Google and the like are much touted as “second generation” search engines that put the world’s information (that word again) at your fingertips. Information retrieval systems have been studied for many decades. In the course of that study two important criteria have been developed to evaluate such systems—those criteria are recall and relevance. The first measures the percentage of pertinent documents retrieved from a database (for example, if there are 100 documents on Zambian agriculture in a database and a search on that topic retrieves 76 of them, the recall is 76%). The second measures the supposed appropriateness of the documents that have been retrieved (for example, if you retrieve 100 documents when searching for Zambian agriculture and 76 of them are actually about Zambian agriculture, the relevance is 76%).
Information retrieval systems achieve high recall and relevance rates by the use of controlled vocabularies (indexing terms, etc.) and present the results of complex searches in a meaningful and usable order. By any of these criteria, Google and its like are miserable failures. A search on those engines on anything but the most minutely detailed topic will yield many thousands of “results” in no useful order and with wretched recall and relevance ratios. However, even when the documents retrieved by a search engine are on the subject sought, the quality of the material - often community-generated material that pops up high on a hit list because the material is free and easily accessible — is shoddy or irresponsible. The hits produced by a search engine may contain all of the terms a user has asked for, but the delivered product may in actuality be full of arrant nonsense. More solid and reputable websites are buried by the current algorithms of the Internet because they are often fee-based and cannot garner as many links as free sites (links are key to boosting one’s search engine rank). The true challenge for businesses, search engines, schools, and publishers is discovering how to tap into and exploit this source of reputable and reliable information. Until that occurs, we may well be raising a generation of screen potatoes who, blinded by speed and made lazy by convenience, are ignorant of the knowledge they will never acquire and the rich world of learning that search engines cannot currently deliver to them.
Over many centuries civilizations have developed an ethos of scholarship based on respect for the individual mind and veneration for learning and the learned. The thoughts of those individuals have been preserved in texts—many of them centuries old from China, Arabia, Greece, and Rome—that comprise the most important part of the human record. That record is not, alas, complete. Many texts were lost completely in the Manuscript Age and many have come to us in fragmentary or corrupted forms. Though we like to think that the history of society is a story of continuing progress, many electronic texts are in as much danger as manuscript texts—they are subject to loss or corruption in the same manner as those from before the Age of Print. If the culture of learning that has sustained our civilizations for millennia is to be preserved, it is imperative that we ensure that texts are preserved and authentic, that they contain the author’s ideas in the author’s words, and that we respect authorial intent.
Respect for the text necessarily implies respect for intellectual property and the copyright laws that codify intellectual property rights. There is today a concerted and multifront assault on copyright spurred by monied interests and the desire of consumers to use digital technology to get something for nothing. This assault has created a mindset that sees the notion of intellectual property as a barrier to progress rather than what it is—an affirmation of the singularity of the human intellect and personality. Because few people like to admit to being motivated by greed and self-interest, these assaults on intellectual property are often couched in high-minded digital jargon and/or weasel words. The theft of music by vast numbers of people using Napster and its successors is given the innocuous name “file sharing” and large-scale stealing of video clips is cloaked in talk of the creation of “virtual communities.” (The very word “community” has become so debased as to be meaningless—but that is another social problem entirely.) Another excuse used by thieves in the war on intellectual property is that they are taking on big monied interests, as if the facts that the Disney Company is twisting the copyright laws to its advantage and that big music companies rip off their musicians somehow justifies the taking of the intellectual property of others.
Plagiarism—the ultimate disrespect of intellectual property—is famously on the rise at all levels of higher education. The ease with which one can cut and paste texts found on the Internet and make them look like one’s own makes yesterday’s plagiarists look like pikers, faced as they were with the laborious task of copying before there were word processors and high-speed Internet connections. Digital sample essays are readily available for purchase by students and every week brings an allegation of plagiarism and other academic fraud against some professor or graduate student. If our society maintained a respect for the creations of individual minds, and if that respect had not been eroded by assaults on intellectual property and an increasingly casual approach to truth, the fact that digital resources can empower plagiarists would not have led to the epidemic of pretense and falsehood pervading today’s educational systems and the wider society.
A common feature of call-in talk shows and even blogs is the person claiming to have “done research” into the topic under discussion. What invariably follows is a torrent of half-baked ideas, urban myths, and political vituperation, the former two being attributed to “the Internet.” Research, properly used, signifies complete and critical investigation of, or experimentation in, a particular subject resulting in new conclusions or discoveries. To many, it now means a few minutes noodling around to see which shards of data a search engine can retrieve and, worse, a delusion that one is now in possession of all pertinent facts.
