Friday, June 15, 2007

Gorman v. Web 2.0

Featured on the Britannica Blog this week is the first of three essays by ex-American Library Association president Michael Gorman, who doesn't think much of blogging, the "citizen journalist," or what he terms the online "cult of the amateur."

At one point, Gorman writes, about Goya's etching, "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters," that

I know about this etching partly because I read about it decades ago and partly because I recently went to authoritative printed sources for confirmation of what I had read and for additional information and insights. These reference works were not only created by scholars and published by reputable publishers but also contained the paratextual elements (subject headings, indexes, bibliographies, content lists, etc.) also created by professionals that enabled me to find the recorded knowledge and information I wanted in seconds. This small example typifies the difference between the print world of scholarly and educational publishing and the often-anarchic world of the Internet.

Among Gorman's respondents are Matthew Battles, senior editor at the MFA Boston, author of "Library: An Unquiet History," and sometime contributor to Ideas. Battles has plenty to say, but I love how he replies to Gorman's Goya mention:

Citing Goya's "Sleep of Reason," Gorman dismisses ... in one gesture the varied panoply of actions together called citizen journalism as nothing more than navel-gazing and vain self-promotion, a black sabbath of mumbling, incoherent wretches pursuing id-driven hungers with decadent abandon. But when I mash-up Goya with Web 2.0, what comes to mind is the remarkable "Disasters of War" -- a series of drawings made between 1820 and 1823 in which the artist depicted the depredations of Napoleon's Grande Armée as it swept through Spain on a campaign of terror. Goya was a court painter whose portraits of cardinals and dukes conferred authority, but whose more subversive images (in both the "Caprices" and the "Disasters of War") were suppressed and shunned throughout his lifetime for political reasons. The "Disasters of War," in fact, wasn't published until long after the artist's death put him safely out of reach of inquisitorial authority. Too bad he didn't have an Internet through which to express his clairvoyant visions.

Touche!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:48 PM

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