in particular), the internet (and its relation to a philosophy of the material world in particular), and religious tolerance (stemming from a visit by the Dalai Lama to the area), all from the perspective of a theologian.  That list extends to the sites of my research interests, draws upon non-theological expertise I've developed, and stakes a position in an area where anyone in my field would be expected to be able to speak cogently.

I like being asked to write these pieces, although they're not always easy.  It seems to me that academics ought to contribute to the public conversation in areas where our training has led us to think deeply.  The most rewarding part, though, is being able to make connections between the skills I've developed in various aspects of my work and the kinds of cultural conversations in which a broad array of people want to be involved.

Perfect timing

Books and albums have had official release dates for years.  Used to be that if you wanted to be among the first to read that book or hear that album, you made time to go to the store on that Tuesday.  (Why are release dates always Tuesday, by the way?  Anyone?)

Now thanks to internet pre-orders, you can have the book or album shipped to you, scheduled to arrive on its day of release.  Or if you have a Kindle, you can have the book appear on your device as soon as it's available for purchase.  I woke up this morning and found the next book in my all-time favorite fantasy series, Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North, ready to read on my Kindle.

This process hasn't completely killed the tradition of going to the store on release day, though, as anybody who has ever attended a Harry Potter midnight release party knows.  It's become an optional, socially-intensive way of acquiring a highly-anticipated book or album.  We have the no-effort way, in which it comes to you, and we have the maximal effort way in which we make a big production out of the acquisition.  Either way, there's something wonderful about waiting for that piece of media you want, and devouring it on the first day you can get it.

The essentials

Ah, there's nothing like a new hobby.  Assembling a library, acquiring tools, building skills.  I love throwing myself into a new interest wholeheartedly, researching the best techniques and references.

Carol got me started in the best possible way -- by sharing her own list of essentials.  There's something irresistibly wise and constructive about such a list.  Those who have learned by experience what is most useful, sharing that experience as a starting point with beginners and helping them avoid the long period of trial and error.  Cool Tools can be used to assemble such a list for dozens of specialized and routine occupations.  Mark Frauenfelder recently started adding his most-used and most-useful Mac applications onto a new computer, and decided to share them in order of centrality to his life in a series of Boing Boing posts.

Do you have a list of essentials that help you do your job, or something else you love to do?  And if that thing is sewing, all the better.  Please share on your own site, or in the comments?

In touch

While discussing the first chapter of Kevin Kelly's new book What Technology Wants with my senior seminar, we started talking about the well-worn topic Social Networking: Bane Or Boon?

A few days earlier, I had sat quietly fuming as the five dozen freshmen in our program fell all over themselves in an introductory class session to denounce Facebook and cyberspace in general as the root of all evil.  Not for themselves, mind you -- for their less enlightened peers, and especially for their younger siblings.  "I didn't get a cell phone until I was sixteen," one young man interjected, vis-a-vis the inappropriately early introduction of cell phones into the lives of the next generation.

I was amused -- the haphazard adoption of new communications technologies in the last decade thus being turned into ironclad and commonsense principles of The Way Things Should Be -- but also annoyed.  Never having not been connected, the eighteen-year-olds were disturbingly quick to identify connectness as the central problem of their time.

Kelly helped my seniors put it in perspective.  I paraphrase, not having the book in front of me: "At the exact moment when Americans were said to bowl alone, millions were gathering online."  I looked it up.  Sure enough, Putnam's famous essay is dated 1995, and what else was happening in 1995?  The World Wide Web was entering its adolescence, having come into the lives of the early adopters just a couple of years earlier.

I never fail to be astounded at how quickly the predictions of doom shift.  Fifteen years ago (and for the previous several decades), the ruination of American society was our increasing isolation from each other -- we sat before our TVs passively imbibing, amusing ourselves to death, building houses without front porches and cities without coffeeshops or gathering places.  Now the ruination of America is that we can't live without each other, that we communicate incessantly, that we are losing the ability to be alone, that we have way too much to say and feel entitled to be heard.