There are three levels of research using texts. The first and most rigorous is enquiry using primary sources (documents and texts created during the time being studied or after that time by persons who were observers of the events in question) that seeks to establish new knowledge, change previously accepted knowledge, or synthesize existing knowledge to shed new light on a topic. The second is consulting authoritative secondary sources (scholarly books and articles, entries in reliable, expert-based encyclopedias, and others that describe or analyze a topic but are at least one step away from the actual event, written by authors with credentials, and published by reputable publishers) in order to acquire knowledge and understanding. The third, which scarcely deserves the title of research, consists of unorganized and serendipitous consultation of unauthoritative or uncertain sources (reading popular nonfiction, mass-market magazines, or “googling” a topic). It is no exaggeration to say that a complete understanding of these levels of research—of their virtues and difficulties—combined with critical thinking, are essential if we are to make progress in K-16 education, in particular, and toward a knowledgeable and informed society capable of seeing through the commercial, political, and special-interest blandishments to which we are all subject.
“If you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist” is a common saying of Jimmy Wales and his ilk—a remark that gives shallowness a bad name. It does, however, illustrate neatly a state of mind that has turned away from learning and scholarship and swallowed—hook, line, and sinker—every banal piece of digital hype. There are intellectual treasures of all kinds in libraries and archives throughout the world that are not available on Google, and, because of the defects of all search engines using free-text searching, would not be retrievable using Google even if every last word in them were digitized. Mr. Wales may place no importance on anything other than information in digital form, but we owe more than that to the young. There is a life beyond the search engine—a life of richness and nuance undreamed of in Mr. Wales’s philosophy—and all teachers at all levels of education must insist that their students use primary sources and authoritative secondary sources in their papers and studies, regardless whether these sources are digitized. Further, they should emphasize the acquisition of research and critical thinking skills applied to the human record in all its variety.
There is a present danger that we are “educating” a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet and of interacting with, and learning from, the myriad of texts created by human minds over the millennia and perhaps found only in those distant archives and dusty file cabinets full of treasures unknown. What a dreary, flat, uninteresting world we will create if we succumb to that danger!
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June 19th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Manual trackback - delete if you let through the trackback I just sent:
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001216.html
June 19th, 2007 at 8:59 am
I’m following your blog with great interest, and you certainly seem to enjoy “hacking” away on the www.
I’m just wondering why it has to be a case of either/or.
I don’t trust the internet as a 100% replacement for “classic” information, but it has great advantages in terms of speed, interactivity and accessability, just to name a few.
Why can’t the internet complement classic strategies?
June 19th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Michael,
I think this is your best post so far.
I am wondering if I might get you to tackle a topic I tried to get Clay Shirkey to deal with in his response to you.
David Weinberger has written of user tagging that “[it] repudiates one of the deepest projects our culture has undertaken over and over again: The rendering of knowledge into a single, universal framework. The rendering has been assumed to be a process of discovery: The universe has an inner order that *experts and authorities* can expose. But in a networked world we know bettter than ever that such an order is a myth of rationality. We can’t even agree even on basic issues such as what constitutes a ‘major’ religion or a ‘legitimate’ state. Order and categorization, we are learning, depend on context and project. The semi-chaotic state of the ‘tagosphere’ represents the nature of our shared world better than the cool marble columns of the old mono-order ever could” (from web article “Tagging and Why it Matters”)
With comments like these, things like Library of Congress Subject Headings, the product of so much love and care, are considered more or less useless, devoid of utility, disconneceted from more holistic models, etc, and Weinberger can call for all manner of overhaul in the specialized librarian’s use of concepts to name this or that aspect of reality. I agree with much of what he says, but babies and bathwater come to mind.
I tend to think that discovery *is* a part of this. Involved are: Hard work. Curiousity. “Leather-foot” journalism. We make sense of the world, and *to some degree at least*, the world makes sense. Its not an either-or. I recently heard argued the following: Scientists, for instance, have treated the world as if it were a deliberate work of genius (having depth, harmony, precision, intelligibility, elegance, beauty, order, meaning), as one might approach the work of a great artist like Shakespeare, and they have been rewarded for it (resulting in things like the ordered, and hence useful, periodical table of the [chemical] elements).
Is it simply the organizational powers of the scientists - apart from the realities “on the ground” - that somehow creates this order and its usefulness? Is it something else?
How is this related to your arguments about experts and authority?
24d3June 19th, 2007 at 9:12 am
I personally think the digitization of sources is a wonderful advancement in civilization, and one that perhaps Gorman under-appreciates, but his concern at the end - that “we are ‘educating’ a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet and of interacting with, and learning from, the myriad of texts created by human minds over the millennia and perhaps found only in those distant archives and dusty file cabinets full of treasures unknown” - is spot on and beautifully stated.
