A week ago, if you googled Palin Youtube you got the ineffable Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. When I tried it just now, I got a slew of pro-Palin clips. Gentle reader, take heed.
Oct 052008
Sep 052008
People are always attacking Wikipedia, an easy target; I regularly issue warnings to my sons about using it uncritically or exclusively. But the question of its authority is not simple. This morning, coming across them in Boswell, I wanted to check the record on the Gordon Riots, the anti-Catholic events of 1780 that began with demonstrations and proceeded to arson, looting and murder. The CD-ROM version of Britannica (“deluxe” edition, 2004) has no headword. Under ‘Gordon, Lord George’, there is a cursory account. Wikipedia by contrast has a decent-sized article with proper (and recent) sources. Unfortunately, it’s a matter of case-by-case comparison, except for some domains, such as popular culture, in which Wikipedia is it and a bit. (Try it under ‘Great American Songbook’ and follow the cross-references.)
Reference works have always been controversial. Try this – it’s by ‘S.S. van Dine‘ (Willard Huntingdon Wright), from Misinforming a Nation (1917)
The [advertising] statements insisted that the Britannica was
a supreme, unbiased, and international reference
library an impartial and objective review of the
world; and it was on these statements, repeated
constantly, that Americans bought the work. The
truth is that the Encyclopedia Britannica, in its
main departments of culture, is characterized by
misstatements, inexcusable omissions, rabid and
patriotic prejudices, personal animosities, blatant
errors of fact, scholastic ignorance, gross neglect
of non-British culture, an astounding egotism, and
an undisguised contempt for American progress.
Yes, I found the reference in Wikipedia. And yes! the online entry for S.S. van Dine in Brittanica does not mention Misinforming a Nation.
Graeme Philipson, whose views I attacked a few posts ago, dislikes people who so much as question the new electronic order. How he would despise someone like Susan Jacoby, who thinks the US is becoming stupider and more ignorant. She believes the decline of reading is in part to blame. (Her other causes, ‘anti-rationalism’, populism and fundamentalism.)
She says, forget about what kids are getting from the screen; what are they missing on the page? In business terms, what are the opportunity costs of kids not reading books?
Which in turn makes me wonder (a) what do kids 11-19 actually read nowadays? (b) what did they read in the 1960s (or whichever period one selects) and (c) is anyone framing up the question in something like that way? It would be easy to kill any such project by pointing out that what’s read makes sense only if you consider how it’s read. But perhaps there’s a way around that.