… plus stacks of Philosophy, Sociology, short stories, essay collections, collected reporting, poetry, works of religion, biographies and autobiographies…

All of these things adorn my desk, dresser, bedside table, floor, coffee table, kitchen table, radiator, and any other relatively flat surface. I’d have my cat balance them on her head if she wasn’t so grumpy about it.

And, the extreme anxiety of leaving the house without something adorned with print.

From as far back as I can remember I have been surrounded by the word.  True computers were there too, but they seemed something which fascinated me in a negative way.  I was always interested in the fact that people were sharing their lives through the computer.

But the computer has never been something sublime to me. It is easy. The word is difficult. I’ve been trying to find a profession which would allow me to work with books and words on a full-time basis. I thought scholarship was it, but I wasn’t ready to compromise my polymathy for a life behind a magnifying glass.

Librarians–of course they deal with books. What could be more elementary, the word “book” is contained in their name. But it only seems that my younger colleagues are trying to run away from books as fast as possible.

The perfect sentence is something which gives me the most profound joy. I sometimes think about trying to create them myself. The greatest compliment I can give to a writer–and I will give this to Pasha Malla whose The Withdrawal Method is moving me in profound ways right now–is that they make you want to be a writer.

But that is going to take another 5 years (giving myself 5 years for my 7 years of university writing. Even though it is bad I feel like I came out a better writer then my peers). What career in the meantime?

I find now, because I can say with confidence why I enjoy in writing, even to the point of finding flaws in very successful writers, that I have a desire to move into editing and publishing. I never really felt like I had to actualize my love of reading in this way before. I was merely content to read and hope that someone would pay me to do so. So perhaps a new path, after a few years of walking down the wrong ones.

Kierkegaard from The Corsair affair

My favourite parts of this little book were Chapter Three, which deals with the problem of embodiment and virtual social interaction, and Chapter Four, which deals with nihilism under the weight of the infinity of information on the Net.  I will talk about the second part first as the later ties in with something I am writing for a class I am auditing.

Dreyfus quotes heavily from Kierkegaard’s “The Present Age” which discusses the mass media of newspapers and its negative effects on culture.  Dreyfus quotes from Kierkegaard:

The Public is not a people, a generation, one’s era, not a community, an association, nor these particular persons, for all these are only what the are by virtue of what is concrete.  Not a single one of those who belong to the public has an essential engagement in anything.

The Internet allows people to comment and discuss everything without having to act on it.  Dreyfus does admit that for those who are engaging in social struggle in the real world, the Internet is an essential tool to help people socially organize and get their message out.  But discussions which are completely virtual are much less committed.  I thought immediately of those whose social action is limited to subscribing to causes on Facebook.

Becoming an expert, and putting one’s ideas into practice, requires risk and the possibility of failure.  But there is no commitment when only debating online.  As well, the endless triviality of the discussion online leads to the ultimate trivial discussion, talking about the Internet itself: how big it is, how it is growing, how new and profound it is.  Such talk has always disgusted me to no end.  From McLuhan to the present day, it distracts us from the more important task of critique and a desire to ask why we would want technology the way it is, and what the proper path is for us in the future.

Ultimately, the only way to stay engaged is in living what Kierkegaard calls an aesthetic existence.  Dreyfus says:

Such a surfer is curious about everything and ready to spend every free moment visiting the latest hot spots in the Web. He or she enjoys the sheer range of possibilities. For such a person, just visiting as many sites as possible and keeping up on cool ones is an end in itself. Life consists in fighting off boredom by being a spectator at everything interesting in the universe and in communicating with everyone else so inclined. Such a life produced what we would now call a postmordern self — a self that has no defining content or continuity but is constantly taking on new roles.

Instantly I thought of my daily skimming of BoingBoing. This is not the first time I’ve been overwhelmed by the triviality of it all.  Every day there is a new wave of “Wonderful Things” made up of pop culture, nostalgia, middle brow science, and the occasional political comment.  The thing that always struck me was that I knew that none of these things would make an impact on me.  Regardless of whether I saved the link to any of them I would not look at them ever again.  I surely wouldn’t go back to them like I go back to Kierkegaard or Heidegger again and again.  I don’t mean to disparage BoingBoing, I am sure the writers take it very seriously.  But life on the Internet feels like BoingBoing: A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, ultimately. We are not really compelled to react to the flood, but only keep up with it.  This is Kierkegaard’s aesthetic commitment.

