Anti-social networking

I’m in a bit of a quandary. I love socializing online but it seems that as time goes on the big social networking sites are becoming more and more invasive, controlling, exclusive, and downright anti-social. First it was Facebook with its data mining, online tracking, and ridiculously complex privacy options. Did you know that even if you log out of Facebook it is still tracking your every move online? It can even share your surfing activities unless you figure out how to turn that off. And that’s just today’s trick. Tomorrow they will find a new way to collect data about you and you’ll have to go through the same exercise again if you want to protect your privacy.

Then there is Google+ which initially seemed like a much freer alternative to Facebook, until it turned out that it was designed as an “identity service.” With the recent harmonization of the Google privacy policy, that means that they can now track your activities across the entire Googleverse, as well as any page with a +1 button on it. Add to that the idiotic “real name” policy whereby anyone who tries to sign up with an unusual name or pseudonym can be suspended and their other Google services frozen. You could create a hundred spam accounts with “normal” sounding names with no problem but if your parents were hippies and named you Starflower your account will be flagged and you will be asked to submit government-issued ID. That’s like a coffee shop asking for your passport before letting you chat with your friends. It’s draconian and excludes a lot of people who have perfectly legitimate and sometimes life-and-death reasons for not using their legal name online. Moreover, now you cannot even create a Google account without joining Google+ and providing a “real” name. This applies to Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, the entire Googleverse. If you have anything to say that you do not want publicly associated with your legal name, Google is no longer the place to go.

Now Twitter, which has been credited with helping dissidents under repressive regimes to organize protests, is getting into the censorship business. They have announced that any government that wants to censor tweets on certain subjects or by certain users in their country can do so if they supply the appropriate paperwork. Twitter says “the tweets must flow,” just not the ones that any government finds inconvenient. Some have pointed out that Twitter is being quite transparent about this, compared to some websites (like Yahoo) that censor silently. Tweets won’t just disappear, they will be grayed out with a message that it has been banned in your country. But for a company that garnered such fame by facilitating the Arab Spring to now collaborate with governments to censor on demand seems particularly monstrous. Freedom of expression is a universal human right, not to mention a constitutional right in Twitter’s home country, so why are they denying that right to others?

I seem to have painted myself into a lonely corner with my ethical objections to these giant social networks. There are certainly alternatives. There’s Diaspora, a distributed, open source social network where you fully own and control your own data. It’s great but the problem is that about 99% of the people on it are software developers talking about software development. There is also identi.ca, which is an open source alternative to Twitter, but is also dominated by techie types. There are plenty of great subject-specific web communities out there, but obviously they don’t offer the convenient one-stop-shopping of the big social networks. Then there is the little problem of the good friends I have already made, mainly on Twitter. Just moving on and leaving them behind is not an option.

I honestly don’t know what to do. It does seem as though the free and open internet we used to know and love is being eroded, bit by bit. Both governments and corporations are getting more and more control over what we can do, share, and be online. The question of who owns the internet is being answered by those with the money and political influence to stake a claim in cyberspace. At the same time the open internet movement is strong, and as we saw with the SOPA/PIPA protest, the virtual masses are aware and willing to stand up for a free internet.

I am faced with the age old question of whether to vote with my feet or try to create change from within. I’ve seen some people leave Google+ in protest and others stay to fight the good fight. I cannot say which is better. It remains to be seen what will happen on Twitter after today’s #twitterblackout boycott. Perhaps people will decide to up and leave for identi.ca, Disapora, and other free and open social networks. It doesn’t seem too likely though. It also seems highly unlikely that Twitter would bow to pressure, refuse to censor, and allow itself to get banned in every country that stifles dissent. Those are some pretty big markets we’re talking about.

I guess I will just have to wait and see and try to learn more. I recently started reading the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog, which explores all these issues in detail. At the very least we should be well-informed about the forces that are shaping our online lives.