As a secondary school teacher I see this all the time – students truly are getting intellectually lazy toward research methods, and I can only imagine how lazy they’ll be when they continue on to college and graduate school. The Web 2.0 crowd needs to acknowledge this, that standards and skills can be harmed as we adjust to the wonders of new technology. On this point, Gorman is dead-on correct.
June 19th, 2007 at 10:24 am
[…] It’s always fun to watch the fur fly, maybe that’s why this quote by Michael Gorman on the Britannica Blog made me grin: [Gorman summarizes the history of intellectual property development and then says:] “There is today a concerted and multifront assault on copyright spurred by monied interests and the desire of consumers to use digital technology to get something for nothing. This assault has created a mindset that sees the notion of intellectual property as a barrier to progress rather than what it is—an affirmation of the singularity of the human intellect and personality.” […]
June 19th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I understand what you are saying. Students are losing the ability to take an encyclopedia and look up and actually read the information that they need. With Google and other web searches, it’s too easy to bypass the book and in 2 seconds you have the information you need. Although, I can’t help but point out that the government, who is asking/demanding schools to use the latest and greatest technology (the internet) in classrooms, is partly to blame. I remember going to the library and doing all of my research in encyclopedias; today, I don’t know if students even know how to do that. Perhaps, this can be blamed on the school districts that are eliminating their libraries to make room for media centers? Just a thought.
June 19th, 2007 at 11:33 am
[…] Michael Gorman’s recent Brittanica link-bait attack on users of the Internet mentions copyright. It disturbs me that a former president of the American Library Association would offer both such a simplistic view and one not backed up by research- especially since this article complains of that very issue. There is today a concerted and multifront assault on copyright spurred by monied interests and the desire of consumers to use digital technology to get something for nothing. This assault has created a mindset that sees the notion of intellectual property as a barrier to progress rather than what it is—an affirmation of the singularity of the human intellect and personality. Because few people like to admit to being motivated by greed and self-interest, these assaults on intellectual property are often couched in high-minded digital jargon and/or weasel words. […]
June 19th, 2007 at 11:58 am
You write “…in 2 seconds you have the information you need”–using Google, that is. I would contend that you have some information but you have no idea if it is the information you need or just the first “information” you have found.
Best wishes, Michael
June 19th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Something else we all might want to take in:
http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i41/41b00601.htm
(found via ACRLog)
June 19th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Michael,
You got me there…it’s true that it is very unlikely you find what you want upon the first search, but for students, it sure beats flipping through several books and pages and actually *gasp* read the information. I know that students will read the little blurb that Google or Yahoo! give and think that’s all they have to do. Their goal: The less reading, the better.
Maybe that’s generalizing, but you can’t deny the truth in it.
June 19th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
I have heard from Mr. (Jimmy) Wales himself, that he not only has not written “If you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist” but also that this quotation is directly opposite to his actual views. I had read the quotation attributed to him in the New Yorker article by Stacy Schiff (July 31 2006) — “Wales, in his public speeches, cites the Google test: ‘If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist’”—and had not seen the attribution disputed. However, I was remiss in not checking further before I published this essay. I apologize to Mr. Wales unreservedly and wish, not for the first time, that the saying “A lie is half way around the world before the truth has its boots on” was not so spot on.
Michael
June 19th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Mr. Gorman,
It’s very gratifying for me to know that someone as articulate and influential as yourself has this forum to express the concerns that I (and likely, a number of others) feel about the mass, uncritical acceptance of the Internet as the only and best way of doing research.
I know I am a relative youngster - born in 1957, the year in which, I believe, you started working in libraries in Britain - but for the past dozen years or so I have felt like Rip van Winkle as I have witnessed the absolutely wholesale, uncritical adoption of Internet search engines (Google, especially) as the primary, and nowadays the sole, avenue for locating information and actually conducting research.
By no means am I a complete Luddite, but I too am utterly dismayed at the absolute dismissal of traditional print and microform resources, not to mention manuscript resources located in archives.
As an academic reference librarian, when conducting bibliographic instruction sessions for undergraduates, I express my concern about this to the students. I acknowledge that in this modern world we are all under pressure and in a hurry and tempted to take the easy way out. However, if one relies completely on Internet searching or even solely on using the “fulltext”- only periodical articles, one is truly in danger of doing incomplete and possibly inaccurate research. Appealing to the students’ self-interest, I also note that doing at least a little research using more traditional resources is likely to ensure an “A” paper rather than a “C” paper or worse.
Thank you for expressing eloquently and publicly the concerns many of us more traditional librarians have about the mass, uncritical adoption of the Internet by the world at large. I hope this isn’t a losing battle. I know change is always occurring and that the Internet does have a number of virtues but it’s so very hard to convince people outside of the academic world and under, say, the age of 40, that the Internet does not yet provide a valid substitute for genuine, sometimes hard, research using truly reputable and authoritative tools.
