From a comment thread, a defense of the notion that “gaming is a literacy unto itself”:

Really good games have had me searching for books on Muslim culture and history; searching road maps and google maps for satellite views of faraway towns; reading Shakespeake, Lewis Carol, Bradbury, and all the Oz books; finding proper clothing for almost the span of written human history; learning algebra, polyhedrons, and probability when I was struggling in math class; challenge a theater teacher on Peter Brook’s principles about what constitutes “theater;” and being able to accurately explain vampire myths across 4 continents. It’s also taught me some very creative swearing.

Now, I wouldn’t call myself an avid gamer. I do enjoy the major non-FPS titles, and I have been playing my Christmas-gifted XBox360 since I got back home, but I’m far from an otaku or whatever. Still, really, what the fuck? What kind of games has the commenter been playing? And if we can determine what these games are, is there any way to justify the notion that these games, and those gaming experiences, are typical of the young’ns these days?

I always get the throw-up-in-my-mouth-a-little response when I see someone go so very far out on a limb to justify librarianship. It suggests to me that we are a doomed breed, grasping at straws. Ulp.

Haven’t written lately, mostly because of the dark pit of suck. Grr grr grr. Things are brewing in the ol’ brain-pan, but I just can’t seem to bring the thoughts into focus and then write them up.

But here’s something:

In the last day, I’ve read these three articles:

• “Web searches for minority groups”
• “Google Deal or Rip-off?”
• “Defeating Bedlam”

These three seem to share some commonality, but I can’t quite express what it is. It, whatever it might be, is something that’s been stirring in my head for a while, but it remains shadowed and vague.

It has something to do with the notion that a search engine’s results will be personally useful only if those results are prearranged specifically to be useful to a person like you, and with the notion that it is encumbent on a for-profit corporation to act like a government-supported public amenity, and with the way that the necessity of creating folders and filenames seems exasperating where the old process of collating photocopies and labelling manilla folders wasn’t.

There’s this notion trying to form in my head concerning the way people react to electronic information, and how that way of reacting is fundamentally wrongheaded. It’s in the way that people whinge about how the new way of things might be 50 times better than the old way, but it still isn’t perfect so it’s (somehow) no better than the old way anyway. From the other end, it’s in the way that people are willing to treat the electronic equivalent of a friends-and-family newsletter as being revolutionary, when in fact it’s just the electronic equivalent of a friends-and-family newsletter.

I don’t know, I just can’t make it clear in my head. It’s like the great majority of people seem to think the Internet is a series of tubes stuffed with twinkly fairies, and are disappointed when their screens aren’t automatically filled with instant utopia.

Does anybody have a better handle on this than I do? Is it even clear to anyone what I’m going on about?

So I was sitting in as a non-voting member on an all-day meeting. At one point a vote came up, and I got a little confused when I realized that only four or five of the people in the room were voting members.[1]

I wasn’t alone. One of the potential voters spoke up, noting the oddity. The chair responded that the committee’s bylaws declare that a quorum is automatic in any meeting announced two weeks in advance. Even though only five of the dozen-plus voting members were present, any decisions made would be binding.

I’m torn. On the one hand, this rule creates a strong incentive for committee members to attend. On the other hand, this is a committee made up of faculty members–very busy people, often traveling–so the system could very easily be gamed by an unscrupulous chair.

(Note that the current chair is very scrupulous indeed. He won’t be chair forever, though.)

So: good rule, bad, or just another problematic but acceptable variety of democratic procedure?

[1] The vote was on whether to give voting status to the library representative, who would likely be me. This made my confused feeling especially awkward.

So you’re in a meeting with people from several different departments or organizations. The person with the floor is going on about something–maybe a procedure, maybe a concept, maybe even just using some vocabulary word–and you finally have to admit to yourself that you have no earthly idea what sie’s talking about. This isn’t a case in which the speaker is presenting poorly, though, but instead one in which you are ignorant of the thing in question.

Your eyes go glassy. You sit up a iittle bit straighter and very consciously try to behave as if you’re following along, but the air around you gets hazy with your outgassing nervousness. You don’t want to speak up and ask for clarification, because you’ll A) reveal yourself for the dumbass that you are; and B) you’ll break the flow of the presentation, removing value for the rest of the participants who do understand the subject.

And then you survey the room, and you realize that at least a quarter of the other participants are in the same state you’re in.

There needs to be a word for that.

(What’s interesting is my experience of what happens when you bite the bullet and admit your ignorance. Sometimes the other confused people look relieved and join in on the requests for clarification, but just as often they’ll glare at you and resent you for exposing, even by proxy, their own ignorance. In the latter cases, they’ll sometimes come up to you after the meeting and thank you for playing sacrificial lamb. Other times they’ll just glare at you some more.)

Relatedly, there also needs to be a word for the phenomenon in which the speaker bases hir presentation on knowledge of some situation that half (or more!) of the participants couldn’t possibly know anything about, like the policies favored by a manager who retired before many of those in attendance were hired.

One week until my 35th, and I still feel like I’m mucking around in a dark pit of suck. Harumph.