28ad The Siren Song of the Internet: Part I -Britannica Blog

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The Sirens—half-bird, half-woman—sang a song of such surpassing sweetness that they lured sailors to their death.  Odysseus avoided the fate of other mariners by lashing himself to the mast and telling his crew to plug their ears. The siren song of the Internet is audible everywhere these days and we cannot be deaf to its charms and benefits, though we can avoid being lured to intellectual destruction by it.  Let me be clear at the outset, the Internet in particular and the digital resources available to us in general are ineluctable forces that are shaping our lives, in many ways for the better.  We cannot turn away from these forces, nor should we.  But we must exercise judgment, use digital resources intelligently, and import into the digital world the values that have pervaded scholarship in Western societies for many centuries. 

It is nearly impossible to write about any of the difficulties and dangers of the tsunami of digital change without being accused of being a Luddite by those wearing rose-colored digital blinkers.  Some of the more bizarre and less interesting responses to my first post are perfect illustrations of this point.

Folks often forget that Ned Ludd and his friends actually had legitimate grievances and that their lives were adversely affected by the mechanization that led to the Industrial Revolution.  Just as that revolution brought many miseries as well as many benefits, the Digital Revolution is not without its adverse consequences.  The answer, as ever in contemplating change, is to be objective and to look at things as they are rather than as we wish them to be or fervently hope they will be and, so doing, to weigh their present and likely consequences.  One guiding principle in seeing things as they are is reverence for the human record and for the countless individual minds that have created the texts, images, and symbolic representations therein.

One common difficulty arises from the ambiguous and varying use of the word “information.”  We are told that we live in an “information age” (though it’s arguable that there is not more information than before but simply more information more readily accessible to more people).  We are also told that information wants to be free, a dubious assertion made all the more questionable by not knowing what this abstract thing is that yearns to be free.  Mortimer Adler, long-time chairman of the Board of Editors for Encyclopaedia Britannica, once proposed a categorization he called “the four goods of the mind.”  These were, in ascending order of value, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom

Information, in this formulation, can be defined as data—statements of facts and figures—and images and short texts that can be used out of context.  Knowledge is something created by the human mind.  That mind integrates and synthesizes data, contextless texts, and ideas into something new.  A database is an example of an assemblage of information; a university press book is an example of recorded knowledge—something that is far more than the sum of the pieces of information that were used in its making.  Understanding (otherwise called learning) comes when one has learned from recorded knowledge and from teachers to reach a level at which one becomes an authority and a teacher.  Wisdom arrives when that understanding is integrated with a whole life lived. 

These are not arcane distinctions of limited applicability but definitions (particularly that which distinguishes between information and knowledge) that are crucial to an understanding of the present state of the intellectual life.  The reason is that information, properly defined, is especially amenable to being stored and transmitted digitally whereas recorded knowledge in the form of scholarly monographs, literary texts, and complex texts of the kind found in major encyclopedias is not.  To think that digitization is the answer to all that ails the world is to ignore the uncomfortable fact that most people, young and old, prefer to interact with recorded knowledge and literature in the form of print on paper.  The many manifestations and failures of e-books have shown that enthusiasm for them is confined to hobbyists and premature adopters.  The kind of e-books that are used by a wider public of library users are those texts consisting of assemblages of information that can be used out of context (quick reference books, computer and automobile manuals, and the like).

Computers are very good at information, if you can locate the information you need.  Computer systems are very convenient to use and they deliver their results with great speed.  However, what is the use of blinding speed and complete convenience if the results are inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading?

Tomorrow: Part II

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24 Responses to “The Siren Song of the Internet: Part I”

  1. MS Says:

    Gorman is really touching a nerve with techie librarians in the blogosphere. They can’t stand anyone questioning their techno-biblio utopia.

  2. Ian Kemmish Says:

    In 1643, harpsichord builder Jean Denis published a “Treatise on Harpsichord Tuning”. He may or may not have been a good builder of harpsichords, but he was almost certainly an early example of a blogger. His treatise/blog is full of barely literate and often contradictory ridicule of anyone who disagrees with his views (which he however fails to expound clearly) and what technical information there is, is so vague that unless you already know perfectly well how to tune a harpsichord, it is absolutely bereft of meaning.

