ALA President Not Fond of Bloggers

Phil Shapiro writes "American Library Association president Michael Gorman is not too fond of bloggers and blogging. '[The] Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief... 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. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.'"

Duh

Well yeah... blogs are for people to express themselves, not a place for them to write great literary works.

Think of your photo collection and music collection. It's just another extension of that (think DIARY).

It's about links between information

It seems to me that blogs help people develop an understanding of the links between information. For that matter, I think the main value of blogs and homepages is the building of links between the blog and world at large. A well linked blog becomes a discussion with the world.

In someways, blogs are a welcome relief from published literature which can be a bit too introspective or polished. I do agree with the librarian who is dismayed at the hype given blogs. Everything in computers gets overhyped. Individual blogs like mine [blogspot.com] really mean nothing. In aggregation, they provide an interesting topology of the concerns of our culture.

Re:Duh

blogs are for people to express themselves, not a place for them to write great literary works.

The complaint isn't that blogs are not great works of literature, but that they're such poor specimens. Surely there's something between the average blog and "great literary works" to strive for?

He needs to get out more

If the head of the ALA were a publisher, he would know that the overall quality of bloggers' work is no worse than the output of the vast majority of so-called "writers" who submit manuscripts. The fact that some people have talent and others don't is a trivial and uninteresting observation. His reaction sounds more like resentment that mediocre authors, whose work otherwise wouldn't be published, are able to attract large audiences on the web. Maybe he thinks they don't deserve it. Or maybe there's a crumpled up rejection slip in his wastebasket.

Irony:

Having read TFA, I find myself struck by nothing so much as how very much like a blog entry this alleged "article" reads...

HA!

Don't let this guy read any Slashdot comments in that case.

"Blog people"

Look out! The "Blog People" are going to burn books!

Random Facts

It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.

Not sure what

a random

paragraph is. The temperature here is 33 degrees
fahrenheit. I took a walk today. My HP

doesn't like talking to CUPS.

There are 3,472 green M&M's in the

jar.

Complext Texts?

"I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts."

Read complex texts? Ha! /.ers can't even be bothered to RTFA.

ALA People

I'm not to fond of these ALA president people. From what I have superficially seen they make broad sweeping generalisations and knee jerk statements about others who they do not take the time to understand. I also heard that they don't shower very often and are cruel to puppies. There was a rumour going around that they get their tertiay education from discarded tissue boxes and glue sticks.

Slashdot ad?

"It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."

Kind of like slashdot readers?

Work harder at uncovering the good ones

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.

Yo is sure to get schooled from my mad skillz. Oh by the way, this 3l33t haxor had oatmeal for breakfast this morning. Oh and here's a picture of my cat.

It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.

On one level, blogs are intended for brief communications or thoughts that often revolve around a central theme, but not always. Often they are intended as a means for maintaining communication with family and friends or as a creative outlet. However, this guy has obviously not been very informed or is lazy about finding informative/interesting blogs out there like:

Kevin Sites [kevinsites.net] whose reporting pioneered the use of the blog in combat reporting.

Dan Gillmor [typepad.com] whose new efforts are targeted at grassroots journalism from sources exactly like blogs.

Or Chris Anderson's blog The Long Tail [thelongtail.com] which discusses businesses, economic, cultural and political models whose goals are to take advantage of the significant portion of those populations underlying the distal distributions of a curve.

And many others whose careful investigation, research, thought and reporting go into the content on their blogs.

Oh, and then there are the blogs like mine [utah.edu]........

Librarians are bitter

He's just bitter because the idea of mapping IP addresses to the Dewey Decimal System never caught on.

I don't know that he is an antidigitalist...

...but he certainly doesn't get it.

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. The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. 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.

If he is opposed to "inefficient search" then the Dewey Decimal system must infuriate him. Google is great for getting a rough idea of what is out there, occasionally it may lead you to something really worthwhile - but most of the time it only cuts down on the early legwork, something very worth doing.