Learn a language while you translate the web

I was listening to Spark yesterday and heard about Duolingo, a new web project that aims to translate the entire web with volunteers who want to learn a new language. The way it works is that Duolingo presents sentences in the new language and the user tries to translate the sentence into their mother tongue. If you don’t know a word you can mouse over it and a suggestion will pop up. Computers are very good at translating individual words but terrible at putting them together into meaningful sentences, so that is what the human part of this equation contributes. How much you mouse over the words determines the complexity of the sentences you get, so the experience is always tailored to your level of proficiency.

According to creator Luis von Ahn (who also invented ReCaptcha, which helps digitize books), people are actually learning languages on Duolingo as quickly as they would using conventional methods. The system also asks people to vote on the best translations for each sentence, and they say the results are as good as you would get from professional translators.

Since I am interested in learning languages and like to play on the web I am very eager to try Duolingo, but it is still at the private beta stage. All you can do is submit your email address and get on the (reportedly massive) waiting list for an invitation. So far only Spanish, German, and English are available, but they plan to add more languages as they work out the bugs.

At this point Duolingo is entirely free with no ads, and von Ahn wants to provide translations for free at least for non-commercial content. However, Von Ahn has a habit of getting bought out by Google and it’s hard to imagine every web page being translated into every language without Google-sized computing power behind it. But it’s clear that von Ahn is not doing this to make his fortune but to allow the people of the world to understand each other. Perhaps this is the beginning of Web 3.0, where the world wide web will be truly accessible to the whole wide world. I can’t wait to try it and will report back when I do. In the mean time, watch the introductory video and sign up!

Lady Susan: Busted!

Facts are such horrid things!

—Jane Austen, Lady Susan

I just finished reading Jane Austen’s early epistolary novel, Lady Susan. It could almost be called an unfinished novel because of its precipitate ending. Just when the truth about Lady Susan’s scheming comes fully to light, the letters stop and all matters are concluded in scarcely three pages of prose. Did Austen not know how to proceed or did she simply tire of the project? It does seem as though she was following a form from the waning 18th century—correspondence around a scheming female—but that was simply not her style, to judge from her later novels. Lady Susan is not a nice person, and the only one who seems like a typical Austen heroine, her daughter Frederica, is only allowed a single, desperate letter (though we are assured she marries well in the end).

To me, Frederica seems to be the direct forerunner of Fanny Price. She is young, mild, bookish, affectionate, sensitive, neglected, and subject to the schemes of powerful adults. Her aunt writes:

“Though totally without accomplishment, she is by no means so ignorant as one might expect to find her, being fond of books and spending the chief of her time in reading.”

Books are clearly her saving grace, having lost her (presumably superior) father early in life and being neglected by her mother, both emotionally and educationally, though in the latter case that was perhaps for the best. I wonder if Austen was acquainted with any girls in similar circumstances? She evidently thought enough of the plight of such girls to create Fanny Price twenty years later. Obviously the public sympathized with the shy, overlooked, friendless girl because Mansfield Park ended up being Austen’s best-selling book in her lifetime. Today we may prefer the beautiful, talkative, swash-buckling female, but I’m glad Austen paid some attention to those who do not naturally attract it.

Reading Austen in the 70s

From Margaret Drabble’s introduction to Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon:

We may tend to think Elizabeth Bennet a sensible girl not to mind getting her skirts muddy, and the Darcy and Bingley women ridiculous for noticing, but eighteenth-century mud was doubtless much more substantial than our own, and long skirts picked it up more, as those who now wear long skirts again will surely have noticed…. The Austen family wore pattens when young, to negotiate the country lanes round Steventon, a practice which seemed as archaic and vulgar to Jane Austen’s nephew, as the wearing of clogs would have seemed to us now, had not a freak of fashion brought them very nosily back again in 1972.

I confess I did wear clogs in the 70’s, though I preferred pants to maxi-skirts. I wonder what cultural trends we could relate to Jane Austen today? Perhaps laptops are today’s writing desks, and instead of daily letter-writing today’s young ladies check Facebook.

“Jane’s Fame” by Claire Harman

Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
Claire Harman
Henry Holt and Co.
2010
304 pp.

