I am... a Kindle reader

Photo by Asal Lotfi on Unsplash

Much to the disgust of many of my friends, I have been a Kindle reader since it came out over 15 years ago. The three arguments that have kept me so are:

• A lot of what I read is not worth sawing down Canadian forests for

• I love to read numerous books at once, depending on where I am and what my mood is

• It is so much easier to read in bed than a book

Nevertheless, a friend of mine, Charlotte, recently published the findings of a study that stated readers of IRL books remember more than when they read e-books. That made sense because I remember handwritten notes much better than typed notes. So, maybe the tactility of books helps the brain to remember more. 

Then there is the fact that our dear daughter spent a laborious two days doing magic on our bookshelves in the living room. I rediscovered a slew of books to read again. And finally, since we have been with Amazon since it was only a bookstore, we have shamefully bought hundreds of books, so we can either reread some of them or order books at our local store.

Now, the punchline to this post...

I was rereading a favourite book of mine and was so enthralled with the story that I caught myself tapping the side of the page instead of turning it.

Need to inspire

Nichole Pinkard from New Learning Institute on http://vimeo.com">Vimeo.

A friend recently asked me if I would hold a series of mini-workshops for youths and their parents concerning media literacy. I don't know what it is like where you live, but in Germany, there tends to be an enormous amount of discussion about the dangers of media and very little celebration of its potetial to influence our children's ability to develop their communication and problem-solving skills.

Nichole Pinkard speaks persuasively about how imperative it is for us to inspire our children toward learning a complex set of learning skills they will undoubtedly need in the future. Can you imagine what it would be like to have access to the Digital Youth Network program (especially library part) she discribes?

Mimi Ito from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

Equally, Mimi Ito looks at the questions of "Why do we assume that kids socialising and playing is not a side of learning?" and "Why do we assume that schools can't have a spirit of entertainment and play as a part of what they are doing?". Her group has done extensive research about "friendship driven participation" and what short of beaviour and learning processes the children are involved in. They have also looked at all the things kids do beyond just chatting with each other after school.

She summarises succinctly the gap that exits between the generations. How the older generation places very little value on the time their children spend before the screen. How they even believe the internet is hostile to learning. What she says is must do is  to differentiate between friendship-driven activities and interest-driven activities. If we lump them all together we miss the opportunity to enter into a conversation with our children about something that has a huge potential to teach them important skills.

Curiously Lacking in Representation

As so often happens in life, a common thread of an idea has woven its way through my reading over the last week or two. This common thread is the lack of vital representation of  women leaders in our society. It started to make itself present through a  lecture I listened to that Stephen Lewis gave called, Women: Half the World, Barely Represented. (This was the 4th of the 5 Massey Lectures he gave in 2005.)

Then my son sent me this rather whimsical video called The Bechdel Test,



You would think with such minimal requirements contemporary films would manage to past the test, but it does not appear so.

Then this video by Women's Media Center that was a winner of the Vital Voices youtube contest discussed the curious lack of representation of women in media.



It really makes you wonder doesn't it about how long it has taken to move such small a distance? Or maybe not, the news I read today lifted my spirits. Congratulations Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessa!

Identity

A while ago, I wrote a blog entry about how my children will, in the future, have to work out what aspects of their life, history, and memories define their identities.

This weekend I was browsing through the wonderful web program called Imagining Ourselves a Global Generation of Women, and you can imagine how thrilled I was to read that this month’s sub-theme is Identity. I spent an hour reading the articles/stories and looking at some of the films/artwork of women. I found the following stories or articles particularly inspiring:

Mira Veda from India, whose encounter with Immaculee Ilibagiza, a holocaust survivor of the Rwandan genocide, made her realise that her sense of identity was strongly connected to events or persons she identified with (paraphrasing here).

Rebecca Walker from the United States poses some poignant questions (e.g., What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we’ve inherited or devised?) and attempts to find her answers to them.