For a high-ranking librarian...

...He's actually a pretty funny guy:

For the record, though I may have associated with Antidigitalists, I am not and have never been a member of the Antidigitalist party and would be willing to testify to that under oath. I doubt even that would save me from being burned at the virtual stake, or, at best, being placed in a virtual pillory to be pelted with blogs. Ugh!

I hope he realizes that while most blogs aren't worth the bytes they are printed on in terms of content, there are enough gems that one can't write the entire concept off as a bad idea. In any case, judging bloggers by the quality of their writing largely misses the point--blogs aren't supposed to be a regulated, edited, meticulously researched medium of writing--they are a means of sharing thoughts with the world without having to jump through hoops. Whether the world listens, complains, enjoys the blog, takes offense to it, or feels that the author should have gingerly lucubrated every detail as if each entry were a Nobel Prize acceptance speech is beside the point entirely.

Ignorance breeds arrogance Wisdom breeds restraint

Haven't we all been in a social situation (out to dinner or a bar, for example) where a serious conversation starts up about a serious topic and what ends up happening is that the folks with the least informed opinions do much of the talking, whereas the ones with a more enlightened view say very little? There must be some facet to the human condition that predicates that ignorance breeds arrogance, and wisdom breeds restraint.

Our current U.S. political climate bears this out.

There are plenty of articulate and educated bloggers, certainly. But there are many many more who aren't. We should slow down and think more about the quality of our information, not just the quantity.

Can't replace a good book

"It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."

Hey, it was good enough to score a few million for Ken Jennings!

But seriously, who thinks blogs are where great literatire is to be found anyway? The best blogs-with-a-purpose seem to be the ones that report news stories the mainstream media won't cover. The blurring of the Tinfoil Hat as it were. Anyway, when I want good literature I usually turn to a book. For example in the wake of last weekend's suicide by one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to finally crack open a copy of Hey Rube given to me last year which I had not gotten around to reading. I found this in the Author's Note at the very beginning:

"What has gone wrong with our communication system since then? Why are we more ignorant and less informed today than we were in 1941? ... If World War III can start in a vacuum of silence and stonewalling by the White House, we are doomed like rats in a maze of fear. We are slaves to mendacity and hostile disinformation. Bread and circuses were not enough to sustain the Roman Empire and they will not be enough for the United States of America."

You don't need to wear a Tinfoil Hat these days to see that the plutocracy now in power in the U.S. controls the message and the media. Bloggers who attempt the lost art of Journalism can become a powerful force for truth and justice, keeping the old-guard media whores honest (if that's even possible anymore). But I don't think the ALA has to worry about dumbing down Americans' interest in literature. For 90% of the masses television finished that off decades ago.

this guy is hurting his cause

I'm no blogging cheerleader, but the patronizing tone he uses is bound to alienate a less enthusiastic booster of the blogosphere than I. He comes across as an arrogant prig who's using his (extremely limited) bully pulpit to bash those about whom he admittedly (and rather proudly) knows little. I have nothing but regard for the ALA and love my local libraries, but this mocking, snobbish attitude isn't going to win anyone over to his side.

What I got out of it is that the president of the ALA is afraid that his way of life and his preferred methods af acquiring information are becoming less relevant, and rather than changing the way he and his association do business, he figures he'll stand up and mock the people who are changing things in hope that others wil listen. Nice try, man.

Context

I think we could use a little context here. Gorman had written an article [infomotions.com]. for the LATimes questioning the value of Google's search engine for books (as contrasted with say spending the money on a library). The position of the article is that information in context (i.e. in a book written by a researcher) is worth far less to someone doing research than a far greater quantity of facts without the organizational structure of a book.

Bloggers who focus primarily on
-- putting together collections of obscure references
-- often don't have formal training in their areas
objected to the classical approach to research that Gorman advocated.

