Sunday 24 June 2018

Hove Library - 110th Birthday Celebration



On Sunday 8th July it will be 110 years since Hove Library (gift to the city from Andrew Carnegie) opened. on 8th July 1908. 
At 3pm, we will be having a street celebration outside (cake and cordial) to celebrate. We intend short readings, poems and quotes in celebration of Libraries - musicians and celebrities also welcome. One lady has already offered to come dressed in Edwardian costume to read an Edwardian library poem! 
Everyone welcome including children. 
Dress code: Bright colours.
A few of us will go to the Connaught pub afterwards for a drink, but we wanted to honour Andrew Carnegie (a teetotaller) in the street celebration.
Please come and show your love and appreciation for this jewel in Hove's crown.
Hove Carnegie Library is much loved and much used, yet has suffered many threats over the years so we thought it would be nice to do something positive with this celebration and show our appreciation. If you would like to contribute a reading or piece, please email hovewriters@outlook.com to let us know.

Facebook invitation here

I myself have penned the following poem for the occasion. 


Love Your Library 

Whether you can or can’t afford to go to university
There’s no greater place for education and diversity
It’s international, equal and inclusive too
And the council provides it just for you!
It’s a window on the world
Great adventures unfurled
A chest full of treasures
And jewels beyond measure
You never know what you might accidentally find
Whereas Google just pairs you with the same kind
Social mobility lurks within these shelves
For the next Carnegie who wants to make themself
It’s a refuge from rain, a sanctuary, a nest
A lifeline for many who need a rest
From the world’s loneliness, cruelty and random tests
So love your library, give it a hug
Tell all your friends about the reading bug
Or come in to read the papers or use the free IT
Or join a book club or writing group in the local community
Bring your kids for storytime, it’s also free
What’s not to love about your local Library?
©LS King 2018


The other day I saw two teenage girls doing a fashion shoot on the internal staircase and enthusing how great the ornate windows looked on social media. It was refreshing to see that Hove Library users also find new ways to appreciate this handsome Grade II listed building 110 years on.

We look forward to seeing you on 8th July!




Friday 8 June 2018

The Internet Of Things We Might Not Want

I've just listened to a Radio 4 programme where a panel discussed how to tighten up online security as people attach more and more 'things' to the internet such as their kettle, toothbrush, toaster and fridge/freezer.

Not once did anyone ask why. WHY? Why would any human being wish to connect their kettle, toothbrush, toaster or fridge/freezer to the internet?

I have just asked the internet this question and found a site with various explanations for five year olds, all enthusing how 'exciting' and 'useful' it will be to have all our objects smartified so that they can talk to us/each other and save us time and trouble.
  • Your toothbrush will be able to tell you when you've spent the full two minutes cleaning your teeth (er, mine has already has a 2-minute buzzer)
  • Your toaster will be able to tell you when your toast is ready (mine pops)
  • Your kettle will be able to tell you when the kettle has boiled (way ahead of you there - mine clicks off!)
  • Your fridge/freezer will be able to tell you you're out of orange juice and order the supermarket to deliver some more (just the one carton? How inefficient. And what if I fancy apple or mango juice instead?)
Even devices controlling our central heating are hardly necessary when we have timers to do that. Smart meters for utilities are equally redundant when most of us already switch things off when we're not using them for cost reasons and they haven't been shown to result in smaller (or more comprehensible) bills. Plus more reliance on devices rather than common sense does not, ironically, make bills smaller or us greener.

Nor does our garage door need its own internet connectivity or account in my view.

The one such application I can see that might be useful is tracking devices for pets to prevent them from getting lost or stolen. However pets are sentient beings, not inanimate household objects.

A friend bought a fertility thermometer and found she was meant to connect it to an app and enter all her (and her partner's) most intimate details into it. She was not impressed. Why could the information SHE needed not be incorporated into the thermometer in a simple daily readout of Fertile Today or Not Fertile Today? That's all she wanted. What would they do with all the data she supplied to their website? She had not agreed to be part of any mass research trial regarding fertility (or whatever their motives were). She could soon contact them to complain if the thermometer failed.

We have already witnessed seemingly innocuous geneaology sites, ostensibly to help people trace their family tree, turning into sinister DNA databases amassing samples worthy of any criminal database, and with the ability to sell them on for all kinds of purposes such as medical, travel and other insurance, prospective employee screening etc.

Meantime my phone remains unconnected to my bank account and I will not be letting Alexa into my life any time soon.

Every internet contact is a security breach risk and everything sold to us as 'convenience' could (and doubtless will) be used for a whole lot more without our consent, to one day control us in ways we cannot currently dream of.

Moreover is it wise to start letting devices and apps do more and more of our basic thinking for us? How dumb do we want to become? Completely-reliant-on-technology-for-everything-dumb?  I have always resisted a SatNav, precisely because I don't want to lose my map reading skills, which by and large, perform just as well and have never led my vehicle down a harbour slipway or any of the other reported mishaps ascribed to SatNavs.

In fact I've started turning my wifi off every night as it is not just security risks which are assuming more and more concern, but the potential damage that constant bombardment of Electro-Magnetic Fields (EMF's) may be doing in close proximity to our natural bodily EMF. The jury may still be out as we have not been under artificial EMF bombardment long enough to find out the long term effects. However it has always been recommended to keep mobile phones at least an inch away from the body and how many people do even that? I often recall a cousin who acquired a terminal brain tumour within a year of acquiring his first mobile phone twenty years ago. Of course it could have been a co-incidence, but he was noticeably in love with this gizmo (still a novelty at the time when whole offices shared one mobile for going out and about) and had it clamped to his ear a lot of the time and within a year he was dead at 37.

A Silicon Valley insider shares his experiences of EMFs here.

When I was around 20 and internet cafes started springing up because few people then had home access, I remember the internet being sold to us as something which would help us and give us lots of extra consumer choice. It would be a useful tool in our lives.

Not once were we warned that the internet might one day take over, closing our banks, post offices, ticket offices and shops and removing all other consumer choices from us including (eventually) the ability to pay in cash or by cheque. That one day Silicon Valley would rule the world and even encourage social isolation. Or that many of its designers were nerds who desired to minimise the need for human contact in their own lives and were designing the same for the rest of us aka the 'contactless' world. Consent for this to happen was neither asked or given and there was no political referendum on it either.

For all the undoubted advantages of the internet, I feel we've been mis-sold it and it should have been kept at 'useful tool' stage. Certainly every update on my computer seems to lead to it being less user-friendly rather than more and I suspect most updates are not for my benefit at all.