thoughtcrumbs

ALA president-elect belittles blogs

Michael Gorman, soon-to-be head of the American Library Association, writes a scathing article about blogs for Library Journal. Certainly his condemnation of writers "untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar" holds true for a genre of blogs ("I like peanut butter sandwiches. Do you?"). And my rampant abuse of commas and parentheses on these pages pales when compared to the cringe-worthy degradation of the apostrophe on some of my friends' sites.

He says:

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.

Gorman fails to recognize the merit of collaborative academic blogs, like Many-to-Many and Crooked Timber. And, though my blog wanders into peanut butter territory pretty often, I'm equally comfortable wading through lengthy academic publications, and regularly review them here. Gorman says he expects his view to be rejected by the uneducated masses of bloggers, one of whom previously called him an idiot. While I don't think he's an idiot, and I give him credit for a well-written argument, he completely discounts a growing segment of substantive online publishing, a narrow view to be held by someone ostensibly at the forefront of information. (Thanks, Noah.)