Knowing More and More About Less and Less

[marmar]

from HuffPost:




Lawrence Alexander
Knowing More and More About Less and Less
Posted April 4, 2008 | 07:43 PM (EST)



Borders, which started out as single store in Ann Arbor selling books to students and other serious readers and became an international chain selling whatever the market would bear, has experienced a nine percent decline in sales and is looking for someone to buy it. Whatever satisfaction independent bookstores might take in the looming collapse of a chain must be somewhat dampened by the knowledge that there are so few of them left to engage in a celebration.

Part of the problem for bookstores of whatever description is that so many people spend so much of their day reading and writing on the internet that they have not the time, and do not feel the need, to read any printed material. The other part of the problem is that it is now so difficult to know what to read.

When Borders was a bookstore in Ann Arbor, and not a worldwide chain, you could ask someone who worked there, often a student working his way through the University of Michigan, what was available on, let us say, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

"There are a number of things," he might have replied; "but if you haven't read it already, probably the best place to start is Schlesinger's three volumes on the Age of Roosevelt."

If you gave him a look that said three thick volumes were a little more than you had in mind, he might then have suggested, "The second volume, The Coming of the New Deal, has what you need."

Ask someone now in Borders, or any of the other chains, the same question - or, if the New Deal sound too remote, about almost any subject of interest - and he or she will probably suggest that you might settle down to a cup of coffee while someone does a computer search. This is unfortunate for more than the usual reasons. We find ourselves, thanks to the latest technology, having access to more information than we ever had before and yet end up knowing less than we did. We are buried under limitless numbers of sources, volumes of undigested and unedited material, with no one to sort out what is worth reading and no one to offer reliable guidance as to what is better and what is worse. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-alexander/knowing-more-and-more-abo_b_95183.html

[glowing]

1. Hmm.. Ok, if you are doing research, def. want a good reference.

But its B.S.... The internet has allowed thoughts and ideas to flow much more freely. Should we limit ourselves to the volumes on the shelf just because those authors were selected by a publishing company to produce?

[silverweb]

2. Nonsense.

Bemoaning the loss of volumes made from dead trees because of internet resources is akin to bemoaning the loss of paintings because of the advent of photography. Neither older form is lost, just forced to move over a bit.

The old forms don't go away; they just lose their dominance and have to share space with the new forms.

The past always resists the future, but must always yield eventually.

[babylonsister]

3. This could also be a casualty of the big stores who hire people

less prone to know about their stock, which increases daily. There IS so much info out there, and we are reading.