The third chapter of Dreyfus’ book deals with embodiment.  We forget how important embodiment is to our social interactions, and we’d like to think that virtual community can be as fulfilling, something else I’ve come to believe is not true.  I’ve been a lover of virtual communities ever since I dialed-up to an IBM BBS to find a driver for my broken computer when I was 12 or 13.  There were people talking on there!  Boy did I rack up a long distance bill.  But as I’ve overcome a lot of my own social anxiety, I’m reaching the conclusion that real social interaction, real talking and debate, watching of local sports or local artists, speaking to people as they walk down the street or sit on a park bench, these are much more important to the health of our society.  It seems like we are making more of a “connection” with people on Facebook, but ignoring the grocer who is an actual member of our actual community.

This ties into my paper for Information Ethics, where I hope to discuss the important of embodiment for ethics, building hopefully on Levinas.  This may be the source of the problem of ethics on the Internet, which is lacking if you read studies on racism in message boards.  I love not having to pay for this class and get a credit, because I can develop this argument without caring about deadlines.  If it takes me until the Spring I am going to write something I am interested in and proud of.

In conclusion, I have a message for those few regulars who read this blog.  You may have noticed my lack of “library” discussion.   I am much more interested in the essence of modern technology and what our phenomenological relation to it is.  So this blog is going to get more philosophical, even as it remains a discussion of technology in general and media technology in particular.  If this is interesting to you, feel free to continue your reading and comments.

And by the time I write down the title of The Idea of Europe: from antiquity to the European Union, I’ve already lost interest. I am not going to spend time trugging my ass to the library every day and read from the various 20 page parts which are relevant to me.   Maybe I could have just read the Introduction and the relevant chapters, took notes, and had been productive from sitting in front of a computer.

But who can read it there are pages missing? It is not that I want to necessarily read every page, but I don’t have a choice in what I can’t read. The Algorithm does. And though the Algorithm can make compromises here and there it is not perfect because it is not me. Depending on the strength of the application of the rules you can see more–sometimes even an entire work. But sometimes you only get

The question then becomes, how much would you pay to read the entire book.  I don’t think I am necessarily ready to pay a large amount for access to a database for music, but I would pay quite a large sum to have Google Books serve me every book I would want to read.  It is fast, it displays the books well.  And yes it messes up metadata for old books. It is not actually the new God, despite some popular opinion.  But going to a true research library is a horror.  For someone who actually cares about looking at to old editions of Charles Dickens, the 1871 and the 1873 editions, the academic research library is much more like the library in Eco’s nightmares.  As a member of the public, not a student, I pay a 60 dollar alumni fee to use the print collection.  If I am just a regular person I think I would pay $120.

And these are not even delivered to my house.  And yes, us priests of the book know that schlepping your ass to the library stacks builds character.  But I’d think that actually using the books more effectively and productively builds a more useful kind of character, no?

I don’t think that there really is a danger in the intellectual tenor of the Internet.  Reading on the Internet will be different, not better or worse, and it is our job to study and interpret the differences.  But I wouldn’t  say that people are fleeing away from books towards the Internet.  Those who can successfully navigate it see its other benefits and we can’t wait for books to catch up with us.  People want to have access to books in the Internet culture.  Students enjoy the convenience of having books they mostly likely are not reading anyway, and those who are more senior citizens of the Internet often express that we wish to  have an opportunity to read more books online and through our devices.

The fact is that the companies who control what culture has become, a commodity industry, have an interest in this relationship of manufacturing physical objects.  But I am ready to offer quite a large sum to have everything on a subscription basis.  And I promise I will continue to buy books.  The best books you need to have by hand to read multiple times, to write in the margins.  To take to the mountains and to the bathroom. But we have to own up to the fact that, like every other form of human production, most books are really bad.  Or to be more generous, most books have little relevance to what I am thinking about right now.  Maybe a chapter, maybe an essay out of a larger collection.  Maybe chapters 3 and 5 and section 2 of chapter 8.

