{"id":2779,"date":"2022-03-09T23:07:05","date_gmt":"2022-03-10T06:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/?p=2779"},"modified":"2022-03-14T16:27:09","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T23:27:09","slug":"breakfast-table-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/?p=2779","title":{"rendered":"BREAKFAST TABLE TALK"},"content":{"rendered":"

GOOD NEWS ABOUT SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a world befuddled by dis-information or mis-information, a beacon of light appears in Tressie Macmillam Cottom\u2019s column<\/a>, \u201cHow to Avoid Drowning in an Ocean of Information\u201d.<\/p>\n

I found it this morning, just in time to share at breakfast. \u201cNot a sure conversation starter,\u201d Charlie, the wet rag, drolled. That, of course, has never stopped me, but just in case it\u2019s a \u201cmore coffee, less talk\u201d day, I will share with you her call out to Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily \u201cLetter from an American\u201d I love, and her concluding paragraph, which makes bigger points about finding and choosing from the best available information. Then, I hope you read the whole column.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother way to look at information sources is to focus on genre, rather than platform. Newsletters are a powerful entry into the information ecosystem. My theory is that newsletters are an evolution of a very old genre: the new iteration of pamphlets. Political pamphlets are hundreds of years old. They are somewhere between \u201cobjective\u201d journalism and polemic. They often present deep explorations of topics and explicitly unsettled arguments. Good newsletters during information events put those window frames up for debate. They are systematic in their analysis of the event but also think critically about the sources that shape the analysis. The historian Heather Cox Richardson\u2019s newsletter<\/a> is a good example\u2026.<\/p>\n

A good media diet is about more than diversity of sources. It is also about information with different purposes. Investigative journalism takes time and resources. Social media shrinks time and resources but can respond quickly. Newsletters give context and help us make meaning of information events. We cannot parse everything. The answer to the problems created by scale is to acknowledge that we are not infinitely deep containers that can take on as much water as information demands. We must witness, but we must remember that we have limits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0SEARCHING FOR INFOMATION IN LIBRARIES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another time, the \u201chow to find the best possible information\u201d quest needs to address libraries’ ongoing commitment to neutrality<\/a>, especially in these polarized and polarizing times, if only to be ready for the next argument with a disagreeable friend. Maintaining that commitment to the \u201cintellectual freedom\u201d that an \u201cenlightened citizenry\u201d needs and deserves from the publicly-supported library, which is, in the words of a friend, \u201cthe mind of the nation\u201d, is not easy, maybe even under threat, but oh so worthy of discussion.<\/p>\n

A BIT OF NONSENSE<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"

My of-an-age son has 7th-grader humor.\u00a0 Sometimes funny.\u00a0 Sigh!<\/p><\/div>\n

SEARCHNG FOR INFORMATION TACTICS<\/strong><\/p>\n

After 40 years of trying to provoke people to care about why they think they know something, I’m now just a frustrated information user who, in the midst of mis-, dis-, or just plain bad information, hopes today\u2019s info-nerds have better ideas about what to do.\u00a0 \u00a0 Here are a few ideas<\/a>, with my \u201cinterspersions:\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEstonia mandates everything from how online content is created to how statistics can be manipulated, lessons about social media, trolls, the difference between fact and opinion and what makes a good source. [Good, but better would be Information as a moving thing, e.g. distribution, change\/editing, flowing from source through deltas to merging,…]\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[Finnish] High school students are given a series of political topics and asked to compile lists of stories and commentary from across the internet, then investigate the veracity of claims. [Vague on skills needed and tactics used to compile and investigate]<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201d[Stanford History Education Group suggests] that kids learn how to assess the reliability of the specific information they\u2019ve found online, who published it and for what purpose, thus look at the whole ecosystem in which the information resides.\u201d [Life\u00a0 or \u201cecosystem\u201d of information is a good idea, but the Internet makes distribution a study in itself, with change of purpose possible at each \u201cgrowth\u201d spurt.\u00a0 Frankly, this approach sounds simplistic.]<\/span><\/p>\n

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<\/p>\n

Whew!\u00a0 Good to be finished with that.\u00a0 I need the tab space for my current Poetry Club assignment of choosing 3 poems from a list of international poets.\u00a0 ARGH!\u00a0 \u00a0 Too much angst and flowery language, too little good-nature and crisp-ness. So, thanks to Kathy’s good idea, I’m trying to use the Japanese “founding” of\u00a0 haiku as sufficiently international to use\u00a0 Japanese-ish,\u00a0Caroline Lazar’s very funny NewYorker haiku.<\/a>\u00a0 I also need to either “mediate” translator differences in addressing Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Psalm”, or just accept all of the differences in one version and be done with it.\u00a0 Sniff, humph, or say what you will, I’m having a very good time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GOOD NEWS ABOUT SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION In a world befuddled by dis-information or mis-information, a beacon of light appears in Tressie Macmillam Cottom\u2019s column, \u201cHow to Avoid Drowning in an Ocean of Information\u201d. I found it this morning, just in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2779"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2788,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779\/revisions\/2788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roseledgebooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}