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I just got back from California where my dad had his 4th Change of Command ceremony and then retired from the Navy after 30 years of active duty service. Pretty incredible. Counting college, U.S. Naval Academy, he's been in the miltary longer than I've been alive. I'm impressed. The ceremony was beautiful, the weather was unusually cooperative and even though I felt like I spent more time in airports than I did in the actual city of Port Hueneme, I was glad to be there and very proud of the Captain.

Here's where it all becomes school library/book related. I flew Frontier airlines. I don't think I've ever flown with them before but would like to make a special request that I fly with them for the rest of my life. Friendly, courteous, informative, organized and TVs in the back of every seat. What more could you ask for? Well, how 'bout volume control? Or at least an awareness of when your volume is turned up so loud I can hear you over your earphones, my earphones, the child sitting next to me also watching a movie's earphones, two seats down! It gets worse. She wasn't even watching whatever program she chose to lose her hearing on. She was flipping through a magazine, the TV mere background noise FOR THE WHOLE PLANE. I happened to be reading Fahrenheit 451 for my book club. So, here I am reading about Seashell radios and wall panel "families" thinking for you, replacing your imagination and appreciation for Life, and I hear nothing but unwatched FOX news crap.

Bizarre. It made me laugh and shudder at the same time; I luddered. But it also made me think. Of course. What a cool curriculum could be developed asking questions like "Why read?" "Why think?" "Why imagine?" "Why question?" It'd also be interesting to look at who has asked those questions over time and for what purposes or what were people's reactions to those who asked those questions. Of course I'm suggesting using Fahrenheit 451, but then reading feed, by M.T. Anderson. Especially because there's a line that jumped out at me this afternoon and reminded me of feed: (when Faber learns his two-way ear radio is burnt and he doesn't have another one) "So I haven't another green bullet, the right kind, to put in your head." Surely Anderson read this book. (There's another cool Anderson allusion to his feed lesions in Octavian.)

Anyway, glad to be back. Miss the ocean breezes. Don't miss cluelessly loud airplane people.

By the way, and I meant to say this a few posts ago when I started linking book titles to Google Books. I like this because it shows the cover, a quick synopsis, some reviews, consumer links and then has a special and utterly fabulous Find this book in a library link. Sadly, the nearest library to me it lists is over an hour away. Believe you me I will be contacting my local libraries to gently suggest they give this a look-see.

I have seen a few things that are only tangentially related to what I normally do here, but I thought you might like them.

• The New York Times does a photo essay on people and their avatars.
• Sethf does the research (yes with GOOGLE) to track down some of the facts behind michael Gorman’s possible misquote of Jimmy Wales and who was behind it.
• Oh check me out, I’m in the BIGWIG social software showcase. I’m sorry to also be in the program, theoretically on a panel on Saturday. I said okay sometime in 2006, and had to say no sometime in March. That was apparently not enough time to not be in the program. So 1.0!
• LifeHacker does “book hacks” for the library using crowd.

I haven’t been digging too deeply into the Gorman back and forth because I’ve said my piece and unless he says something radically different, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. It’s been fun to read a few more spirited responses than mine, I like what booktruck has to say.

[H]e has an opportunity to fulfill a role as a public intellectual talking about libraries, archives and information topics that are important to the public, and he blows it on a self-referential argument chasing some bygone ideal of what it means to have reasoned discourse (bypassing, like, the last 70 years of western thought!), and in a needlessly puffy and alienating style that would (in a perfect world) never pass muster in a “real” scholarly setting.

Also don’t miss a counter-essay from Matthew “An Unquiet History” Battles. What is particularly interesting about his response is the bizarrely snooty comments it receives especially the first few.

[I]n the end, we’re still left with a Wild West ethos on the Web where kids armed with a powerful new toy (yes, yes, the toys and tools are “creative” too!) can hide behind anonymity, shirk responsibility, pretend to be professors of Church doctrine a la “Essjay” (in the recent Wikipedia scandal), and trash and defame the character of a John Seigenthaler. All with impunity and in the name of progress, creativity (there’s that word again!), and “wildly individual consciousnesses” (Battles is too good a stylist to float such a phrase).

If that’s the high-level discourse so often lamented to be lacking from “blogs” then I can say I don’t much miss it. It’s just blogging with a bigger vocablary, truly. Wouldn’t it be sad if the Britannica Blog just turned into another “you think you’re so great but you’re really not so great” back and forth? “Where Ideas Matter” indeed!

A few people have pointed out Michael Gorman’s blog posts, appropriately enough appearing on the Britannica blog. For reasons that evade me he has one general post split into two parts. Web 2.0 The Sleep of Reason Part I and Web 2.0 The Sleep of Reason Part II. Let me just say that Michael Gorman is a smart guy and I just wish the things he said didn’t sound so… snooty. Statements like these “The task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print, virtues often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print.” are things I can totally get behind but then he follow-up in his later post with “Google cofounder Sergey Brin has said that ‘the perfect search engine would be like the mind of God,’ but most of us took that to be billionaire hyperventilating not blasphemy.” and I don’t understand why he has to be that way.

My take on what is happening has less to do with the nature of scholarship and more to do with the blurring of the idea of “research” as something we do for entertainment as well as scholarship. This may be something I think because I’m not really affiliated with an academic community and perhaps things have changed more than I am aware of, but I don’t think the idea of the expert is going away, only that it’s shifting in many of our interactions. So instead of us asking our expert mechanic for his or her opinion, we’ll check not only Consumer Reports but also epinions and maybe Edmunds.com when we’re buying a new car. We have more data because of the Internet and the network generally, and in many cases there’s no reason plain old humans can’t do something with that data. Gorman glibly refers to the idea his relief that there is “no discernable ‘citizen surgeon’ movement” but why is there a problem with citizen journalism? Especially if, like tagging and folksonomies, these trends are offered as supplments to the existing canon of options, not as supplanters of them?

update: aaaaand Clay Shirky’s reponse to Michael Gorman made boingboing