This afternoon I sat at the playground while my kids constructed two elaborate fantasy parks in turn -- one for each of them to run -- complete with tickets, attractions, rewards, challenges, and prizes -- and I knitted while occasionally making an observation on Twitter.  A thousand miles away, my husband was standing in line at a movie, making his own observations -- a conversation with our friends and acquaintances, tangentially directed at each other, in real time.  Between our tweets flowed the observations, news, appeals, jokes, items of interest, and other ephemera of the conversations we've each chosen to listen in on -- some people we know, some we simply find enlightening.  We are connected.  Being connected, we are presented with opportunities to care, to touch, to help, to encourage, to critique.  Is this not exactly what the doomsayers of the previous generation felt was slipping away forever?

Two million hands at work

Unless you are a knitter or crocheter -- or a web developer -- you probably don't know exactly what Ravelry is.  Yet the site signed up its one millionth member in the wee morning hours of Saturday, November 13.

I've been on Ravelry since August 2007.  I still run into fellow knitters who've never heard of it, let alone the general public.  And I still find it difficult to explain in a sentence of two why they should be a part of it.  It's not just a social network.  It's not just a database of materials and patterns.  It's a socially-generated database that turns out to be the greatest collaboratively-updated repository of information about a specialized skillset ever produced.

When I wrote about Ravelry in my presentation to the Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Theology and Energy last February, there were a quarter of a million members.  When I updated the essay for publication this summer, there were 600,000 members.  The join rate keeps accelerating.  Of course the number of regular users is much smaller and grows more slowly; yet the daily high point of simultaneous users also keeps climbing.  Not only are there more members, but there are also more people logging onto the site regularly.

On January 12, 2008, I sent my first message to a new Raveler as part of the newly-formed Ravelry Welcome Wagon.  Almost three years later, I've sent more than 31,000 messages to people within a day or two after they join the site.  My Welcome Wagon beat is the G's, which means that I welcome everyone who chooses a username that starts with G.  That's 31,000 grandmothers, girls, grrls, glows, and geeks.

It's no exaggeration to say that Ravelry has changed my life.  It's brought me hundreds of new friends in the last four years.  It's pushed me to acquire new skills and try techniques that I would have thought utterly beyond me.  In fact, it's turned me from a person who has managed to learn the basics of knitting, into a knitter.  The living, palpable, visible example of thousands of people just like me who transformed string into art and comfort and warmth and adornment -- that's what it took to make me into a maker. 

Now I create my life rather than consuming it.  Ravelry made it possible.  One million members is quite a milestone.  But a far more impressive feat, from where I sit, is how Ravelry bridged the distance between me when I picked up the needles, and me now.

Glory days

For the last couple of years, I've spent my summer writing about a sitcom that was never a big hit (and hung on for a couple of years at the bottom of its network, ratings-wise). Episode by episode, season by season, I have been working my way through NewsRadio, a NBC comedy that aired from 1995-1999. If you weren't a television aficionado, a Saturday Night Live fan, or a Kids In The Hall follower at that time, you might have no memory of it.

But for my money (and I'm not the only one), it's one of the pinnacles of the half-hour situation comedy genre. Now, granted, that's a genre I think is well worth paying attention to -- a format in which great art is genuinely possible. Not everyone would agree. Particularly in the twenty-first century, when laugh tracks seem to be on their way out among the cognoscenti.

Week after week I find it immeasurably gratifying that a loyal cadre of readers gathers to comment on my write-ups and offer their own observations about the quality of the episodes discussed. It's one of the defining primordial Internet experiences, one that we might find ourselves forgetting as we move farther way from the birth of the web: Strike out alone, and find a community. All of us were watching back in the nineties, or someone helped us out with tapes between then and now, or we've caught up on DVD or online in recent years. And we all find this semi-obscure show worth talking about and thinking about.

The season I'm writing about this summer is Season 4, the consensus best season of what we would contend is one of the best shows the network system has ever somehow fortuitously allowed on the air. If you remember the show dimly or fondly, tune in to the coverage. If you've never been initiated into the club, find yourself a box set or Hulu. We're having an amazing time celebrating TV comedy that approaches perfection more often than any of us have a right to expect. And we'd love to have you join us.

Crowdsourcing inspiration

One of my favorite features of the twenty-first century world of social networking is how visible inspiration has become. It used to be up to art and technology historians to identify who was an influence on whom. But as we assemble our plans and creative impulses in tiny pieces scattered across the internet, our browser histories themselves become a record of our sources. In addition, it's become customary -- indeed, expected -- for those keeping online project notebooks to note and link to the items and ideas that inspired them.