While I was tidying up the list of books I read in 2011 I noticed that I began the year with a short biography of Jane Austen, read the wonderful A Jane Austen Education in the summer, and finished the year with Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. Add to that a re-reading of Persuasion (my favourite) and much munching of popcorn in front of various film adaptations and the enjoyable Lost in Austen spinoff. This all happened without even trying, which just goes to show how ubiquitous Jane Austen has become. Jane’s Fame traces the development of Jane Austen’s popularity, which was by no means a sure thing in the beginning. She was nearly forgotten after her death in 1817, but a biography published by her nephew in 1869 revived interest in her, which prompted the reprinting of her books, and her renown steadily grew from there to today’s all-Austen-all-the-time proportions.

I found it interesting that for a long time the most ardent Janeites were male scholars. No doubt it only seems that way because they had the floor, but in any case her books were certainly not considered to be particularly for women until recently. She was also much-loved by soldiers in World War I, who read and discussed her books in the trenches to escape the hell they were going through. Austen was also prescribed to wounded and shell-shocked soldiers for comfort and solace in their convalescence or their last days.

Claire Harman points out that one of the reasons Austen is so easily appropriated by generation after generation of readers is that her books lack details of time and place that would make it seem dated or foreign to future readers. Apparently she did this quite deliberately and mentions it in her letters. Though some criticized her books for failing to mention the great events of the time, such as the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, in retrospect she made the right choice if she wanted her works to be enduringly accessible. Two centuries later, references to contemporary issues and obsolete facts of life would only get in the way of the stories. Today’s writers might do well to question the conventional wisdom about describing the setting of a novel in vivid detail. People are people, whether they communicate by text message or penny post.

Jane’s Fame is quite a thorough examination of the reception of Austen’s books, and even describes the huge success of the recent film adaptations (including a discussion of the wet shirt), and mentions the most popular Austen blogs and web communities. Nothing is left out, as far as I can tell, though it is understandably UK-centric. If you want to know what people have thought about Jane Austen and her books over the last 200 years, this book will tell you. The tone is scholarly but with enough Austen-like wry humour to make it enjoyable.

After reading this book I realize that I have been remiss in not reading Austen’s unfinished novels, now called Sanditon and The Watsons, as well as the story Lady Susan. I even have a Penguin edition of them sitting on my bookshelf so I have no excuse. I believe that will be my first new book of 2012!

My little low-tech e-reader

As we all know, e-readers are all the rage right now. E-books are flying off the virtual shelves, and according to reports, there is hardly a Christmas tree in the world right now without an e-reader under it. This is definitely the year e-books went mainstream. My library is lending out Kobos and even my murder mystery-loving landlady has a Sony Reader now. I resisted as long as I could but as a lover of both techie gadgets and books it was only a matter of time before I jumped on the bandwagon.

I resisted in part because I did not want to get trapped in a corporate walled-garden where I could only buy e-books from one particular store in one particular format. Not that I had any intention of paying to rent an e-book (one never really owns a commercial e-book), but devices like that tend to be unfriendly to public domain and library e-books. Yes, the various vendors offer bazillions of free e-books and you can download programs to convert public domain e-books into the appropriate format, but that’s just not good enough. The big name readers were out of the question.

Much to my surprise, I found that there are quite a lot of alternative e-readers out there. These are e-readers with no strings attached—no exclusive affiliation an e-book store, and better support for different formats. I won’t even try to name them because there is such a variety, and that is not even counting the alternative tablet and mini-tablet computers that can be used as e-readers. The powers that be would like us to think that we must choose between two or three megabrands, but that is not the case.

After much sleuthing and comparing features and reading reviews, I finally settled on a humble but able e-reader that does exactly what I want without making me work for it. I chose the Ectaco jetBook. Never heard of it? Neither had I until I went on a quest to find every available e-reader. The jetBook is more popular in Europe because of its multilingual ability. That is one of the main reasons I bought it. It can display a plethora of languages including right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. Since I am interested in learning languages that was important to me. No other e-reader supports as many languages as the jetBook; indeed I could not find any others that supported non-Latin alphabet languages, and I gather that many of them have trouble with anything other than English. Ectaco is a company that specializes in translation devices and software, so language support is naturally a priority for them.