1fd1June 19th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
The Siren Song of the Internet: Part II - Britannica Blog
The Siren Song of the Internet: Part II - Britannica Blog
The best part of this whole stupid Gorman thing yet: in a blog post on shoddy research, he misquotes Jimmy Wales based on a printed source. And has to apologize. The irony! The laughs! The sheer…
June 19th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Actually, Gorman cites the New Yorker article accurately, and the New Yorker does its homework and fact-checking and interviewed Wales extensively for the piece. Funny, Wales waits one year to complain about being misquoted? waits until he’s on the hot seat and being criticized in this forum? …but he had no problem with this quote when it merely was contained in the puff-ball New Yorker piece (that also contained the Essjay lies to boot)? Hmmm….And this reflects badly on Gorman? How convenient for Wales to remember he never said this….(Gorman is actually being gracious and letting Jimmy off the hook! I doubt I would if I were Gorman.)
June 19th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
P.S. Michael Gorman leaves the following note on “See Also” site mentioned above, the one with the silly statements by a Steve Lawson (whoever he is). Gorman shows once again that he’s much too gracious for this crowd:
“Dear Mr. Lawson
I did not ‘misquote’ Mr. Wales. I read that he had said those words in public speeches in the New Yorker article. It’s probably counter to the snide ethic of blogs, but I chose to accept his statement that, despite the unrefuted statement in the New Yorker, he had not said and did not believe those words.
Michael Gorman”
Gorman is much too much the gentleman to say what we all suspect - that Wales is playing fast and loose with the facts.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Gee, Sherman, why the hostility?
The issue is not so much misquoting (though I am frequently misquoted, that is not the issue) but rather that Schiff’s article fails to give the context in which I make that remark, and also misled Prof. Gorman about what my position - and Wikipedia’s - might be on the issue of the “Google test”.
And this is not even a criticism of Schiff, really. She did not say that I advocate that position, but rather that I “cite” it. And I frequently do cite it… generally in order to explain a more nuanced and useful approach.
I think it is pretty clear to anyone who knows the subject matter that Wikipedia’s position — and mine — are the exact opposite of the simplistic view that Gorman mistakenly attributed to us. This is not a matter of legitimate dispute, really, as the matter has been discussed openly for many years at Wikipedia and elsewhere.
I wrote to Gorman, explained the situation, and he graciously corrected the record. I never said that any of this reflects badly on Gorman. One thing that I am sure that Gorman and I both agree about is this: doing research and getting the facts right is serious business, hard business, and errors will be made, even by people of good faith acting to the best of their abilities. Such is the nature of knowledge.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
June 19th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Well, I did - irony - a Google search, and didn’t find an independent quote from Wales saying that. And if even so, I’d assume he was being descriptive rather than prescriptive. He certainly doesn’t say Google is complete and all you’d ever need, that seems rather strawmanish.
I have heard people use such a saying, but derisively, to describe the superficial practices of many Wikipedia contributors.
I’d have to give this one to Wales. It’s not reasonable to expect him to protest every misquote or context problem.
June 19th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Seth: You’re missing the point. Wales isn’t saying he was “misquoted”; he told Gorman he’s never said any such thing, which seems not to be the case. You choose to give him the benefit of a doubt, but there is no basis to assume your assumption is any more accuarate than the opposite conclusion, that Wales has indeed said this–that he said this to the New Yorker and has said it elsewhere, whatever his meaning, and that’s he’s not being truthful now.
June 19th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Ah, found it (using a different Google search)
“But there are other cases where it’s borderline. Where you might say, I’m not sure if this is a hoax, if this is real, is this not real, and the example here was a film called Twisted Issues, an obscure underground punk film from 1988. The funny thing is, I gave a talk just two days ago at the University of Florida, and the next day somebody wrote me and said, “Do you know I played on the soundtrack for Twisted Issues.” I said, wow really, go ahead and edit the article, really, so anyway, so the first person says it’s supposedly an underground punk film, but it miserably fails the Google test. So what’s the Google test. You look something up in Google, and if you can’t find it, then it probably doesn’t exist. It’s — this is not a foolproof test, but it’s pretty good. Right? There are still a few things on the planet that are not in Google. But it’s pretty good. And so it fails the Google test, and it doesn’t have any listing, so a couple people say, “delete, delete.” And then somebody says “Hey wait wait wait wait, I found something. It’s in the Film Threat Video Guide to 20 Underground Films You Must See. So maybe it has some notability. Next person down says, complete it. Next person says, it’s a real movie, it’s in IMDB, keep keep.” So at the end of a discussion like this, this would have been kept. In fact it was kept, and the article’s still there.”
