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See Michael blog. The human record under threat?
See Michael blog. See Michael provoke.
Over the next six weeks, former ALA President Michael Gorman, known for his disdain of ‘blog people,” functions as lead blogger at the Web 2.0 Forum on the Britannica Blog.
Gorman will post a series of six essays on a question posed by the folks at Britannica: Web 2.0: Is it real, is it hype, or does the truth lie somewhere in between?
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Two of Gorman’s essays are currently posted. The early conversation itself points to the potential for this medium to inspire cerebral dialog. It may itself prove that not all blogging is “hype.”
Gorman asserts:
The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called ‘citizen journalists’; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular . . . millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy . . . and scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics.
Matthew Battles, senior editor of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and author of Library, An Unquiet History, responds:
As president of the ALA, Michael Gorman led an organization historically committed to protecting and enhancing the individual citizen’s right to information and freedom of expression. But here he seems to take a stance better suited to the counter-reformation than the age of information. From his strange conflation of blogging with intelligent design, to his atavistic take on authority and individual expression it’s clear that Michael Gorman misunderstands the potential of the Internet so thoroughly that he can’t even be wrong about it. For the Internet is not the end of the responsible making and sharing of knowledge, but a tool—in fact a uniquely powerful creation of reasoning human minds—that fosters and empowers responsible individual expression.
Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, suggests we are witnessing a cultural shift:
Contemplative Man, the fellow who came to understand the world sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is a goner. He’s being succeeded by Flickering Man, the fellow who darts from link to link, conjuring the world out of continually refreshed arrays of isolate pixels, shadows of shadows. “contemplative man to flickering man,” and adds to the dialog:
The decisive factor is not how we produce intellectual works but how we consume them. When Gorman says we must cherish “the individual scholar, author, and creator of knowledge,” I can wholeheartedly agree (as most people would) and still believe that he’s missing the point. The millions of people who consult Wikipedia every day are not pursuing any kind of anti-expert or anti-scholar agenda. Their interest is practical, not ideological. They go to Wikipedia because it’s free and convenient. They know its quality and reliability are imperfect, but that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make as they hurriedly fill their market baskets with information. It’s our mode of consumption that is going to shape our intellectual lives and even, in time, our intellects. And that mode is shifting, rapidly and inexorably, from page to web.
(Since my number of characters is limited for each blog entry, please read the next post for my response!)
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About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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