Editorial: The Power of Blogs
The blogging hullabaloo was beneficial for us all
Francine Fialkoff, Editor -- Library Journal, 4/1/2005
Whether viciously funny, or just plain vicious, Michael Gorman's scathing indictment of bloggers ("Revenge of the Blog People!" BackTalk, LJ 2/15/05, p. 44) unleashed an avalanche of outrage from librarians, the blogging community, and technophiles generally. The consensus among readers was about 99–1 against Gorman—and very few seemed to find the piece humorous, as he said he intended. (For more on the background and reaction to Gorman's piece, see News, p. 18, and Letters, p. 12.)
One unintended consequence of "Revenge of the Blog People!" is that in the larger world, librarians were attacked as being antitechnology, in part because Gorman is president-elect of the American Library Association (ALA). That perception is unfortunate. It harms the image not only of librarians but of libraries. Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that librarians are technophobes, as the pages of LJ attest continually. Libraries are often ahead of most businesses and institutions in developing and using technology.
Publishing "Revenge of the Blog People!" was a tough call for LJ's editors. We certainly don't publish every utterance an ALA president (or president-elect) makes. Nevertheless, we've published opinion on different sides of issues many times before, including those with which we disagree—and while most LJ folks take issue with the ALA president-elect, one or two on our staff agree with him.
The first thing that came after the one-page opinion piece appeared was a firestorm of anti-Gorman, antilibrary/librarian email. We got blogged—and blogged. The deluge was startling. Some emails from bloggers confirmed Gorman's criticisms: they were ungrammatical, often anonymous spewings. Most, however, were well written, and many were thoughtful. We started email dialogs with some of the writers, pointing them toward library web sites and blogs that prove librarians are technologically cutting-edge, and we even got some apologies from outside the library world.
While our technology-literate editors knew all about the blogosphere, a few of our senior people were surprised by the magnitude and reach of it. The power of the blogosphere as a new way to communicate ideas and spread news electronically has been reinforced for all of us.
Librarian blogs abound, and at LJ we regularly scan them for news (and just plain fun) stories and leads—and we give credit where it's due. While blogs can disseminate news from many sources, they also can generate news and be news, too. They reflect tremendous energy, often creating niches for and drawing together likeminded readers. As with any written words, however, in their immediacy, blogs can make mistakes.
We're still grappling with how best to take advantage of blogging for our readers. In the April 15 netConnect supplement to LJ, Karen Schneider opines on blogging ethics. Our new web site, launching in June, will have a technology blog with several bloggers contributing to it. (If you'd like to be considered, please contact me.)
So Gorman was partly wrong, and he may well have eaten a plateful of crow. Ultimately, the discussion itself was beneficial, whether you liked or hated Gorman's piece, whether you found it funny or objectionable. It brought out not only librarians but scores of library users. Even if the uproar put librarians on the defensive, it gave them the opportunity to show those bloggers how tech-savvy they and their libraries are. As much as Gorman got a lesson on blogging, so did many bloggers learn something about their libraries.
