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Speaking of Ignorance--"The library? How quaint!"
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Ditto for the libraries where I live.
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This Brian Cooley could do with someone showing him how to put his brain in gear. A librarian, for instance.
Among the dozens of errors made and implied in his short piece, in my opinion this is the most gross:
"Seriously, you've got some ninety-year-old reference librarian who's going to point you to what, a Britannica volume to look something up? All you've got to do is Google. For crying out loud."
Let's overlook the sneering tone -- common with frightened little men who aren't at all certain of their facts-- and concentrate on the underlying assumption, which is that all sources of information are equally valid.
Usually at the top, and always near the top, of any generic Google search is Wikipedia, whose name was chosen to suggest that it is an encyclopedia of the same quality as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. But Wikipedia is no such thing: it is as far as one can get from an authoritative source as possible. Anything, anything at all, in Wikipedia is subject to change. Try it. Find an entry, any entry in Wikipedia, and change it to the opposite of the truth. Your lie will sit there until someone changes it, not necessarily to the truth. Wikipedia is the acme of that wretched modern invention "knowledge by popular vote", in short a contradiction in terms. That is what accounts for the wretched Wikipedia's permanent inaccuracy. Wikipedia doesn't contain the facts; it contains what the last idiot to make an entry would rather the facts be than what they are.
CNET, where Cooley works, is equally wretched. It is no surprise that Brian Cooley, a CNET employee, cannot distinguish between facts and street corner gossip.
This is moral relativism creeping out from journalism, which it has already wrecked, to wreck knowledge as well.
Cooley's uncertain and defensive tone tells us he knows he's too dumb to deal in opinions and should have stuck to facts, except he doesn't know what facts are either, because journalism schools no longer deal in truth and knowledge but in opinion and faction-fighting, hence this poor dumb cluck's axiomatic acceptance of "knowledge by popular vote of the lowest common denominator".
Copyright © Andre Jute 2011. Free to reproduce as long as this copyright notice is attached. Andre Jute & Andrew McCoy's most recent book about the failures of journalism is STIEG LARSSON: Man, Myth & Mistress.
Andre Jute wrote: "http://lisnews.org/cnet_editor_quotth...This Brian Cooley could do with someone showing him how to put his brain in gear. A librarian, for instance.
Among the dozens of erro..."
Andre:
What an absolutely brilliant response! (See me laughing and jumping with fist in the air shouting take that you numbskull) With your permission I would like to send this response to the librarian that posted this on his blog.
I wonder if Mr. Cooley would ever have the courage to go head to head with a librarian and debate this issue. He has not responded to any of the comments on the site. At first I thought it was a joke. But alas it was not.
Well done, Mr. Jute.
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Andre Jute wrote: "Margie, librarians are welcome to reprint that piece. Notice that I've added a copyright notice, which should stay with the piece, but otherwise it is free."Thank you. We librarians (well at least the ones I know) tend to be pretty picky about copyright. I will comply.
http://lisnews.org/cnet_editor_quotth...
Frankly the man must live in a cave to be so clueless as to what services and materials are available in libraries today. Our public library is always packed with people of all ages. So are our school libraries during the day.