Collage of an audio addict

Just spent the last few evenings writing a new entry for the Red Tent Blog about my new love of audio entertainment:

"With the occurrence of broadband Internet, I have discovered a new addiction. One far less expensive than buying books or renting DVDs… Audio! Podcasts, radio programs, playlists, online radio, lectures, debates, panel discussions, etc., are all at my fingertips and nearly always for free (shame on you, Ricky Gervais and New York Times Select). Oh, the bliss, an unlimited amount of wonderful things to listen to at any time of day, from any corner of the earth. It is just unbelievable. The reason I am mentioning this is that in the last few days, I have listened to some exciting audio programs, which I would like to share with you."


While listening to the Reith Lectures, I made this collage. Don't ask. It just sort of hit me.

New collage

This is a collage I made recently for and put in the Book Corner page of the Red Tent Blog.

My favourite place

My favourite place to sit outdoors at the moment, now that spring has arrived, is in the Vai Restaurant. It is just around the corner from where we live, and everything (ambience, food, drink, music, people) is, as Goldilocks said, Just Right. The header for this blog originated from a collage I made using photos there about a year and a half ago.


It was my first experiment with podcasting (diary of a notorious café goer). Since, at that time, the idea of podcast-free music was in its early stages, most of the music I used in the podcast was not copyright-free and therefore, I cannot publish it.

Creating a podcast is a delightful pastime/occupation, but it is far more time-consuming than most laypersons would assume. I developed an enormous respect for the various hosts of podcasts, either professional or amateurs.

At the moment, I am trying to put together some sort of opinion or preference list concerning podcasting. The BBC podcast Digital Planet mentioned in their April 24th show that it is believed that most podcast listeners are young tech-savvy males. I don't comply with any of these things, which means that most preference lists are not quite along my lines. And yours? Can anyone suggest good music, film, art, or book podcasts?

When I finally write something, I will publish on the Media Safe 101 page in the Red Tent Blog.

Excellent stuff

The flavour of this month as far as podscasts go… Ritmo Latino. Definitely worth listening to. It really gets your tooshy moving.

It also shows you what excellent music is legally available for podcasters and listeners, all hoping that listeners will purchase the music online. So, look into it, friends and neighbours, and then go in for a spin around your living room.

Puzzle of life

Here is a collage I created listening to my favourite playlist, Radio Déliro, and some newly discovered BBC podcasts (I'll write about this later).

Virtual possessions

Talking to my teenage son about what he plans to do with the 900 upward photos he took on his trip, he said he would select 20 or 30 pictures for friends and family to look at and then copy the rest onto his external hard disk. 

I was appalled, why did he want over 900 photos, some of the blurry and unfocused, crowding up his hard disk? He said he wanted the images just to “have”. To him, unlike me, virtual possession or collection has material significance. In the same way I used to collect books and records, he contains mp3 files and photos. They actually translate materially in his mind. Isn’t that phenomenal?

Cold turkey gone bad

Second day in paradise. Well, I didn't bring down my laptop. Unfortunately, there is a laptop installed with DSL access, sooooooooo, I'm back to blogging and Bloglines.

Cold Turkey

Well, the children and I are off to visit my mother in Grenada for the next few weeks. (Have I mentioned this before? Maybe ten times over the last few days…)

After much reflection, I’ve decided to go down sans ordinateur! Oh lala, quelle horreur! Actually, I hope going cold turkey will re-establish a balance between my enthusiasm and obsession with blogging, bloglines and news sites (here and here), as well as free up some time to spend with the children or in quiet occupation.

I am bringing down some work: the rough London Live (the sequel to Sydney Soap) treatment, some topics for the Red Tent blog to write, and an ideas book to expand. All can be done on paper and then transferred onto a digital medium at a later point in time. Back to the basics, it’s going to be nice.

When to Unsubscribe

Bloglines is a program which lets you subscribe to various blogs of your choice. Initially, you set up a list of blogs, and then the program automatically tells you whether anything new entries have been written since you last opened the list.

I made up my subscription list about half a year ago, and at any one time, I read the entries to 20-30 blogs daily, but only about 10 of them remain constant on my list. The other ten to twenty blogs vary according to whether or not their content can hold my interest and whether the bloggers’ behaviour is acceptable to my sensitivities. Indeed, sometimes the bloggers just decide to stop blogging, but mostly, if the content of the blog posts steps over one of my “trash” borderlines, and then I unsubscribe (i.e., delete key) the blog from the list.

