I was commenting only on the discussion in the WSJ article. I haven’t read Weinberger’s books or Keen’s either. Hence, a hack. Dilettante, maybe?

I also had Everything is Miscellaneous on the coffee table, until the stack of library books got too tall and I moved it to the floor. I started reading it yesterday, but I put it down after the intro chapter and decided to renew it again.

But after the introduction, he’s already got me teeming with the idea that people don’t ask for help because they “view it as a personal failure”. Hopefully, he’ll redeem that segment later.

I think I am also unfair in comparing Weinberger to subversive censorship in libraries. It’s probably better to compare his discussion of “gatekeepers” directly to libraries.

Already, libraries are deep in the myth that we provide access to information. Sometimes we do, but most of the information we provide access to is from a list of books that has been filtered by book vendors choosing publishers and publishers choosing authors and titles. In this way, libraries are a trusted gatekeeper of knowledge.

If this is how we’re supposed to deal with the multitude of voices online, I think the model needs improvement. People *do* respond to trusted online gatekeepers / aggregators – Huffington Post, Pitchfork, Slashdot, info-fetishist (they come in so many forms). I hear Weinberger saying we need better and more official gatekeepers, but I don’t think it makes sense to turn the web into a pyramid, even if we can essentially build our own. There has to be information flowing the other way, and side-to-side, and askew.

I may have to do a little more work in that are, though, because I am intrigued by the connections to democracy and the idea that they end up in the same essential place in so far as discussion and discourse are concerned. I don’t know Weinberger’s argument enough to see that or not for myself.

But the idea that libraries and newspapers play similar roles re: democracy also freaks me completely out because — how well could we do what we do if the same few, for-profit, probably located really far away, answering to people who may or may not care at all about democracy or anything else we care about professionally owned us all?

If Tribune owned the Chicago Public Library and the LA Public Library and a dozen or so other smaller systems? Or the NYT owned both New York and Boston? And that doesn’t even get to Gannett – in this tortured analogy they’d own 91 systems across most of the country. I looked it up! I wonder what kind of impact i could have as an individual in a context like that?

Because that’s what I liked about the DK piece – I didn’t think he was saying that the reporters and photographers are doing these things because they are embedded in a machine. I thought he was saying that when they are doing these things they are embedded in a machine and that that machine inherently imposes constraints.

Which is why Keen bugs me so much – he refuses to acknowledge that sometimes people turn away from the media because the product sucks, it doesn’t do its job. And he does it in such a ham-fisted way that he stifles discourse on the topic. Weinberger may do so as well – I don’t know if he’s smart or not because it doesn’t take much to argue better than Keen.

But you, Caleb – you are an anti-hack!

I spent some time with a newspaper photographer this weekend, and, clearly, money was not his motivation. He took pictures of anything that “the public might be interested in”. The story is going to run in a fluff section (or perhaps even a fluff supplement), and yet, the photographer was still chiefly interested in promoting democracy.

And according to the Daily Kos, he does this because he’s embedded in a machine. Or, to my mind, he was hamming it up a bit, but still, it got me thinking that vis a vis democracy, the role of newspapers is not all that different than the role of public libraries.

I recently read the New Yorker’s article covering newspapers and the early 20th-century debate over democracy and newspapers. Given that an informed citizenship able to make democratic decisions is very far from the truth, should we junk the system and give that responsibility to a trusted few (as Walter Lippman argued), or promote democracy through conversation (as John Dewey argued)?

I see Keen and Weinberger duplicating part of this debate, only here, discussion is the problem, not anyone’s solution. Keen argues against a discussion that includes amateurs and Weinberger argues that we should move to a discussion that is more centrally controlled.

Excluding amateurs, or sorting them out, it amounts to the same thing, kind of like putting ‘And Tango Makes Two’ in the adult fiction section so kids can’t find it on their own.

Saying all that, of course, as a hack myself.