    Even in the small world of early music enthusiasts, almost nobody today has heard of Jean Denis. Or indeed the thousands of other pamphleteers like him over the years. There is a good reason for this. Any bloggers who can’t figure it out will presumably be happy to share his fate. Anyone who wants to be remembered (and don’t we all, really?) will presumably take pains over what they write.

  3. Nathan Says:

    A comment about folks like Gorman using blogs to get their views across and the supposed irony of this.

    Is this any more ironic than so many of the Web 2.0 evangelists publishing their books not for free on the web, but in books people have to pay for?

  4. Seth Finkelstein Says:

    Another irony is how so many of them have big media consulting gigs and are investors in start-ups they’d like to sell to big media.

  5. Joan Diedre Says:

    Excellent points, Nathan and Seth. Why let a little something like principle get in the way of profit. But a deeper irony (hypocrisy?) is also present.

    The Web 2.0 folks are always praising their “transparency,” with the assumption being that traditional publishers aren’t. But when you read a Britannica article, you “transparently” know who the author is, what his or her credentials are, what his or her background is, all of which come into play and help the reader, consciously or unconsciously, to make an intelligent decision to grant them some degree of trust and credibility. You can’t say the same thing about a Wikipedia article or its administrators. The “Essjay” scandal at Wikipedia is a prime reason why to worry about this very lack of transparency in this supposedly “open” structure.

    Moreover, we know that Britannica is a for-profit venture that believes experts and expert editing have a price, a worth, a cost worth paying for—there’s no hidden agenda here, no secret marketing or subrosa attempt to try to find a way to leverage their paradigm for personal gain while publicly denying it, as many believe the leaders of Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 advocates have tried to do.

    So, say what you will about this traditional paradigm, but it is much more open and transparent - in the many ways that matter - than its public critics like to admit. Watch out if Britannica finds the magic bullet – that precise and perfect match of the public and the private, the expert and volunteer.

    21ed
  6. Andrew S Says:

    It’s time for Britannica to recognize the realities of today and the future before it shrinks into irrelevance. Your role should be to return Britannica to its place as the top source for quality knowledge, both in accuracy and popularity.

    The reality is that 99% (and increasingly more) of encyclopedia use will use internet resources and not paper. Furthermore, more than 90% of that access will go through a search engine from Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.

    If your site is not searchable on today’s search engines, is not linkable by other sites, and is not fully accessible without a subscription, it will lose to the sites which are fully searchable and linkable. Your articles may be better than Wikipedia’s in most cases, but on the internet, your search engine ranking is your relevance–it’s not ideal, but it is reality. Searching and linking is what makes the web work. Keeping Britannica behind a wall makes it irrelevant to 99.99% of the internet.

    Put all of Britannica on the free web and you’ll regain some of the five-year lead that Wikipedia has on you.

  7. joshua m. neff Says:

    I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally, I haven’t criticized your posts because you’re a Luddite, Michael. The problem I have with your posts is that you make extremely broad statements about the way things are (”To think that digitization is the answer to all that ails the world is to ignore the uncomfortable fact that most people, young and old, prefer to interact with recorded knowledge and literature in the form of print on paper.”) without providing any real statistics to back up what your assertions, you create straw man arguments and then attack them, you exaggerate, you misrepresent (or misunderstand) how sites like Wikipedia work, you attribute things to the internet (like Biblical literalism) that are absolutely unconnected in any way. In short, your arguments are rhetorically unsound, either by sloppiness or design.

  8. Web2.0 and beyond: Non toccate le sirene at _exedre’s riverrun joyce_ Says:

    […] Continua la polemica di Gorman contro… bhé adesso proprio non si capisce più cosa si salvi. Ce l’ha contro la “società dell’informazione”, accusata di non essere abbastanza rispetto ad un “sistema della saggezza” rappresentato da una struttura gerarchica dell’autorevolezza. Poi prende di mira gli eBook, accozzaglia di materiali disparati senza un motivo unificatore, e ovviamente Google, che è un po’ lo zio padre di tutti i vizi di noi googlatori illetterati. Ovviamente il passo successivo è una sacrosanta tirata a favore della proprietà intellettuale e contro il plagio. […]