People already have the option of paying $120 for limited access to a library. And yes, the access is limited by its physicality because you can only carry and deal with so many physical books at time.  And they don’t even deliver for that price.  I would be willing to pay more, more than $200 for sure, and I’d have to think about what the maximum I’d pay would be.  If the Government in the person of its Libraries cannot get this done, why should I not be ready to pay Google Books?

I agree, Google is making its money off of the backs of millions of dollars on public investment.  So it is unfortunate that Google is going to do what everyone wants them to do: give us a repository of books.  All books, because we already have all music, all video.  Those who are in love with information in a long form (like there are music aficionados) will pay money to have books delivered to us wherever and whenever, and in ways that we find relevant to our own work.

Both of the above pictures are from our recent trip to the Caribbean. That is me eating jerk chicken in Jamaica and a mango in Grand Cayman.

I post these only because I was looking at an old image of myself from when I was last in school. In many respects I don’t really like the way I look here.   I am unkempt and a bit overweight. And in many respects I am not happy in this picture.   Sure, I am sitting writing in front of a pile of books, but in public I am curt and dispassionate about what was going on around me.

The last year has been so much about forgetting my time in school. I haven’t really written anything beyond a simple blog post, and for a while I wasn’t writing in my notebook. I spent the spring and summer this year, after I finally got a job, reading random science fiction and whatever else I happened to stumble across and add to my library ILL queue.

I was so unhappy with the last year of my Master’s degree–mostly because of the fact that there were no courses in my last year because of a mass exodus of new professors hired to teach more theoretical courses. So I really ran away from the faculty. I turned in my papers and refused to think about what was before was an important part of my personality:  my scholarly side.

This summer, however, I began to feel listless. One day I took an intoxicated trip to Christie Pitts park, and something drove me to bring my final term papers from my Master’s. And they are very good, even if I don’t necessarily believe the ideas in them.

Three times in my degree teachers encouraged me to publish, complete research, or apply for a PhD. Mainly because of my original failure to attend graduate school in Philosophy (although I was accepted to one school), I really was overly critical about my own skills and attitude towards study.

Reading those papers, however, made me realize what I actually love to do. Not since my undergraduate have I actually had a chance to talk to people who read Habermas for fun. I look up Theses, for pleasure, on my own time. I have many friends but I still feel very much alone because I don’t get a chance to share this with people.

So, I’ve decided, I think, that I have to go back to school. I really have to take what I have learned over the last year about myself and apply it. I have no formal plans, and I don’t want any. I am not going to do this with ambition or a plan on where I am going to end up. I want to do it for me for the pure love of reading and writing what I enjoy. To prove this for myself I have decided to audit a class, and do the work, without concern for money being spent or the mark I will get in the end. I am just doing it for me.

So watch out, I am coming to get you with a new found strength and vigour. And just a little more fun than I had before. Because I sincerely feel like a different person.

Specifically, the following will take effect after the close of business, October 2, 2009:

• All branch and regional library programs, including programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults, will be cancelled
• All Parkway Central Library programs, including children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs, will be cancelled. We are exploring the possibility of relocating the Philadelphia Author Series programs to other non-library facilities.
• All library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers will cease.
• All community meetings at our branch and regional libraries, and the Parkway Central Library, will be cancelled.
• All GED, ABE and ESL programs held at Free Library branches will be discontinued, students should contact their teacher to see if other arrangements are being made.

http://libwww.freelibrary.org/closing/

The majority of the article is a good recap for those who haven’t been following the debate closely, but I specifically wanted to touch on two parts.

The first is her idea, which I believe is original because she doesn’t cite anyone, of “infogration”:

As well as trying to ensure that information is accessible to all, Google is involved in trying to make sure that people are accessing more and more information via the Web. Google has done this by pioneering a brilliant new model of business expansion, introduced here as infogration. Infogration is radically different from the traditional model of horizontal integration, which involves buying up competition, and vertical integration, which involves buying upstream and downstream industries. Infogration involves capturing different aspects of physical and social reality and representing them with digital information. In other words, infogration involves the integration of aspects of the world in to the medium of information into which targeted ads can then be placed.

Much more insidious than the regular process of horizontal and vertical integration, this infogration actually involves the gobbling up of our personal lives by corporations in the business of information. Our personal info, our thoughts and feelings, even our health records and genetic code. As Waller notes, one day we will see that we have the genetic marker for obesity and be targeted for weight loss ads wherever we search.

