virtual snake oil
More than our culture is at stake.
Author Richard Schickel laments that we are loosing the practice of criticism.
we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion …
blogging is a form of speech, not of writing … The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement …
Blogging is yammering, not writing, and the “democratic literary landscape” it creates is a wasteland, without standards, maps, or oases of intelligence and delight.
Josh Getlin reports on how major newspapers are shrinking their book review sections in spite of what publisher James Atlas believes is “a very robust period for publishing,” which effectively cedes critical clout to bloggers.
Literary critic Adam Kirsch observes “hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. And the scorn is reciprocated: Professional writers usually assume that those who can, do, while those who can’t, blog.” Although his discussion focuses on literary blogs, the problem of amateurism extends to blogs of any subject.
The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.
Still, it is important to distinguish between the blog as a genre and the Internet as a medium. It is not just possible but likely that, one day, serious criticism will find its primary home on the Web. The advantages — ease of access, low cost, potential audience — are too great to ignore, even if our habits and technology still make it hard to read long essays on the computer screen. Already there are some web publications — like Contemporary Poetry Review (cprw.com), to which I occasionally contribute — that match anything in print for seriousness of purpose. But there’s no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end.
Thus, blogs seem appropriate as a form of speech or a repository of links. Unfortunately, blogspeech rarely becomes conversation. Rather than a global community for debate and discourse, we have the rabble of a virtual Tower of Babel. Most discussion on blogs raises the question: How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?
Rob Cockerham calculates at least 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways.
The internet is not the utopia of knowledge we wish it to be. Tom McCarthy, a teacher, believes that “the art of thinking is being lost because people can type in a word and find a source and think that’s the be all end all.”
Winni Hu reports that of the thousands of schools with programs providing laptops to students, many are beginning to phase out these technology initiatives. Educators have found “no evidence [laptops] had any impact on student achievement … there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.” Rather than academic growth, students “have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses.”
Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.
Even worse, art, music, physical education, and field trips are often cut to pay for computers, support staff, and constant repairs. Todd Oppenheimer highlighted the dangerous emphasis on computers in education for the Atlantic in 1997. No doubt the danger is more severe today as every classroom is becoming a ‘computer lab.’
high-tech hopes for America’s schoolchildren … are joined to philanthropic commitments to helping schools make curriculum changes. This sometimes gets businesspeople involved in schools, where they’ve begun to understand and work with the many daunting problems that are unrelated to technology. But if business gains too much influence over the curriculum, the schools can become a kind of corporate training center — largely at taxpayer expense.
The Telegraph held a contest. “The idea was to come up with a paragraph or two, no longer than 150 words, packed with as many infuriating words and phrases as possible.” R.G. Banks’ entry exaggerates typical blog fare (slightly). As new generations of students increasingly rely on the internet for gathering knowledge, we have a growing responsibility to improve the quality of online texts. Without editorial standards, accountability of sources, and clear distinctions between online manifestations of authorship and speech, the art of thinking in future generations will achieve this:
Let’s stop obsessing and get down to the nitty gritty of fleshing out the gender issues. John. I’m wanting to hear inclusiveness and ethnicity here. A raft of blue sky thinking to challenge accepted orthodoxies. The bottom line is about empowerment and at the end of the day getting up to speed working 24/7 towards a coalition of understanding through best practice. This can only be fully achieved if the glass ceiling, in inverted commas, is transformed into a level playing field where the goal posts cannot be moved without leaving a substantial carbon footprint which inevitably would consign us all to the expediency of existing between a rock and a hard place. We must pick up the ball and run because we can no longer wait for the smoking gun of the next denial of service attack to consign us all to the wheely bin of history.