This from the man chosen to drive the American Library Association off a cliff ... er, into the future, I mean:
"I had heard of the activities of (Blog People) and of the absurd idea of giving them press credentials (though, since the credentials were issued for political conventions, they were just absurd icing on absurd cakes)."
and ...
"Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts."
In reference to the first point, I've come around in recent months on the idea of current-events bloggers as journalists. The instinct is to close ranks and make 'journalism' a more exclusive field and 'journalists' a more selective society in order to prevent those hacks from diluting the overall quality of journalism. But there's a more important, and pressing, issue to me ... shrinking the pool of people granted Constitutional freedom of the press, then shrinking it again, and continually shrinking it. It reminds me of an otherwise pretty bad season 1 Babylon 5 episode in which one long-extinct race of people had employed cybernetic soldiers to eradicate anyone who was not of their race and pure. The problem was, once the soldiers had wiped out all of the ones who were of the different race, they had to keep refining and redefining their criteria for purity in order to meet the demands of their programming. And soon they had wiped out the entirety of the creator race.
Please pardon the geeky reference, but where's the dividing line, and who gets to decide who's a journalist and who's not? It's left intentionally vague in the Constitution so that the government never has to step into the role of deciding who's free and who's not.
And further, you really can't complain about the poor quality of journalism practiced by a class of writers you refuse to admit are journalists. Bringing them under the journalistic tent also brings them under the watchful eye of journalistic criticism, which is a valuable thing for an informed electorate.
In reference to the second quoted point above, I must sigh with exasperation. It isn't always about the quality of the writing (though many of the blogs I frequent, such as Wil Wheaton dot Net and Neil Gaiman's blog [Neil Gaiman is an established author of long-form works, it may surprise Mr. Gorman to learn], as well, of course, as my own Radically Rational, are exceptionally well written by any standard) -- particularly with the activist politics blogs, it's about the quick dissemination of information that more mediated, edited and corporately owned media outlets are not making available; it's about organizing the faithful for action; it's about subversion of the dominant paradigm.
Then there's the end of Mr. Gorman's statement above. Were I at home, and were I completely moved in to the new house, I'd look over at the bookshelves that will line every wall of every room and mutter, "Idiot!" under my breath. True, this is only anecdotal, but nearly every blogger and bloggee within the small circle of my acquaintance is some combination of avid reader of fiction and nonfiction, light and heavy; academic researcher; or professional writer. And without exception, among all of friends and acquaintances within 10 years or so of my age, all of the smartest ones (by my subjective measurement, I admit) blog or read blogs.
And setting aside all of the above commentary ... Sheesh! Does this man have half a clue? The point to such advancements in technology and society, from the perspective of libraries and librariants, isn't to assess them for their validity or lack thereof as information tools, it's to get out in front of the trend and figure out how to make the tool valid, to preserve the quality of information people get. To do otherwise is to render yourself and your (and my, by training) profession irrelevant.
Oh, here's another quote, this one from the beginning of the article: "My piece had the temerity to question the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine." I agree that there are innumerable problems and concerns I can see in this project, mostly arising from lack of context and the inability of users to build proper searches (see later in this paragraph). Whether Google is inefficient, though, depends on what you mean. If the inefficiency is in the quick retrieval, without critical user interaction, of purely relevant information, then yes, it's inefficient. Google's effectiveness is almost entirely a function of the user's ability to craft a proper search that uses terms and operators to refine, and make relevant, the search, and/or to sift through the returned results for the needed information.
But if the inefficiency is in the computer, in the indexing and then searching that index, Mr. Gorman is dead, flat wrong.
Oh, and ... "Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of 'hits' (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order."
The order in which results (not 'hits', you yutz; hits are something completely unrelated) are displayed is the core of what makes Google, Google and why people started using it in the first place -- a complicated calculation, from my understanding, that determines how many pages link to a given page (which is usually a good indicator that others consider that page authoritative), how often people visit, or click through, to that page, etc., etc. As long as no one's Google-bombed a given term or set of terms, the top results of a properly-crafted query are almost invariably the most useful.
Enough. This is the man they've chosen to lead libraries through the most critical period of self-reflection and role definition in their modern history? Goodness gracious me.
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