I see this article as written response the blogs which attacked Gorman. As a society we could wonders on the library front for a fraction of the cost of projects like Google's; this is a point that no one questions. The real issue is what is the relative value of libraries as contrasted with digital information repositories.

Blogging proposes a very democratic model of information evaluation that any intelligent person given access to the information will be able to derive the correct conclusions quickly and easily. The classic approach argues that a guided program of study is highly advisable prior deviling into raw sources of information. In feeds in which you are an expert which approach do you think is more correct?

Did anyone else notice ...

That here we are, creating an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs, with no attempt to build up to a complex document ...

Did Mr. Gorman just troll Slashdot??

noise issue

I think what he fails to realize is that the benefit of blogs over mainstream press is that the amount of noise present directly equates to more information from which to sift.

In the sense of traditional information theory, noise is information (to simplify a bit). Without noise there is homogenization of signal equating to a lack of movement toward chaos or entropy. Information therefore is created by breaking down communication channels, altering the signal (in this case news) between source and destination. The creation of noise hence creates a dynamic system of information in which all elements are going toward a state of complexity.

Complexity = good.

When extrapolated toward blog vs. popular press, blogs present a situation in which subjective filtering and emergence from it creates the content, rather than content coming from one source.

It is a distributed publishing model which puts the onus of interpretation, use and distillation upon the reader rather than the propagator of said content.

So taking information theory and applying it to blogs, blogs create more dynamic states from which useful information can be gleaned, but it changes the practice of information dispersal to the extent that the hierarchy which typified the dissemination of information pre-Internet has been flattened and in some sense elimnated. No longer is there a differentiation between the reductive properties of grass-roots press and large press.

The issue I see with this guy is not that he is a Luddite, but that he is threatened by the breakdown of the hegemony imposed previously be the hiearchy created by movable type and the publishing industry.

Oh come off it Mahatma

In the case of bloggers: "First they don't read your blog, then they laugh at your blog, then that's pretty much it."

Comparing the "blogging phenomena" to the Indian independence movement is a fine way to illustrate your massive sense of self-importance, though.

Oh, no, not the Gandhi quote again!

I hate how often that quote is used online to support ANYTHING where one organisation ignores/laughs at/fights another one. Not blastingt the parent or anything, I guess it is appropriate to this context, but really ... in any case, I offer a contradictory Carl Sagan quote:

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

They're both true, of course, but it's silly to forget either one in a debate.

Re:Couldn't be more true

I agree with most of what you say. The open bias of blogs does not bother me. However, there are other shortcomings. Namely, the thing I don't like about blogs (or, usually just the portrayal of blogs) is the treatment of them as writings. Indeed, I have read many posts that could be considered an article, though usually those are even on the short side of things.

All-too-often, some blogger will post an entry regarding a very interesting and thought-provoking idea, but mostly it's a few sentences and a hyperlink. The blog entry is just an arrow, a finger pointing at the moon. Why should the blogger get credit? Not only is the idea not theirs, they also didn't even offer an in-depth analysis of it (or more often: any analysis). Quite commonly, blogs are devoid of real content. When I look at a lot of the blogs--even professional ones--and they are essentially just posting summaries and references, I question the validity of blogs as a writing medium. Which is to say, it might be one for reference or information, biased or not, but not one of substance.

The really funny thing to me is sometimes it becomes circular, or even recursive. This blog posts about a concept via another blog which posted something they found over here which was just a little blurb about Apple buying out TiVo. Again, the idea proves very interesting--the short degrees of separation and locus of interest allow for quick news online--but it is not very weighty.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Plenty of bloggers, especially those with a political bent can get long-winded. And, furthermore, this is not to discredit the weblog as a medium. I think its pretty great and has quite a bit of potential. But I use blogs (or more specifically, their rss feeds) as information harvesters, not as sources of well reasoned, well written articles.

Re:This guy has no right

His writing styles is absolutely atrocious.

The irony ... it burns!