Well!
The president of the American Library Association is calling bloggers out. He writes:
[The] Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief… Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, 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.
Well!
I can speak as someone who is interested in computers only inasmuch as they are tools & instruments (whether for me as a writer or concerned citizen, bands like Depeche Mode or filmmakers like Weta Digital or Pixar).
I have no belief, fanatical or otherwise, in the “transforming power of digitization, but I’m someone who does believe in the glorification of information (it is so much better than disinformation, or lack of information, I find).
I’m someone who can tell you that Digby and Josh Marshall can outdo ALA President Michael Gorman’s turgid prose any day of the week.
I’m someone with what works out to a one-book-a-day habit at my local library, including the sustained reading of such less-than-complex texts as You Have The Power by Howard Dean, Adlai Stevenson and the world : the life of Adlai E. Stevenson, and Conversations with [Arthur] Miller.
And as such a person, I feel supremely qualified to say, Mr. Gorman: Bite me.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.