  9. Free Range Librarian » Blog Archive » Britannica, Sirens, and Sexism Says:

    […] I’ve hinted at this before, but in watching the discussions unfold on the Britannica blog — discussions I have contributed to directly, in part because my blog post trackbacks don’t show up there — it struck me today, while reading Jane’s parody, that the only woman cited in the entire discussion is, as she puts it, a “watery tart” (and a fictional one, at that). […]

  10. Hypercrit » “If you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist” Says:

    […] Michael Gorman, the pariah of Web 2.0’s passionate pundits, is back on the Britannica Blog this week with another article warning intellectuals of the Internet’s “siren song.” […]

  11. Yellow Dog Says:

    […] Some forms of research ask for the “answer” (or claim), but the kind of research I propose here is that of the unknown (following Barthes: as if things shuddered with meaning). The example in the JAC essay is “Detroit Day,” and it concludes with a digital diegesis that has Dylan at the Cobo in 2005. The example, however, could just as easily be “An Evening in Detroit.” This isn’t to say that the discs don’t exist (or that the day didn’t exist) but that my interest in them is not dependent on hearing them (as much as I would also like that). The lack of representation is as important as the representation (but for different goals). The lack of representation evokes the imaginary (imagine what this might entail). Those that adhere to strict hermeneutics might object that such a practice mocks traditional research goals (evidence supports the claim) or intent or true meaning. Or they might bemoan a collapse of all things scared to information organization. Information as sacred is little more than fetish (thought fetish is not necessarily a bad thing). The imaginary Zappa experience suggests that mockery is important to research goals (I want to hear the mockery as well). But it also suggests (again) the importance of allusive meanings (what does it look like/what does it sound like) that keep our research goals (and investments in ideas) going, going, going strong. […]

  12. EdVentures in Technology » Diigo Links 06/22/2007 - The Online Predation and Blog-Bashing Edition Says:

    […] The Siren Song of the Internet: Part II - Britannica Blog […]

  13. John Daly Says:

    Dr. Gorman seems to ignore the entire body of information theory in his definition of “information”.

    I would prefer to think of “knowledge” as embodied information. Obviously that is what we mean when we say someone knows something, has knowledge. Of course, many people gain much knowledge from direct experience, including the greatest scientists from their observations and experiments — not from books and the information supplied by others. However, we these days embody information in robots and other machines, organizations and other institutions, processes, etc.

    I prefer to use “learning” as a verb, and even as a noun I doubt it is a synonym for “understanding”.

    There is a well known phrase: “knows everything but understands nothing.” Understanding I think implies the ability to reason rightly from knowledge.

    Lets think about Gorman’s closing paragraph. It occurs to me that there are books such as the bible that have been the subject of study and debate for millennia. Many believe that they may be inaccurate and incomplete, and all would agree that many have been mislead in their interpretation. Would Dr. Gorman suggest that there is no value in their study?

    1f45
  14. Aggregated CILIP blogs Says:

    Gorman and the missing Good

    Many-to-Many points to one of two new Michael Gorman posting s: Siren Song of the Internet contains a

  15. Aggregated CILIP blogs Says:

    Street signs or SatNav: a publisher on (e-)publishing

    Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age reports that O’Reilly’s editor of Craft and Make magazines, Dale

  16. Title Varies Slightly » Blog Archive » Michael Gorman on Web 2.0 Says:

    […] To people who follow library issues, Michael Gorman writing on Web 2.0 puts one in mind of, well, let’s say Phyllis Schlafly on the Equal Rights Amendment. You may not agree with everything said, but the arguments will be elegantly stated, and the terms of the argument subtly but significantly shifted from the platitudes of common wisdom. (Besides, there’s a certain irony about arguing against blogging on a blog, wouldn’t you say?) […]

