The Little Library Beta 1 Release

The Beta 1 version of the Little Library application was release earlier today (to mild applause by my family). You can check it out here:

https://github.com/rwadholm/The-Little-Library-Beta

Follow the instructions on that page, and you too can be the proud owner of a test library! You’ll be doing the world a service by breaking things now so they don’t have to later. Please send any comments and feedback my way.

Some new features include syncing with other libraries (actually works now!), automatic creation of an online library, a three page End User License Agreement that quotes Patrick Henry, file validation (to avoid loading those pesky malware files onto your computer and in the cloud), optimized iOS page sizes, automatic thumbnails for any items that have images in them, and the ability to upload and view multiple files for every item in your library. This last feature allows you to use your library as a private Web server. You could host every file of a website you’ve made in one item, and when users click on the item–BING!! (not really “BING”, I actually prefer non-microsoft products), they’re at your hosted Web site. So you could share your library with them, they could make changes, share with you, and you can have a dynamic Website between friends. How lovely.

Beyond Web sites, you could include all of the Word documents, books, videos, audio and images you wanted to all in the same library item, so that you can serve up a college course, a series of videos, a compilation of songs, etc. all packaged together nicely. You’ve just got to make sure the content is owned by you (as in, you created it, or you found it with a Creative Commons license that allows you to share it). That’s because the End User License Agreement requires you to only upload and share Creative Commons or Public Domain or other similarly licensed content.

So you can think of the Little Library not as a file repository, but as a multi-device, peer-to-peer, distributed online/offline open content bazaar based on bleeding-edge technologies like JQuery Mobile, HTML5 WebStorage, and CouchDB. Although that is a bit wordy…

More to come.

Susan Herring’s “Questioning the Generational Divide (2008)

The present so-called “Internet Generation” (born in the mid to late 80′s) is a group of people who have never not had the internet. This group is proclaimed as fundamentally different than the generations before them for this reason. Growing up with all of the new technologies that have arisen during the lifetimes of adults, the Internet Generation takes such technologies for granted. To young people, working with technology is not really thought about as working with technology–it is normal activity.

Herring argues that adults are the ones touting the characteristics of the Internet Generation without recourse to the perspectives of actual members of the Internet Generation. This is presented as an “us/them differentiation” instead of a grass-roots “this is what we are” exposition from a primary perspective. Herring further argues that the “Internet Generation” is actually a transitional generation concious of their own and adults’ perpectives. Kids realize that adults think of their activities in a special light, a perspective they do not necessarily share. The true Internet Generation, Herring suggests, is a generation in the near future who grows up not only with the internet and corresponding mobile technologies, but also with adult onlookers who now see these things as normal activites. This future Internet Generation will not have a dual view of themselves, and will be able to truly not grow up with an appreciation of the differences of their present technologies with past technologies.

Herring suggests that such a transition has already taken place with the Television Generation. When the first generation of TV users was growing up, adults viewed their activities as strange and exotic. Several years later, it was the older adults who took on these activities as their own, and the TV Generation moved on to other things. Their children grew up in world where TV viewing was normal activity, not exotic technological advance.   

This brings us to a question: “What is high-tech to you?” Televisions? Text-messaging? Virtual worlds? Blogs? The wheel? We often think of high tech in terms of technological advances made in our own lifetimes and tend to ignore what has become normal to us thorugh constant exposure (i.e. using overhead projectors or flourescent lightbulbs in classrooms is no longer considered using technology in classrooms). Herrings point in the article: Stop exoticizing the so-called Internet Generation. The technologies we now see as fundamentally new and different and theirs, will probably soon become commonplace fixtures in our own adult worlds, and the “Internet Generation” will have moved on to bigger and hopefully better things.