[Can’t link, that seemed to have triggered the spam-eater]
From the full section above, I think Wales is being taken out of context. He’s clearly talking about a narrow circumstance of determining whether something is a hoax or not.
1f42June 19th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Google: 1, Michael Gorman: 0
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001217.html
Sorry …
June 20th, 2007 at 6:03 am
Mr. Finkelstein,
I’m afraid you’re in the cheap seats and can’t see the leader board. The scores are actually:
Finkelstein: 1 (for doing your homework)
Google: 1 (for having the evidence, though it isn’t easy to find)
Gorman: 2 (1 for quoting correctly and 1 for being a gentleman and taking Wales at his word)
Wales: 0 (sorry: correction–
Wales: Disqualified (Bad Sportsmanship)
But stop all this, give yourself a break, and read a wonderful piece on Brian Wilson by G. McNamee on this very blog. (Please tell me you read other things!)
Sincerely,
MH
June 20th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Did you read my complete post? Bombast aside, where I fault Gorman deeply is for not thinking critically. Yes, there’s cheap irony. But at another level, he’s being a terrible example. Not because he couldn’t use Google well enough to double-check the quote. But because anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Wales’ slick defenses on issues of quality and reliability would know that the meaning Gorman imputed to the quote has to be spurious. That part isn’t hard at all. And that’s what’s wrong with this screed - if you’re leading a charge for “the author’s ideas in the author’s words, and that we respect authorial intent.” (note that ideas and intent part!) - but don’t do it in practice, well, there’s a problem there which is not easily cured, and it’s not about skill in Googling.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:10 am
More on Britannica’s Web 2.0 debate
A continuing conversation on Britannica’s blog about Web 2.0. At this point, it’s basically Michael Gorman (former president of ALA) and Andrew Keen (author of the Cult of the Amateur) vs. Clay Shirky (of Many-to-Many and points beyond). Here is
June 21st, 2007 at 9:26 am
Mr. Gorman’s latest anti-web one-two punch brings to mine 2 old adages. The first, “A failure of the student is a failure of the master,” I remember from my days in the martial arts. The second, I heard repeated by my grandfather, a master woodworker: “It is a poor workman who blames his tools.” I’m sure that he wasn’t the first to say it.
The internet is a research tool, and students should be taught to use it just as they are taught to use any other research tool. This is a two-part lesson: The use of the tool, and the research skills that over-arch all tools.
The failure of today’s students is not because of the existence of the internet, but their instructor’s failure to teach those students how to use it as a research tool.
Google can produce excellent (both in terms of recall and relevance) search results, if used correctly. Understanding how to craft the query is critical here- and this is something that is probably not taught to today’s students. In my school days, we had to go to “library class” where we taught how to use the card catalog, the Dewey Decimal System, and the other systems at work in a library.
Secondly, bad research is never the result of the tool, but the researcher. A student can perform junk research in a 100% analog library just as well as they can online. Print libraries overflow with erroneous, outdated, or biased information, just like the internet does. Teaching students how to identify reliable and up-to-date sources is critical no matter what the research medium is, analog or digital.
If our students are losing their research skills, we shouldn’t look to the internet as the scapegoat.
June 21st, 2007 at 10:19 am
As a high school librarian, I witness the process of bad research almost daily. One of the major problems is that most teachers do not want to spend time teaching the research process–the steps to take to discover the proper information, whether through print or nonprint. When I offer to teach the class about Boolean searching,web site evaluation, or how to use certain databases, the teachers often prefer just to let their young researchers Google or Wikipedia it. Is it about spending the time? Is it a waste of time to teach proper research techniques? Learning to evaluate web sites is crucial to discovering good information, but teachers usually say “I’ve already covered that.” Two minutes later, as the students are happily clicking away on the library computers, I see their Google page with thousands of hits, which in itself isn’t a bad thing–but students tend to click on the first one. No advanced search, no limiters, no thought…just cut and paste.
Just think what good researchers these intelligent students could become if we laid the foundation for the proper research process.
June 21st, 2007 at 11:23 am
Mike:
Again we are in violent agreement…. hmmm. Must be in the “name.” Mike #3 is also in agreement with me and thus, by association, with you…
Are you going to be in DC this weekend for the conference. Maybe the Michaels Gorman should get together.
Regards,
Mike Gorman #2
June 21st, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I agree with both Greg and Maggie above. Yes, the fault is not with the tool but what we do with it, but let’s not underestimate the power of the tools’ many vociferous advocates who, as we can see in this forum, often dislike open debate on the negative consequences that can result from imprudent use of such tools. Also, concerning Maggie, you’re experience is not unique, and teachers and librarians (and parents, too) must do a better job of instilling better research habits in our students. This push, I fear, will not come from the tech community.
This forum at Britannica is good start in bringing these issues to a head.