Inspiration is always a delicate matter in academia. We are socialized simultaneously in the art and ethics of referencing our sources, and in the value of originality. Paying homage to our inspirations, in that environment, can come to feel like a chore and a cheat. We overwhelm our readers with references to convince them of the thoroughness of our research. At the same time, we struggle to assert that we are neverthless doing something new, unique, and valuable -- something worthy, we hope, of being cited as inspiration or authority by another.

Perhaps there's something to the two terms I just juxtaposed. Academia -- well, the humanities, at any rate -- operates according to structures that bestow and honor authority. The fear of the limitless eclectic synthesis ethic of the Internet is based in the horror of lost authority. Yet everywhere I look in my social networks, I see people citing each other -- spreading the word about what others have done, adding their own spin, and putting what they do out there to inspire in its turn. The arts have long understood that there is a distinction between inspiration and authority. Even though originality is far more highly prized in those circles, it stands in tension not with the repetition of truths implied by the notion of authority, but with the participation in a communal process of choosing styles and elements of meaning.

As usual, I see a lot to be optimistic about in the emerging folkways of social networking. My hope is that these environments are socializing their participants into an expectation of generosity and appreciation. It seems unlikely that the need for critical engagement will go unfulfilled by other corners of the 'net -- or even in some activities in the same communities I'm discussing. I seek only to praise the existence and growing normativity of counterbalancing forces.

On the shelf

As part of my university's employee wellness plan, I attend two classes per six weeks on health topics. Some of this year's classes have discussed depression, personal finance, time management, weight control, and so forth.

Today I went to the second class of this six week period, listed as "Mayo Clinic Personal Health." When I arrived, there was a table of large softback books; everyone picked one up while entering the classroom.

Turns out the class was simply an introduction to this book -- a basic reference book on health, containing self-tests, timetables for various vaccinations and checkups, information on common disorders, and so forth. It's a nice book, don't get me wrong. I will rarely turn down a free book. But it made me wonder about reference books like this in general. If I had a medical question, I would never think to scan my shelf and pull down a book. I would go to WebMD -- or maybe just to Google.

Is there still a place in this world for reference books? I love them, personally. I have been known to spend hours browsing through them. Some that are wonderfully specialized and have a distinct point of view are unlikely to be replaced by any website, or by the web as a whole. But basic home health? Is a book really the best way to convey that information anymore? This is an area where currency is highly prized; where searchability is key because only a page or two contains the relevant information at that moment; where you might want to have more details than the all-purpose summary at your fingertips. Yes, you might not want to wade through Google search results that will mix quick facts with in-depth or specialized presentation. But there are a number of popular and comprehensive websites that already exist to provide exactly the the same service as the Mayo Clinic book -- and arguably, to provide it with more of the features we're looking for when we need this information.

Other than working during a power outage, or accessibility for those who have no internet at home or work, I can't think of any reason to choose a book for this task. But maybe I'm missing something. What say you?

Found in translation

It's been a cold, wet week. My spirits haven't been at their highest; my energy level has taken a hit. But life got a little brighter when a friend pointed out that you can change Facebook's settings to communicate with you in "English (Pirate)."

Not everyone appreciates the delightful practice of sprinkling one's discourse with "scurvy dogs," "keelhaul the landlubber," and "by Davy Jones' locker." But someone at Facebook certainly does. Switch your language to piratical and your posts become your scribblin's, events become grog fests, and the help command becomes "Mayday!"

The transformation is disturbingly thorough. Instead of viewing pictures of yourself contributed by others, you "spy me bewitched portraits." I'm not married to Noel Murray, I'm anchored to him. Status updates are timestamped "12 shots of rum ago" or "'bout 5 turns o' t' hourglass ago" (and in my case, they're "fired from" Ping.fm). And instead of liking a posted item, you click "Arrr, this be pleasin' to me eye."

Best of all, the e-mails you get from "Ye olde Facebook" don't alert you to friend requests or comments on your status updates; they convey demands for you to be mateys and ask that you confirm that ye sailed with the potential hearty, and let you know that somebody flapped their gums about one o' your recent tales.

Even more than the inventiveness and comprehensiveness of the translation, I meditate on the creative labor involved. Somebody, or a few somebodies, channeled a heck of a lot of pirate in programming the makeover. It warms my cockles that such transcendently useless labor still has a place. Although I suppose it's not surprising that the place is Facebook.

