Gorman on Blogs

Gorman is engaged in the same fight that Jonathan Swift took on in his "Battel of the Books" (1710).   As recounted by Matthew Battles in his splendid "Library: an unquiet history" (which should be required reading for every librarian concerned about where we are and where we're going), Swift was "concerned about the role of pamphlets, those quickly authored and often poorly edited texts that were the chief medium of the quarrel of the ancients and moderns..."  These pamphlets, of course, were the foundation for the print journalism that we grew up with.

It's too easy to speak of the "Blog People" as "the unpublishable, untrammelled by editors or the rules of grammar".  Certainly there are those -- but in the age of Fox News, talk radio, and a New York Times non-fiction best seller list that leads with Jose Canseco's "Juiced", why single out bloggers for derision?  In the late fifties and early sixties, anyone with a mimeograph machine could start a "little magazine" and crank out stream of consciousness poetry and prose, most of which is barely digestible.   But we also got Ferlinghetti and The Threepenny Review.  Keep in mind Sturgeon's Law:  "Ninety percent of everything is crud."

What role blogging will have as our communication tools evolve, I wouldn't attempt to predict.  Certainly the claims of the most avid bloggers, that they represent the complete overthrow of the MSM, are overblown.  And yet, blogs are beginning to have the same level of societal impact that so worried Swift about the pamphlets.   I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily a good thing -- but it is a fact that will clearly have an impact on what librarians do.  Gorman is not a Luddite or an "Antidigitalist", but in his clever haste to deride and dismiss blogs altogether, I fear that one of our finest seers betrays a blind spot.

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[T Scott]

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