June 21st, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I’m afraid that teachers are part of the problem. A friend of mine has a child in private grade school. The child was instructed to only use Wikipedia because “we want everyone to use the same source and it isn’t fair that some families can pay for subscriptions to online encyclopedias.”
Could you imagine a teacher 30 years ago telling a child they couldn’t use the encyclopedia their parents bought?
I asked the parent what they were going to do about this absurdity; the reply was that they didn’t want to make make a big deal out of it.
If teachers are more interested in equality than educating students and the parents don’t want to be bothered making a fuss, then its easy to see why the ability to think and reason critically is becoming a lost art.
June 21st, 2007 at 6:08 pm
For what it’s worth, “If you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist” is a fairly common expression on Wikipedia (especially in discussions) - but invariably it’s always being used *sarcastically* and to make the point that better research would have turned something useful up.
June 22nd, 2007 at 9:30 am
Most states have virtual libraries which provide free access to encyclopedias. Here in Alabama, our wonderful Alabama Virtual Library provides so many databases, encyclopedias, and other resources that no student–or his parent–should ever use the excuse that cost is a problem.
So access shouldn’t be the issue…how we help students learn to use reliable, accurate resources should be. But it must begin at the top, with principals requiring teachers to collaborate with the school librarian to help our students become competent evaluators and users of the tons of information we face daily. (Hey, many of our adults could use this instruction, too!) Otherwise, we aren’t an informed society, merely one deluged with too many bits of information and no skills to assess them.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:42 am
Maggie: Exactly - when I was a kid (which isn’t all that long ago)if you didn’t have a set of encyclopedias at home you were told to go to the library. In fact, I remember an assignment in junior high where we had to use a different major reference work than we normally used - which meant a trip to the school or public library for everybody.
I’m all for easy access to information. I use the Internet extensively for research on a variety of topics. But since I learned good source assessment skills first, I can determine which sources are reliable and which are likely to be less so.
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:51 pm
[…] The Siren Song of the Internet: Part II - Britannica Blog […]
June 26th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
[…] It helps that his points are, by-and-large, valid when considered from within his frame-of-reference. And despite his very pronounced colloquy that seems to drive people mad, he is a concerned citizen with some legitimate beefs. But it’s two recent posts of his that betray his misunderstanding of our 2.0 world and his subsequent strategy for coping with it. The Siren Song of the Internet, parts I and II make it clear that he’s misinterpreting the music. His biggest mistake is to assume that the flow of information through the Net is a zero-sum game and that there should be a procedural framework imposed upon it. You might just as easily catch the wind in a bag and to expect such from the internet will leave you in perpetual disappointment. Which is obviously where Gorman is currently mired. He thinks it is the sirens’ song we’re hearing. But it’s not. (Incidentally, I always thought that the wind-bag setback was simply a matter of poor, untransparent management on the part of Ulysses) […]
June 30th, 2007 at 7:29 am
[…] Michael Gorman also has some trenchant remarks on this subject. His second installment about the “Siren Song of the Internet” address two crucial issues for librarians in this century. First is relevance and recall rates of searches. Second is the two part perception that according to Gorman’s foils, “if it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist” and according to Gorman himself, that these are found “only in those distant archives and dusty file cabinets full of treasures unknown.” […]
July 10th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
You know, used to be, the sum of all human knowledge could be contained in 29 volumes!
July 11th, 2007 at 7:29 am
As he so often does, Michael Gorman has hit the nail squarely on the head in his recent blog postings on Web 2.0. And, as they so often do, his critics can find neither the nail nor the hammer. Full disclosure: I rarely disagree with anything Gorman writes or publishes, especially his recent work on the nature and content of librarianship (including his book co-authored with Walt Crawford). So we can dispense with ad hominem arguments on both sides of the issue right off the bat.
Perhaps the most interesting issue that Gorman raises is that of scholarly authority in an online world. And the question he poses succinctly is this: As we move to publishing online (in addition to print, for instance), do we face a new understanding of the nature of “authority”? Is what has traditionally constituted authority in these matters suddenly being transformed into something else entirely? Or, is the concept of “authority” simply doomed altogether in the hive world? Do we now need to speak of “collective intelligence” rather than, say, “collective ignorance” or “collective stupidity”?