The password dilemma

Like many people, I have a few standard passwords, which I alter mostly by attaching various numbers to them. I've sat through the usual lectures on password security, but most of my passwords are for sites that I consider fairly low-stakes. It was probably a horrible mistake, but I never worried about it too much, other than for my bank's website.

A few weeks ago, I got a new computer at work. As I set up my browsers -- I use Google Chrome and Firefox about equally -- I wanted to find some way to take all my stored passwords and transfer them to the new system. I found a program that claimed to decrypt Chrome's storage files, and decided to try it.

It didn't work. But then I started to worry. Maybe it did work, and all my passwords had just been transmitted to some nefarious entity. Uh oh. Time to start worrying about password security all of a sudden.

While running a spybot check on my machine, I started to change the most sensitive of my passwords -- my Google account. See, I mail usernames and passwords to myself, using my Gmail as an easily-searchable credential retrieval system. So if you have my e-mail password, you have all my important passwords.

Then I started changing more, working my way down the sensitivity list -- bank, PayPal, etc. How to keep track of all these passwords, though? I wasn't willing to use Gmail anymore, seeing its vulnerability so suddenly.

I researched password storage programs, and the open-source KeePass system seemed to be the consensus winner. A brand new master password later, I was storing my refreshingly diverse passwords in the program. I installed one version at work, one version at home, and a similar app on my iPhone.

It's unsettling to think that I won't necessarily have access to my passwords if I'm away from my computer. Sure, you only need them when you're online, but what if you're working on another terminal -- at the hotel courtesy boarding pass printing station, or at the internet cafe in a foreign land? There are a few key passwords that I'm going to have to carry in my head, the ones I use every day. I wish there were a web application that I could trust with my passwords -- then I'd know they were there no matter where I was, like they used to be in my Gmail.

How do you keep track of your passwords? Are you a password slacker, or have you seen the light?

Oh, and the postscript... I figured out how to transfer the key Chrome files to the other computer. My stored passwords aren't there, but a lot of autofill information (including usernames) is. So at least I didn't have to start completely from scratch.

Keeping the conversation going

A movie nerd discussion group in which I've lurked for many, many years has started a conversation about changing formats. The intermittently active community interacts through the venerable medium of the listserv, also known as an e-mail list, a Yahoo! Group, and so forth. You're all familiar with them, I'm sure. To post a message, you send an e-mail to the group address, and the listserv program e-mails it to everyone in the group individually.

Way back in the early part of this decade, I gave a conference presentation about the relative merits of listservs ("push" technologies, so-called because the information is pushed into the e-mail inboxes of each user) and courseware sites ("pull" technologies, which rely on the inherent attractiveness or value of the information contained therein to draw users onto the site).

The advantages of listservs primarily lie in their convenience. The conversations come directly to you via e-mail, and you don't have to make any special effort to follow along. If you want to participate, it's as simple as replying to the e-mail.

But there are some hidden pitfalls. Members may post messages that others consider uninteresting or annoying -- and without leaving the group, there's no way to stop them from cluttering the inbox. Active conversations often get "out of sync," with members posting replies meant specifically for one or a few users, while cross-talk goes on under the same subject heading unrelated to that exchange. Although posting is easy, posting etiquette -- discouraging top-posts, judicious quoting, what counts as appropriate listserv fodder -- is correspondingly difficult to enforce.

Enter the forum, or bulletin board -- an online destination where discussions are threaded, recorded, and most importantly, ordered. Unlike the afterthought archives page of a listserv -- how could you expect anything else from a push technology? -- the pull technology of a forum means that the unit of conversation is the thread, not the post (or the e-mail). They're searchable, they're flexible, they're constructive at their best and contained at their worst, and several conversations can go on at once with people checking in only on those that interest them.

But they're inconvenient, because people have to change their behavior to use them. They have to go to the forum; they have to seek out the conversation. Now there are ways to get activity pushed to you -- most forums allow you to subscribe to an area or a thread to get notified of new posts; even better is a daily digest of new and most active threads, e-mailed to all users. But it's not the same as every message from every member of the group just dropping onto your desktop.

I happen to think that the benefits of the latter outweigh the convenience of the former. Yet I'm under no illusions about the drawbacks. I'm in favor of the move, especially since the group has been pretty dead for a long time. On a forum, the group will change. For better, for worse, who can say -- but it will be different because the communication medium will be different, just as a telephone conversation has different rhythms and nuances than a meeting in a diner.