Thursday in class we divided into our book club groups and spent the whole class period discussing the readings we had picked out (I reviewed them earlier in the week on this blog). We had so much fun! My group was great, people brought snacks (I had meant to but had forgotten, ugh! There was plenty, though), we chit chatted for a little bit before we started, like a real book club is likely to do, and we all had great discussions on every piece. It was really impressive to see how much thought the teams had put into choosing pieces to read as well as how much everyone had put a lot of thought into the reading of the pieces as well. We decided that as a group we picked some pretty "dark" readings, which always makes conversation more interesting, if not uplifting. We managed to stay cheery despite the tone of the readings, though.
Because I don't really want to go through every discussion of every reading, I will list some key points I thought were interesting in each:
1. What qualifies as a quality submission to a crowdsourced digital repository? How do we avoid censoring submissions when we select for curation purposes, and how can we say that a person's experience of an event such as the Boston Marathon bombing is more or less valid than another's?
2. What should we really be taking away from Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings?" Is this an instruction on writing fiction for authors, or it is it an instruction for reading fiction, or can it apply to how everyone should be thinking about their life? The question of what is in "the dash" (meaning that your whole life on your tombstone will be summarized by a dash. How scary is that? E.g., 1989 - 2100, hey, I can dream of seeing the next century, right?) is addressed.
3. In our piece, William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force," we talked a lot about ethics and motivations. We wondered whether the fact that the doctor is a doctor justifies the use of force on a child to get her to comply with an action she clearly does not want to do, and whether because it was to "save her life" if it made a difference. We also wondered what kind of treatment we would allow or expect in a medical setting today. I noticed that we really only asked one or two of our questions that we had prepared; the group really took off discussing it all on their own.
4. The piece on the Syrian opposition being deleted from Facebook was really interesting. We discussed whether Facebook had any responsibility to harbor graphic activist groups or not, as well as how the Syrian conflict had moved from being "good guys vs. bad guys" to a really conflicting mix of everyone vs. the bad guys. It was fascinating to think about the role that social media is playing in this civil conflict, and the continuing role it will play in future conflicts. Social media is not designed for these kinds of uses, and so their policies must evolve to consider their future potential use. Really thought-provoking material.
5. The discussion around Bluebeard was really varied. Mostly it centered around how entirely creepy the story was, and for a fairy tale, we were concerned about how there seemed to be a lack of a clear moral. This likely stemmed from the speculation that Bluebeard is a story based on the true French aristocratic serial killer, which is all kinds of creepy. So what was the moral? We never did figure it out.
Altogether, the book club was a great success!
Your book club sounded very interesting! It would have been great to be able to sit in. I think that I would have been most interested in the "What qualifies as a quality submission to a crowdsourced digital repository? How do we avoid censoring submissions when we select for curation purposes" topic. I think this is a very interesting topic and something that librarians will have to consider for the future to come. What does qualify as a quality resource? I think it will vary for each person but this is certainly something that we will see during the course of our career.
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