It might be useful to explore, just for a moment, the origin and core meaning of the concept of “authority” in this context. The primal origins of the concept and word, of course, derive from the idea of the “author”—that is, the person(s) in the best position to know about what he or she has written, claimed, said, or otherwise created. Over time, the concept has developed along two parallel lines: (1) the concept of having the power, or right, to do something or compel someone else to do something; (2) the concept of being in a position to have the final say (or at least the most credible say) about a matter. Thus we speak of “authoritative opinion”, “authoritative statement”, and to provide the “authority” for a claim or statement. It is clearly implied that a person or persons may acquire or forfeit authority in the latter sense as quickly as they may be purged from a position of authority in the first sense. But while political downfall, say, can be simply a matter of brute force or weight of numbers, such is presumably not the case with the loss of intellectual authority. Intellectual authority is not a democratic concept at all. This fact about the concept is quite independent of modes or formats of publication or dissemination. Just as the legal concept of an “expert witness” transcends time and place, so the concept of intellectual (or scholarly) authority does not depend on the mode of distribution of opinion and scholarship.
There are two questions about authority that must be kept scrupulously distinct: (1) What confers authority, or constitutes authoritativeness, and (2) How can we tell who (or what) has it? I may be a saint, but perhaps no one can tell that from outward appearances. Gorman is asking us to consider the second question, really, rather than the first. Once we get beyond the idea that every opinion about any matter is equally worthy of our attention and respect, then we are still left with the question of how to decide whose opinion to trust. This is the question that Michael Jensen has raised in his Chronicle of Higher Education article on the “new metrics of authority” (CHE, 6/15/2007). As we move increasingly to the online publication and dissemination of scholarly and intellectual work, do we need to find new ways to measure authoritativeness? Or does the concept simply evaporate altogether in the hive world?
Let’s assume for a moment that what constitutes authority, or authoritativeness, can be explained in a fairly straightforward, pre-analytic way—something like the following from Black’s Law Dictionary: “…by reason of education or special experience [having] knowledge respecting a subject matter about which persons having no particular training are incapable of forming an accurate opinion or making a correct deduction.” Surely we can all agree that, if we had to bet our lives on an opinion about something, we would want to bet on the opinion of someone who qualifies as an authority in more or less this way. But how are we going to recognize such an individual when we need him or her? By what markers or criteria are we going to identify a proper authority and not merely a pretender?
In the halcyon days of print publication in the academic and scholarly worlds, we had fairly well understood ways of doing this (even if they sometimes failed to distinguish the good from the bad; witness the Alan Sokal affair, for which there is a Wikipedia entry, by the way). The distribution of not just “information” but actual scholarly and intellectual content and opinion on the Internet is not merely pushing the limits of traditional ways of marking authority, but rapidly moving beyond any semblance of possibility that we can continue to cling to traditional strategies. Nor should we want to. But that is a far cry from giving up the traditional concept of “authority” itself. We should agree with Jensen (and Gorman) that many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Internet: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument. Authority by virtue of applause and popularity, Jensen observes, is not a satisfactory substitute. Gorman would doubtless agree that what is needed most urgently as we move on to Web 3.0 (or whatever) are new ways of identifying, publishing, and making available to critical analysis and review the results of scholarly and intellectual inquiry in ways that both preserve the traditional values of authority and yet recognize the sometimes tenuous and fluid nature of that authority.
2751July 23rd, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[…] July 23, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under libraries, Michael Gorman, librarianship, wikipedia, blogging, Uncategorized Although I must acknowledge that the fractured attention span caused by my hectic summer schedule lends itself more to small bites of expression than to multicourse meals, I have a personal interest in the Michael Gorman controversy and couldn’t resist jumping into the fray. First and foremost, I would suggest that Mr. Gorman’s comments on digital media clearly reflect a negative bias despite his assertion in his controversial 2005 Library Journal column Revenge of the Blog People that he is “no antidigitalist.” Never mind that he has skewered video games, Wikipedia, Google, the Google Books digitization process, weblogs, and consistently asserts the superiority of print sources over digital ones and the importance of the librarian as a mediating authority in the process of gaining access to recorded knowledge. Gorman may or may not be an antidigitalist, but he is certainly a library traditionalist and arguably disingenuous in his persistent habit of verbally yarking all over a medium he claims not to despise. He is free to have his biases, as we all are to the extent that it does not interfere with our functioning. In the case of a librarian, functioning could arguably be defined as having the capacity to locate the best source of information to meet a given need. […]
August 3rd, 2007 at 5:56 am
There are problems inherent in the Internet, one of them being how to find authoritative, relevant information on a subject you are researching. But as noted above by T.G. McFadden, an even more pressing problem is how to identify those who have authority. But this isn’t a problem unique to or caused by the Internet - this is a problem everyone considers whenever they research a topic. Frankly, pinning it on the Internet and claiming it’s a new problem is deceptive.
Gorman seems to like the idea that authority should - in general - come from academic prowess. Yet history has proven to us time and time again that academics are generally reactionary communities who don’t like radical ideas that disrupt the basis of all their work. The vetting process that should be carried out by academic groups to ensure that their members are worthy of authority, fails.