While I appreciate the social aspect of the Internet, it seems like you take any organic naissance of a means of social interaction, and sooner or later it gets sold out to the highest bidder just for the aggregate of information built up. YouTube is a prime example, but any of Google’s acquisitions would do.

The second discussion of Waller’s, and one I have begun thinking about a lot lately, is the differing concept of “information” used by Google in their business goal to organize the world’s information, and by Libraries as exemplified by the ALA’s mission statement.

However, how can these two uses of the information support such dissimilar goals: to make information accessible and sell advertising on Google’s part, and to support democracy on the part of public libraries. Waller quotes Roszak’s The Cult of Information: “‘A fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are “information”.’” She briefly discusses the modern use of the word “information”, and then writes in a very important passage the following (my emphasis):

Google is concerned with the free flow of digital information, information that is accessible anywhere anytime. In other words, Google is concerned with the form of the information. In contrast, public libraries aim to provide access to information in order to strengthen democracy. This requires a balanced flow of information and some sort of ordering of significance. In other words, libraries are concerned with the content of information. Google is only concerned with the content inasmuch as it is enables targeted advertising.

This quote explains exactly why I have been so dissatisfied with my colleagues in libraries, and what I believe the problem to be. With the rise of computer systems for accessing data, librarians have given up on their historical mandate of supporting democracy by not only supplying “information”, but by supplying the kind of information that will allow citizens to come to independent judgments and participate in a healthy democracy.

We have given up on trying to offer some balance, quality control, and yes, even ordering of information based on educated judgement, in favour of ever increasing flows of information, technological utopianism, and a willingness to let corporations solve our problems instead of using our own professional judgement.

But a recent post by Walt Crawford has got me thinking though (as usual), and that deserves more than a Tweet.  Entitled “We and Me“, he questions the mythology around new technology when people make statements such as

“We (all) are (or soon will be) connected to the internet all the time.” “We (all) are growing to prefer reading online rather than in print.” “We (all) use iPhones.”

And in comment which echoes everything I have been thinking about our profession for the last year, Walt writes:

The breakthrough recognition: It’s not false universalism. It’s elitism. “We” really means “the people who matter.” Doesn’t make it any more right. Does make it a lot more understandable. Without that recognition, I’d have to believe that some We-ists are hard of hearing, hard of understanding or a bit daft: Surely they’re aware that their universal assertions are nowhere near being universal?

I think it is time we all took a step back and really thought about the universals that do apply to our work as librarians.  That everyone seeks knowledge, not just information.  All people desire to know, says Aristotle. And to know is more than to just be informed.  In terms of information theory, Fox News gives me “information”, but I don’t know if I then know more about the world except for the fact that Fox News is good for a laugh.

The related universal is education.  Everyone has a right to education, from birth until death. The education gap is different then an information gap.  Identifying an information need and then seeking it is very different then identifying an education need and filling it.

And lastly people need recreation.  All of these are coming from my enthusiastic reading of Bill Crowley’s Renewing Professional Librarianship.

The danger that Walt identifies, and I agree with, is that when blinded by one kind of universal–the myth of universal connectedness–we are missing the other universals.  That not everyone can even use a web browser, let alone Facebook, Twitter, and the like.  That not everyone has a cell phone, or if they do they can do anything beyond make calls.  The one benefit of my job is that I interact with users of all ages and skill levels.  Some people use the social features of the software I’ve implemented very well.  And yet the women down the hall from me can’t find the “Internet” because all she does is make icons for the few sites she uses, and clicks them from her desktop.

I don’t see this changing any time soon.  Even in the net generation.  My younger brother and sister, while both technologically savvy, are not these mythical users that people make them out to be.  My brother really dislikes social software.  And while my sister takes to it, I don’t see her doing library research from her cell phone.

The Internet is important, and is changing things.  But it doesn’t change the fundamentals, and I think sometimes that we are losing focus on what we are delivering when we look to much on how we are delivering it.

I stayed up all night reading that report, and then writing that post.  And I think that was the time I was sure I was going to be a Librarian.  I think I was already accepted to the University of Toronto then, and from that moment I knew that librarianship was what I wanted to be passionate about. I was so interested in the process of going through the library and doing research, and how this would change in the future.