The other main reason I chose the jetBook is its pragmatism. For starters, the hardware is generic. Aluratek also makes an e-reader using the same device but different firmware. For me the “design” or “style” of my e-reader is irrelevant, so if they can keep the price down by using an existing technology, that’s fine with me. The screen is a 5” reflective LCD, which means it does not have the annoying page-turn flash of e-ink readers and does not cause eye strain like the backlit tablets. The pages turn instantly, and I can read it outside without glare. The buttons, of which there are many since it is not a touch device, are crisp and intuitive. Just about anyone could start using it right out of the box without much trouble.

As for the firmware, the jetBook is incredibly flexible. It supports more e-book formats than any other e-reader, including Adobe DRM, which many libraries use. I especially like the fact that it can “reflow” PDF e-books, basically reading them as text files, though it does preserve tables and figures. Not all e-readers can handle PDFs that way (or any way, for that matter). As I mentioned before the jetBook can display many languages, and it also includes a few language dictionaries, but they can only be accessed while reading a txt file and are limited to common words. An advanced language learner would still need a conventional dictionary standing by, but that would be true of any other e-reader as well. The jetBook also supports mp3 audiobooks (or music), but it lumps all the files together in one menu so it’s not quite as slick as I might wish if it were my primary audiobook reader. As it is my Zune (with the help of Overdrive) does a great job of playing audiobooks so I don’t need the jetBook for that.

Managing books on the device could not be simpler. There is no software to install; one simply connects the jetBook to the computer and uses the computer’s file manager to move files around. The jetBook only has a small built-in memory but you can add an SD card of up to 16GB, which is enough for several lifetimes’ worth of books. On the SD card you can create as many folders and subfolders as you like, arranging and rearranging them in any way that suits you. I really like a device that does not tell me how to organize my files.

As you can see, simplicity and openness are the hallmarks of the jetBook. It lacks some of the bells and whistles of the big name e-readers, and costs a little more since it is not subsidized by e-book sales, but if you are looking for a device that does not put any obstacles between you and your e-books, this may be the e-reader for you. When I bought mine I was not even sure that I would get much use out of it. I do not travel or commute so when would I need such a thing? As it turns out, it has many uses even at home. I’ve used it to read e-books from the library, online PDF e-books and articles that I did not want to read on the computer, and public domain books that the library does not have or that are simply more convenient to load on the jetBook and keep for as long as I like. I still do most of my reading from paper books and audiobooks, but there are many cases where the jetBook is the best way to read something and then I am very glad to have it.

If you’d like to know more, check out the Ectaco website, and to see the jetBook in action watch the video tour below. Just note that you can get a better price than this reviewer did by buying directly from Ectaco.

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: The Passage of Time

He opened a book he had borrowed from Posulov and stared with distrust at the even lines of print:

“They all promised to cling to one another, to help one another at all times, to rescue one another from danger, to sacrifice their lives for one another if necessary and to avenge the death of any of their number.”

Kozhemyakin drew the lamp nearer without taking his eyes off the book.

“So sacred was this vow that a father would take vengeance on his own son to fulfil the demands of the blood-contract made with the brotherhood.”

He closed the book for a second, then re-opened it cautiously at the first page, put his elbows on the table and began to read. He read as long as his eyes could see, and when at last he raised his head he discovered that the room was light and the trees in the orchard had thrown off the heavy robes of night.

Surprised, he got up and walked about the room, smiling to himself and shaking his weary head.

So that’s what books are for, he thought. So that you don’t notice the passage of time.

Snatches of what he had read floated through his mind like clouds, changing colour and shape, merging, separating, vanishing. He made no effort to hold on to them, so astonished was he by the magic force that could make him forget himself so utterly.

A little later he undressed, lay down and feel fast asleep.