Each medium is defined by its limits. The Internet is perhaps the most frightening medium to come along because it has so few limits, and thus is notoriously difficult to define. The meaning attached to print is being killed by the Internet, yes. But I’m sorry, that’s not a reason to halt the expansion of it.
Meaning is what you bring to things, not what you take away from them. Instead of trying to make your academic qualifications stay relevant, show the Internet that you can critique and analyse. Maybe we can start assigning authority based on proven ability to take things apart and point out the relevant parts, rather than proven ability to pass university exams or have articles published.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:04 am
Dr. Strangelove, unlike his/her namesake, takes a critical stance toward authority. And this is absolutely correct. The Internet does not raise a new conceptual problem, but it often makes the problem more difficult to solve (or even articulate).
The more frightening problem, though, is how little idea our students have about how to evaluate anything at all they read, whether it be in print or online.
We are, it has been said, becoming an increasingly documentary society. The ability to read, to write, to manipulate symbols, and to think critically and independently are all essential to survival in a world of words and text. We need to be able to recognize what kind of evidence or information might be required to solve a problem; to identify what kind of evidence or information would be relevant to a solution; to locate and retrieve appropriate evidence or information, in whatever format and in whatever kind of publication; and to evaluate the quality and usefulness of the retrieved information for the problem at hand. Anyone lacking the ability to handle sophisticated documents, to read and understand complex text (however presented), in contemporary society is in deep trouble. Such a person undeniably borders on the illiterate. He or she may not be able to read thoughtfully such general interest intermediaries as Time, Newsweek, or The New York Times—let alone more advanced but still general interest texts such as Smithsonian or Atlantic Monthly.
This is the real problem, and the Internet is both part of the problem itself, and can be part of the solution if rightly used.
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I think much of the problem derives from the inability of librarians (ourselves) to have access to the proper expertise that might help determine the authority of a given author.
Mostly, we just help people find books. The critical issue of “authority” is eroded by our willingness to add books to our collections w/o much regard to such authority … authorship (and frequently mere popularity) is enough.
This is OK for many purposes. If a person wants to find junk, more power to him.
But when we are asked for a “professional opinion” as either a book-recommender or (more importantly) in a reference interview we are apt to waffle and wave our hands in what appears to be a post-modern inability to make value decisions.
Yet to be able to make such decisions implies our having necessary subject expertise … in each of the thousands of subjects represented in a given collection.
Perhaps having close-to-real-time access to a community of library-profession-vetted subject experts would help … a role which the Internet can help fill and which was impossible to fill in a print-centered world.
November 17th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Let’s think of an encyclopedia as essentially a substitute teacher for those of us whose curiosity exceeds what knowledge we can afford to obtain in a formal classroom setting.
In any teacher, authority is no doubt a virtue. If you are paying for a Harvard education, you expect your instructors to be highly qualified in their field.
If you are in a community college, the instructors’ credentials will probably less impressive. However, in either environment, you have a right to expect a teacher who is enthusiastic about the subject matter and who motivates you to seek out more information on your own.
Consider for a moment which would be a more useful learning experience: a world renowned expert who can deliver his pearls of wisdom in his sleep because he has been doing so for 30 years and who is fully capable of demolishing any student who dares to question the revealed wisdom; or, a teacher who is still discovering the subject for herself and is in the middle of sorting out the issues and who communicates her sense of urgency in this quest to her students.
I see the comparison about Britannica and Wikipedia in a similar light. Consider this as an example. One the the most profound transformations going on in America today (and probably in the UK as well) is privatization. There is a striking difference in the way Britannica handles “privatization” and the way Wikipedia does.
Britannica does not give privatization its own entry. The main discussion is a short passage in a much longer article “Government economic policy”. It is a rather dry, highly summarized overview. There are no easy links to related topics embedded in the text.
If this was your only source of information about the topic, you could conclude that it was highly arcane subject of interest only to public economic policy experts. I read in five minutes everything that I, as a citizen, need to know about this–done.
Wiki-pedia, on the other hand gives it its own quite long entry. There is more space given to each of the “Pro” and “Con” sections than Britannica devotes to the whole topic. There are many dozens of links. Above all, you get the sense that this is a momentous and highly contested policy battle that has widespread impact on our lives and that huge forces are arrayed on both sides of the issue.
Authority is important if you are looking for an unimpeachable citation for your term paper. In this example, Milton Friedman has just as much “authority” as J.K. Galbraith, but they are diametrically opposed to each other. Stimulating a desire to learn more is just as an important a virtue in an educational medium. Traditional encyclopedias have a new challenge to meet.
1549December 22nd, 2007 at 12:11 am
[…] For educators fretting that the Internet is creating a generation of “intellectual sluggards,” the problem isn’t just that Yahoo!’s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework. It’s that a lot of the time, it doesn’t help them cheat all that well. […]