Anyone who has followed my posts since then will know that this passion was slowly killed by that Information Studies program.  The story of the disaster has yet to be written.  If you had been watching me over the last year you wouldn’t even suspect that I cared about libraries any more.  And that is because I didn’t.

The struggle of having to deal with what Bill Crowley calls the “cognitive dissonance” of librarianship versus the information professions in our education.  The agony of realizing that I actually got no professional experience while in school.  The defeat of having no true mentorship in my so-called practicum.  And then the depression of not finding my first professional gig for eight months.  All this killed my interest and desire to be a librarian.

I haven’t mentioned it, but since February I have been working as the Coordinator of Information & Knowledge Management at the Office of the Worker Adviser, within the Ontario Ministry of Labour.  So despite my love of libraries and distaste for the discourse of “information,” I am more of an information professional than a librarian.  I take the problems of the economy in stride:  due to the policies of the government I am employed as a temp (through an actual temp agency).  While I am being paid less then I should, I look and see that people all around me are without work.  Six months ago I myself was without work.

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the position.  I went to so many interviews in academic libraries, and had one particularly shocking experience that I feel like I am ready to tell.  But every time I am introduced as the “tech guy” at my office I cringe.  I insist on describing my self as the librarian. I love my computer, and I am a computer nerd, but this is more of my hobby.  I might like model trains, but I don’t necessarily want to do it for eight hours a day every day. There hasn’t been a Master’s level professional here for some years, so getting people back into the habit of seeing this position as a professional has been rewarding.  After showing people that their reference questions would be answered, with care and timeliness, I got a standing ovation at the all staff conference a few months ago.

And yet, I am still more of a book nerd, even though books may or may not be dying.  At least I want to be passionate again about what books represent: introspection, transcendence from one’s daily life, education,  empowerment, and knowledge over information.

I was ready to give up on libraries altogether.  I did so well in school, I had amazing people who were willing to attest to my passion and commitment, and I served through various professional activities.  So I didn’t have professional experience like some others, so what.  When I didn’t get a job for four months, six months, eight months I was down. And parts of this job get me down every day, to the point where I was ready to quit being an information professional.  I realized I am not an information professional.

Should I work a while then leave the profession altogether, I thought.  I even thought that I should focus my efforts on hooking children onto reading while they were young (inspired more than a bit by my partner Xuan-Yen’s work with Green Thumbs Growing Kids, who’ve won a Green Toronto Award for 2009). And I still would love to work with kids more.

While I am still unsure whether what I am doing now will count if I want to try again at academic libraries, I think I’ve come home to my path with a whole new set of ideals and priorities.  Over this year I’ve been searching for something to be passionate about again, and I feel like something is starting.  At least I am writing more.

Toronto Night Market 2009

At the same time, I’ve become largely disillusioned by Internet culture. I don’t know if the rise of Twitter coincides in my apathy for social media, Web 2.0, and the hype around software in libraries. My Facebook page is as empty as a development of pre-Financial Crisis houses, with dead leaves blown from uncut lawns strewn around imitation hardwood floors in mansion-like houses.

People are beginning to speak of Twitter as if it is this tap into some collective consciousness. I can’t deny that some amazing things have been done with the medium. The troubles in Iran alone are enough to convince anyone. But it is not the actor of the story. It is not the miracle. It doesn’t shed blood. Or, to put in a another way, the French Revolution happened without Twitter.

Ever day around the world people are fighting a struggle for their lives, and it just seems a little shallow to be focusing on the golden halo around these technologies. In my current field, libraries, you’d think the computers were going to make every student successful. A student who doesn’t know how to write, and isn’t motivated to put serious time in studying, isn’t going to be graduated by a interacting with the library through Facebook. It will be done by the library unfolding the world of ideas before the student. By showing her all these wonderful creations and inviting her to make her contribution. By all means have a presence, but can we now talk about something else.

Or perhaps I am doing the wrong thing. Part of the stress of this writer’s block is trying to really figure out what I am interested in. In one sense I have had so much trouble reading, because every time I want to do directed research or reading on something I lose interest almost immediately.

On the other hand I do so much free reading. From the Dune series to histories of Modern China, from the poems of Charles Bukowski to Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of Criticism, my reading has been far and wide and completely at whim. Part of my writing has always been bound up in directed reading, and I don’t know how to connect such disparate inputs with my outputs, or whether they should be connected at all.

