A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of “web log.”) Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People. —Michael Gorman —Revenge of the Blog People! (Library Journal)
Gorman’s op-ed piece isn’t easily accessible online, but I’ve found someone’s cached PDF copy.
Gorman writes, “When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place.” He is talking about Google’s plan to digitize the contents of some huge libraries and serve them up to online searchers. The original material that was initially published as books, so from that perspective Gorman is correct. Still, there are queries for information that don’t logically have to lead to a patron’s request to check out a book. And while I, too, find it distressing when my students habitually click the “full text only” option when they are using the library catalog on campus, literally across the street from the library’s stacks of printed journals, today’s students have developed the digital literacy that helps them to multitask much more efficiently than their sequentially-working elders. Thus, it’s hardly productive to sniff at the information-processing skills that students have developed through their entertainment and social uses of the internet.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Google will let people idly peek at a fact in a book that they would otherwise never see. At the very least, they’ll have had that peek. And I bet that some of the dusty books that would otherwise have never been found will get more readers than they have now.
I have some sympathy for Gorman’s position… for anyone to claim that Google reveals God’s mind is ridiculous. Still, I’m stunned that the president-elect of the American Library Association and Dean of Library Services at a major university would brag in the year 2004 that he knew barely anything about weblogs.
Good points, Mike and Tony. One of the great features of the codex (as opposed to the scroll) is precisely that readers can access the contents in ways other than sequentially. Computers aren’t particularly useful at helping readers comprehend texts sequentially — though I have several books on my PDA, and I both read these books and mine them for data. The convenience of having the books with me, so that I can read them whenever I have a spare moment (while I’m waiting in line somewhere, or during those brief moments when my kids are playing quietly together), more than makes up for the drawbacks of reading on a tiny screen.
Gorman’s argument that the ability to conduct keyword searches within the text books is “all but useless” is, I believe, flawed. For several decades respected and revered cornerstone reference resources such as EconLit (published by the American Economic Association), PsychInfo (American Psychological Association), and MLA Bibliography (Modern Language Association) have indexed chapters and sections of books and monographic publications. And the MARC records (MAchine Readable Cataloging)upon which all online library catalogs are built have for many years inlcuded a field that catalogers use to include Table of Contents information for books, theses, dissertations, etc. Speaking of tables of contents… Shall we rip all tables of contents and indices from our mongraphs so that readers will not be tempted to forsake the sequential and cumulative examination that Gorman describes? I think not… This heavier level of indexing provides students, researchers, and casual readers with additional access points to the information they need to build knowledge.
I suspect Gorman’s piece was spawned more out of genuine concern for the “googlization” of information and information retrieval rather than his contempt or disdain of the digital culture.
You’ve captured the conflict really well here — and I, too, am often troubled by the knee-jerk reactions some academics have about digital culture. You’re right: the literacy shifts a bit and people make up for it in productive ways — today’s readers can multitask well and process information in bits. But at the same time, Gorman’s right too: without context, the art of concentration evaporates. “Information processing” isn’t quite the same thing as “reading”…or, at least, it’s a different paradigm for reading than the one that print-based/book culture privileges. To sustain a thought, to follow a train of thought, to concentrate for an extended period as a book requires is a valuable skill — one which fewer and fewer people really acquire. At the same time, being able to adequately process snippets of text is a skill, too. Educators need to enable students to do both, and hone their reading in a conscious, meaningful, and ethical way. It’s the same with TV: one needs to learn and practice at being an active, critical reader — simply
“processing” the rapidly firing info on the screen doesn’t go far enough.