  17. The Counter-Information Age | Power Webblog Says:

    […] Let me try to historicize Gorman’s arguments in his second essay. Imagine we are back in the Fifties now — amidst the rosy-eyed “visionaries” who predicted an ideal consumer society rooted in an information and entertainment miracle called television. That’s the last time we got so excited by information technology. That’s the last time we had utopians telling us that we were on the verge of a new golden age in the distribution and consumption of information. So what happened? Well, of course, it didn’t quite turn out as the visionaries imagined. Instead of television liberating our intellects, it ended up — to paraphrase Neil Postman — entertaining us to death. The negation of the negation — the Sixties — simply turned the Fifties on its head and remixed the original utopian text in equally absurd dystopian language. It’s no coincidence that “Kill Your Television” became one of most emotive battle cries of the counter-culture. It’s no coincidence that the cure turned out to be as bad as the original disease. And that’s the real danger of all this brash talk by the utopians of Silicon Valley. The most corrosive consequence of the Internet’s seductive Siren Song is disappointment. As Gorman so ably argues, we now have a whole generation of digital idealists who believe that information should be free, that it’s liberating, and that computers are emancipating our intellects, unbottling our creativity. It’s the Fifties all over again. But contemporary sceptics like Gorman aren’t Luddites. His nuanced critique of digital idealism is actually a defence against Luddism. The real Luddite reaction, the digital counter-culture, I’m afraid, is yet to come. Unless we temper the outrageous claims made on behalf of the digital utopians about the value of a “democratized” Internet, “kill your television” will be remixed by the next generation of bitter idealists into “murder your computer.” As Gorman suggests, the only way of avoiding all this is by resisting the Siren Song of the Internet. As he so rightly says, we’ve got to distinguish between information and knowledge, between Googling and research, between miscellaneous data and truth. Gorman is right. The Internet is a magnificent invention if it can be harnessed to traditional epistemological and pedagogical practices. And if not? Then we are on the brink of the counter-information age. […]

  18. sirens, harpies, and wax « Jenica P. Rogers-Urbanek Says:

    […] Why Michael Gorman decided to start posting his anti-blogging/anti-web 2.0 manifestos on the Britannica Blog, I’ll never understand.  That said, John Blyberg has come up with the most eloquent response to Gormangate Part A Million And Two that I’ve seen yet.  It starts with, I’ve been watching with some detached interest over the past few weeks as Michael Gorman decided to become one of the “blog people” and launch a blitzkrieg against what, one would presume to be, “all the other blog people.” […]

  19. Information Ain’t the Issue | Power Webblog Says:

    […] Michael Gorman mentioned Mortimer Adler the other day in Part I of his “Siren Song of the Internet.” He was calling attention to Adler’s “four goods of the mind”:  information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. He did so in order to distinguish information, which by consensus we are awash in nowadays, from knowledge and understanding, which are manifestly not in oversupply. Let me, or rather let Dr. Adler, draw the distinction even more plainly. Back in October 1992, at the fifth of what we called the “Editorial Convocation and Wayzgoose,” Adler spoke to the Editorial Department of Britannica. This was at the advent of the Internet Age for EB (a little over a year later, Britannica Online would go live, though without public announcement), and Adler laid out frankly his reservations. In doing so he made this startling statement:  “I regard myself as a generally educated person, and I am very poorly informed. And I’m not concerned with being well informed. It’s a waste of my time.”  What can he possibly have meant by that?  He did not mean that he was unaware of who was President at the time or anything of that sort….

  20. Aggregated CILIP blogs Says:

    2 Updates: Gorman’s Ludd revisited and Kelaidis’s blueBook

    I responded to Michael Gorman’s Siren Song of the Internet comments in Gorman and the missing Good ;

  21. Dewey is just so YESTERDAY!! « Parka Says:

    […] Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://ddc.typepad.com/ (2) http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/06/the-siren-song-of-the-internet-part-i/ (3) http://www.librarian.net/ (4) http://www.librarycrunch.com/ (5) mailto:andrew.lavallee@wsj.com […]

  22. Anne Frank Was an Unpublished Citizen Journalist: A Response to Michael Gorman « Linkadelica Says:

    […] July 23, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under Friday Random Ten, 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. […]

  23. We Review First Internet Steps » Mastering Windows Server 2003. Says:

    […] The Siren Song of the <b>Internet</b>: Part I […]

  24. Citegeist » John Blyberg: will you marry me? Says:

    […] I visited John Blyberg’s blog this afternoon so that I could properly cite a post of his I wanted to quote from. His latest post, “Wrong Song, Michael Gorman” is an elegant and gentle rebuttal to the latest episode of Gormangate, another two-part “post” at Britannica’s blog titled “The Siren Song of the Internet.” […]

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