More than once I have thought about intellectual work in itself. Perhaps I would like to be chopping wood somewhere and reading books in my off hours. I was at a provincial park for a wedding the other week and I remembered my two wonderful summers at the park. In the mornings I would show up at 6 am. I made coffee in the cantina, stole a cookie from the jar, and listened to Weather Canada’s report on the marine radio information channel. I would then write the weather down–the wind speed, direction, forecast, etc–on a chalkboard by the boat launch, so boaters and fishermen could see it as they go. Sometimes I would cut grass all day on a robotic riding lawnmower. Often I would drive around in this rugged golf cart with six wheels, picking up picnic tables, moving barbeques, or jumping around the hills on the way to the beach.

To combine the two, I would really love to build a library from scratch. To physically build the shelves, finish the wood with my own hands, then select the books to fill them. It is a postcolonial colonialist dream to go over to other places to help “fix” them. But perhaps to give someone a library is to help them fix themselves. You know at one time in North America there was a libraries movement. It become the right of every democratic citizen to have access to a library. We give food aid, and we build schools and hospitals, but you never hear about libraries. Maybe it is because society has moved on. Once the wealthiest individuals donated their fortune to establish them. Now our governments can barely keep the lights on. Or the twitters tweeting.

http://www.boomerang.nl/kaarten/boomerang/google-classic/

Write now I am writing this blog in the wonderful Textmate Blogging bundle. I do most of my writing in Textmate, from interview preparation to my book reviews. I don’t really have an excuse to open Word anymore, except when jobs place their postings up as .doc files. Built into the blogging bundle is the Markdown syntax and some other fun time saving tricks which makes writing HTML or CSS or anything else a lot faster. I also don’t use Word anymore for academic writing or my resume, having completed switched to the markup based LaTeX.

Over the weekend I purchased an old CDROM drive for $6.95 CDN to intall Xubuntu. People might have heard of Ubuntu. Xubuntu is a version packaged with a light-weight windowing system. I installed it on this old computer—actual the one I bought with me to my undergraduate degree. It is a Pentium III, and according to the bios only 1.0 GHz.

I hooked it up to my television and a keyboard for only 30 mins. After doing the initial install I’ve connected to it from my laptop through the terminal program SSH. I mostly use it to download things from the Internet and watch videos on the TV (thinks I can initiate from anywhere on the Internet).

A lot of this time off from my job search has been trying to realize what I actually enjoy doing.

Today I continued to work on designing my own Wordpress template from scratch, which should be ready very soon. And I just caught myself reading about Advanced SSH Techniques. I also have been working on designing a Content Management System for a non-profit organization.

Not that I necessarily want to be entirely technical in my work, but I think it is an important set of skills to have in my toolbox.

There is not one Canadian child in the last 30 years who hasn’t seen this I think.

On the one hand, I am a child of the computer generation through and through. I was on Bulletin Board Systems when I was 12. From there I upgraded to the text based Hamilton Freenet when the Internet first became accessible to a wider public. In elementary school I always followed around that one teacher who ran the network, and in high school I seriously considered studying computers in university.

But a few good teachers at the end of high school and I feel in love with academic subjects like English and History. Slowly over OAC and five years of a degree in Philosophy I became a reader and writer.

I always loved the reading more, and I now read much more widely than I every did, from Rousseau’s Confessions to Milton Friedman’s A Monetary History of the United States. But I never really have had a subject to write about that took up as much as my interest as hacking on a computer does. In many respects I think communication on the Internet can be shallow, pointless, and a waste of my mental energy, and I would much prefer being in a book. But I admit I am an Internet addict.

I think if I could help people—particularly those in academia—help one another find what they consider good and interesting, that would make me happy.

So I think I am seriously considering moving my focus to becoming something of a web or technology librarian. But not exactly. I think I have been progressing that way. Copyright, Information Literacy, Media Ecology, for me these all point to something: what is the Internet doing to those things that have been dominated by the success of printing technology, those being scholarship and learning.

The end. Right now I am touching up my CSS and HTML skills. And I am planning to write a paper on adapting this particular open source networking site in academia. Expect some design changes here soon.