Here is a list of my trash borderlines:

• A blogger proudly announces that he is a staunch conservative from way on back and, as far as he is concerned, there shouldn’t be any gun control in the States: the more gun carriers, the merrier. (Trash factor: immediate)

• The blog has so many co-authors that every day’s input on just one blog is ten to twenty posts. I just reallyreally don’t have the time to wade through all that stuff. The information I gather from reading blogs doesn’t replace proper news sites. What I do, as in the case of the Huffington Post blog, is to just keep monitoring one or two bloggers on the blogs list. (Trash factor: over a longer period of time).

• With personal blogs of people I do not know, but whose ideas and daily occurrences I find interesting, there are three faux pas they shouldn’t transgress. First, start lamenting about the weather (admittedly a transgression I have been occasionally guilty of). Become obsessed about their health, or lack of: this includes both mental and physical health (I really don’t want to know how many forms of Prosac there are in this world). In the case of foreigners-living-in-other-countries blogs, when the only character descriptions of people you encounter in the blogger’s entries are those of people who are stupid, rude, or lazy, then something has gone wrong with the blogger’s perspective. (Trash factor: give it a while, for anyone can lose their way, yet rest assured, when the point comes you’ll know).

• With personal blogs of friends and family members: if you find out disturbing, critical or intimate details of their lives and they haven’t bothered to communicate these facts to you directly, there is something intrinsically wrong in your relationship, and no vicarious acquirement of facts is going to change this. (Trash factor: immediate).

Another collage as blog header

I made this collage for a friend for her blog.

New collages

Here are two new collages. The first one, Tango Mix, is for a CD cover.

The second one, Radical Reminders, was inspired be music I was listening to at the time from the wonderful online radio program Radio Delirio.

Embracing the Inevitable

Read this article about the demise of books in the future. It seems such an odd premise to think people will not want to read books, even though they have for hundreds of years.

Isn’t the whole debate about learning to embrace new media to support traditional practices? It really isn’t a choice of books or ebooks/no books, is it; it is more like the issue of choosing to watch a film in a cinema or on a DVD.

They will still continue to produce films even though DVDs have some interesting developments. Film studios and cinemas have rethought their marketing strategies. Having the price of a cinema ticket be half the cost of a DVD is not acceptable to many film viewers anymore.

Why can’t publishers and bookstores just embrace new possibilities of bringing books to readers in all sorts of formats (e.g. print, audio, electronic) instead of making doomsday predictions about the demise of books?

Take in point the new independent bookstore, Crockattpowell & Powell Booksellers* in London. They obviously want to sell books in their store. To do this they have an attractive store in a good location and offer online services as well on their website. Yes, standard stuff, you are saying. Yet, look at their blog*, delightful. The blog is bound to be a great source of indirect advertising to sell some books.

If a good customer wishes for print material in another format (e.g. audio or electronic), they will do their best to serve them. They would still go on selling books, though, wouldn’t they?

There is also the fact that people seem to underestimate how part of the whole reading experience is simply the sensual pleasure of touching and smelling paper, as well as the visual pleasure of good print.

Nothing will replace the joys of reading a nicely printed book.

*Sadly, in 2023, as I was editing this post, it looks as if this bookstore does not exist anymore. It looks to have been well-loved.

Starless Night

Cold. Black. Starless night.

The first of Advent is tomorrow, though the Christmas Market started yesterday. This old Unesco city sets a magnificent stage for such celebrations. It also means that those of us who live on the island must crab-walk through the crowds for the next four weeks.

Read an article in the New York Times today. Even the title, “As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation “, made me want to wince. What rebel reputation? Maybe Ms. Story should first go back a few decades to the founding of the telephone.

The telephone was initially an alternative to the telegraph: purely a means of information exchange. It took all those women working in the post offices to transform an information device into a communication device. It was this shift in content which started a revolution.

The same revolution, not an act of rebellion, has been happening for the last two years in the Internet, driven partly by bloggers and podcasters. The times of rebel or cowboy bloggers have long gone. Journalists, politicians, educators, parents, lovers, priests, and even, yikes, lawyers are using blogs these days. The fact that some of the bloggers have found schemes to earn money doing this seems very secondary.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)