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February 27, 2005
BrisBloggers Meetup, Ideas and Librarians
Friday's inaugural meeting of the Brisbane Bloggers was interesting and useful. We are rather an eclectic bunch of armchair philosophers, and as such it was most entertaining to spend some time chatting with new people about everything from politics to technology and drinking games. I'm just sorry I couldn't stay long, as I was obliged to attend a graduand function after about an hour. Nevertheless, the first meeting was fun, and I'm sure that in future meetings the Brisbane blogging community can work together to achieve some useful public debate.
Speaking of debate and public engagement, I haven't exactly been bombarded with suggestions on my previous RFI post on community engagement. Thanks to Rob for your suggestion - most appreciated! But to everyone else, if you read this blog, I'd be grateful if you took the time to just make a suggestion or two.
Finally, I am absolutely floored by the extraordinary hypocrisy of the elected president of the American Library Association, Michael Gorman, who is now describing bloggers as effectually ignorant:
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.
MORE HERE
His main complaint is that bloggers base their criticism of his writing on excerpts of his work. This, in spite of the fact that Gorman himself says he has learned about the blogosphere as a result of reading only fragments of works. Email messages containing blog excerpts seem to form the basis of this highly antagonistic and defensive article in LibraryJournal. "At least two of the blog excerpts sent to me....". He is even trite enough to suggest that the investment Google is making on digitising books and making them available through the Google search engine should instead be spent on books and libraries in California. This cheap grab at the public interest is apparently proof of his shallow understanding of the project Google is undertaking. Whilst he regards Google as an inefficient tool for information retrieval, he seems to be wilfully ignorant of the fact that the global audience for information retrieved through Google is now in excess of 934 million citizens, and not just the 35 million in California, and that humanity and society are far better supported by global connectivity and the information sharing that occurs online than if there were a few more libraries in wealthy California. What a shame that an individual who is supposedly dedicated to knowledge propagation has mistaken alternative channels for information access and debate as competition for his own business of information entombing.
Posted by jj at February 27, 2005 11:12 AM
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The man (Gorman) sounds like an ignorant buffoon, and much the same as other ignorant buffoons who attempt to describe, categorise and otherwise pidgeon-hole bloggers and the 'sphere as just another virtual fad. Let's be quite clear. The art, as it were, of blogging can be whatever the blogger wants it to be. Even a little time and bandwidth spent rambling through blogs will reveal that. It's neither a new art form, nor a ground-shaking media revelation. It's a format for personal expression and as such, should be supported, not repressed.
Posted by: Niall ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.joannejacobs.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 27, 2005 3:33 PM
I think it's unfortunate that Michael Gorman has chosen to comment in this way on the reaction to his LA Times piece. The points that Gorman made in his LA times piece are relevant and interesting in terms of the influence of google on information retrieval and the usefulness of the digitisation project. What he says about the context of information and how we use it is true... and worth consideration. (I think the points that Gorman makes about the difference between information and knowledge are particularly relevant in the age of the googlisation of information retrieval).
While he has certainly revealed an ignorance about blogging and the 'blog people' as he calls them, there can still be some truth in what he says about blogging - if you take it in context. Take a blogging community like livejournal and you get all extremes of posters and topics from crazed fangirls, to teenagers, to college students - the serious, bizarre and ephemeral. What is particularly unfortunate, I think, is not Gorman's characterisation of the 'blog people', but that the president-elect (yes, he's not president yet, but will be in the next election cycle), that the president-elect of the ALA has revealed a fundamental ignorance of the 'blog' as an information tool. Regardless of of how long the blog has been around and the research into it (blah, blah), you would think that after the 'rise' of the blog in the US election campaign last year, that the powers that be in the American Library Association would be well aware of the blog in the context of an information tool. This is unfortunate and a very poor reflection on our profession.
Posted by: Rachael at February 28, 2005 5:05 PM
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