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.'"

Comments

Duh

[boola-boola]

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).

Re:Duh

[curunir]

I think your analogy of a diary is particularly good. The vast majority of diaries never amount to anything. But some diaries become historical records that are truly valuable literary pieces. Anne Frank is the obvious example of this. Another would be all the diaries that constantly show up in shows on The History Channel. No librarian would ever think twice about having one of these works in their collection. Yet they make a big fuss about a form of media which isn't really intended to be archived. Maybe they should pay attention to the deterioration of forms of media that are supposed to be archived. The latest Grisham novel doesn't stack up too well against novels from past eras.

I think blogs will be treated similarly to diaries by history. 20 years from now, we may see collections of important bloggings as eBooks, or however "real literature" is published at that time. But the vast majority of blogs will have vanished into the /dev/null, as it were.

Re:Duh

[X_Bones]

That was one of the most painful posts I've ever read on Slashdot. Do you find it even the least bit ironic that your post, rife with spelling and grammatical errors (in a language-related thread, no less), was full of pretentious language and sounded exactly like the whiny blog posts you're complaining about?

ok, apart from the wierd metaphore quite a good post methinks.

Apparently not.

"Blog people"

[panth0r]

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

Random Facts

[pintpusher]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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

[splatg]

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.

Oh come off it Mahatma

[SweetAndSourJesus]

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.

Librarians are bitter

[rrs]

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

Ignorance breeds arrogance Wisdom breeds restraint

[whjwhj]

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.

It's about links between information

[yintercept]

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 really mean nothing. In aggregation, they provide an interesting topology of the concerns of our culture.

Oh, no, not the Gandhi quote again!

[ggvaidya]

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.

He needs to get out more

[serutan]

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.

Re:This guy has no right

[Leo McGarry]

His writing styles is absolutely atrocious.

The irony ... it burns!

Irony:

[uhlume]

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

What liberal media?

[gad_zuki!]

Correct. Everytime I hear the ignorant claim of "the liberal media" I politely ask the person who said this to tell my how Judith Miller got all those NYTimes (you know the big gay liberal paper) front page pieces about Iraq's WMD from anonymous sources. If they plead ignorance I then ask them to show me ANYWHERE in say, Harpers or The Nation, where those liberal stories intersect at all with what's presented on CNN et al. If they again plead ignorance then I ask them to debunk the propaganda model of media as described, with many examples, in Manufacturing Consent.

The "liberal media" is a nice meme that helps right-wing politicians get their way and keeps their supportoers from experiencing too much cognitive dissonance. its also completely and utterly false. Bias for all commercial media outlets can be traced to the ownership of that media outlet, profitability, nationalism, and fads.

Remember, if you're not part of the solution...

[po8]

What amuses and annoys me about Michael Gorman's comments (and yes, I did read them and understand them) is how arrogant they are. Gorman, as President-Elect of the American Library Association, is not just proud enough to say how much smarter he is than other commentators about managing information. No, he's proud enough to dream of telling Google how to manage their money. He's proud enough to characterize a whole class of people intelligent enough to operate a computer as mouth-breathing idiots.

Best of all, he's very proud of how the Universal Bibliographic Control scheme he endorses will solve the world's information access problems. Now please understand: UBC doesn't actually give anyone access to source materials. In point of fact, it seems to be a scheme for trying to assemble a meta-bibliography---in other words, a list of what printed materials you could read if you could get your hands on them. This is unlike Google, an organization crass enough to actually digitize the text of books, to put you one click away from the primary source of the information it indexes, and to maintain backup copies of that information against the loss of the primary source. It is unlike Project Gutenberg, an organization that has already published a huge number of digitized texts that are now available to anyone with Internet access. It is unlike even the bloggers, who at least make their own work fully available online. Gorman apparently has the more limited goal of indexing materials without providing access to them, while mocking the efforts of these other organizations to provide access.

On the offhand chance that Michael Gorman is reading this, let me make my position as clear as possible. I am a scientific research and (if I do say so myself) a fairly literate writer. I use Google, Wikipedia, Citeseer, Project Gutenberg, and other online information resources on a daily basis, because I've found them to be quite effective for me. I read about five fiction novels a month. The last time I used a library card catalog was about 6 months ago. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the comprehensiveness of my University library's bibliography, and everything to do with the paucity of its actual content.

I support our American public libraries, because I think they're an important bulwark in our fight for free speech. In terms of effectiveness in serving my needs and the needs of my family and friends, they are so bad that I fear for their future. Mr. Gorman, please keep in mind that when public library funding comes up for public discussion, your comments, especially given your position, are extraordinarily unhelpful. So, in the jargon of the "blog people" you so despise, please STFU.

Re:Librarians

[xSauronx]

Getting back to the article, I do tend to agree with the general idea that we are becoming a fast food people who just gobble information without thinking of where the information came from and what it represents.

I'm not sure that we are becoming that kind of people....but rather that we already are. Look at the politicians we have in office, the decisions they make, and the laws they pass with little resistance or interest from the average American.

My dad was reading what he thought was a funny email to me, something about left-wingers wanting the guantanamo bay priosners charged with something or released, and a right-winger saying how bad those people were and would the liberals like to baby sit a gun-toting terrorist.

He stopped laughing when I asked how many cases he'd read about in the paper of those prisoners being charged and proven to be terrorists...when he realized he hadn't. He hadn't ever realized that the government that locked those people up is based around a constituiton that says *everyone* has rights to things like a fair trial.

And he's not the only one who has no idea what the fuck is happening in the world outside his pretty little town. And he's not the only one who probably doesn't really care that much.