Buying/Selling Used Books--A Job for the Digital Age

The online journal Slate recently had an article by a man describing his job buying and selling used books. The guy has a scanner and software linked to Amazon.com's book marketplace. He goes to thrift shops and library book sales and scans the barcodes of nearly every book there. After scanning the barcode, the software will tell him how much the book sells for used on Amazon, as well as how popular the book is. Based on these numbers, the man will then make a decision as to whether to buy the book or pass on it. He then offers the books for sale on Amazon. People make a living doing this work--he describes some people making $1,000 a week. (Although the author describes how the job can be humiliating.) This is a low stakes version of arbitrage going on throughout the world with the development of the Internet and high-speed communications technologies.

Social Activism and Social Media

In STS302H we will be talking about Wendell Berry's vision of community today. This week in the New Yorker, there is a related article by Malcolm Gladwell. A lot of people have hyped the possibilities of social media to affect social change, and some people have claimed that technologies like Twitter empowered people in Iran to protest the massive election fraud in that country. Gladwell is skeptical. He gives as a counter-example the story of the lunch counter boycotts in North Carolina and notes these were launched by people who had "strong ties" to each other--they were good friends and were committed to each other. Gladwell claims that Twitter and Facebook promote "weak-ties,"--people you are happy to know, but whom you won't risk your life for. Gladwell claims that connections with weak-ties can be very helpful in some situations--finding a job, finding a possible blood marrow donor, but not in others, such as agitating for serious social change. Wendell Berry would translate this into the need to have strong communities where one has strong face-t0-face relations with people.