Next morning, as he was washing himself in the kitchen, he said to Shakir:

“Tell anyone who asks for me that I’m not at home.”

“Even Nikon?”

Kozhemyakin considered.

“Yes, even Nikon. Anyone at all. I shall be very busy.”

After breakfast he seated himself by the window and opened the book again.

Reading came to be essential to him It was as if he had been going down a long pathway through open fields and had been stared at from all sides by hostile eyes which seemed to be demanding something of him; he longed to hide from them but there was nowhere to hide; and now he had found a sequestered niche from which he could not get so much as a glimpse of the irritating life around him, a niche in which he could live without noticing the dull monotonous passage of time. He read slowly, going again and again over the lines that pleased him most, and whenever he approached the end of a book he would anxiously finger the diminishing pages that remained….

“…I want some more history,” he said to Posulov.

“There is no more history.”

“What do you mean?” asked the startled and incredulous Kozhemyakin.

“I haven’t got any more books on history.”

“Then get some. When you go to Vorgorod for goods I’ll give you some money to buy books. Serious ones. Ask somebody what to buy.”

So accustomed had he become to reading that he could not get through the day without it, and if he had no new book he would re-read old ones. Amazed by the strength of his passion he said to himself:

Fancy that! I used to look down on people who had a passion for cards and other things, but look at me now….

When Posulov returned and brought him a big box of new books he was overjoyed. He instantly cut the pages of all of them and arranged them in two high stacks on the floor beside his desk; from them he selected Solovyov’s History, put it on his desk, opened it at the first page and walked up and down in front of it for some time, postponing the pleasure of beginning.

Soon he was again reading all day long; reading until his eyes ached, jealously guarding his solitude, going nowhere, taking no interest in anything, hardly bothering to glance at the hands of the clock that noted the passage of time on the yellow fly-spotted face.

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: Sweet Tranquility

Peace emanated from the pines, standing straight as candles, their trunks decked with the gold and amber of hardened resin, their boughs shedding the blessing of sweet shade upon the earth, their crowns blazing like emerald flames in the sunlight. Through the billowing green foliage gleamed the gold of the chapel domes, the silver of the river and the yellow of the sand. Apple- and pear-trees, lavishly hung with fruit, stepped in solemn procession down the hill-side, and everything was wrapped in the sweet tranquility of a beautiful dream.

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

This is one of many beautiful descriptions of the scenery in The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin. It’s a sad story, but Gorky’s appreciation of nature and the seasons inserts some much-needed beauty into the book.

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: Books

She talked a lot and willingly, and the most important thing he gathered from it all (and this raised him considerably in his own eyes) was that everything she said came from books; all her knowledge had been acquired by reading.

“As soon as you’re well you must get me books,” he insisted.

“Yes, indeed. I’m glad you want to read.”

“So am I.”

Mentally he added: Soon I’ll get to know as much as you do.

It was pleasant to realize that her superiority to him came only from books.

She kept saying over and over again that people must be taught, that then they would be come better and live like human beings. She told him about people who devoted their whole lives to trying to make others upright and to cultivate in them a respect for knowledge. And for this they were thrown into jail and exiled to Siberia.

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: First Lesson

“What is learning?”

The quietness with which the question was put made the boy’s heart contract with a foretaste of mystery, and be edged nearer to his teacher trustfully.

“Learning,” said the deacon, stroking his pupil’s hair, “is the means by which we acquaint our minds with events in the past, with life in the present, and with human dreams for the future. Learning, then, binds one man to another; in other words, it is a link connecting him with the world as a whole. Now let’s see what that means.

“What are words? Words are the body of the human mind, just as these bodies, yours and mine, are the vesture of the soul, no more and no less. Further: take a book, any book; it is written by a man who lived, let’s say, a hundred years ago and left for our edification all the treasure the man’s soul accumulated in the course of a lifetime. And so we might say: books contain the souls of people who lived before our day or are still living; a book is, as it were, a man’s account to the world at large of his deeds; it is the life record of a human soul. Is that clear?”

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin