The Curse of Google

Google have contracts to place seven million books from the University of Michigan online and a further ten million from Harvard, Yale and Oxford. Their aim is to eventually make all of the world's information available online. Information? Yes, I will be able to look up Primo Levi's 'Is This Man' and that will give me some information about Auschwitz! Gawd, I wish they had read Russell's 'Useless Knowledge'.

Books are for snobs, this democratizes everything. Availability and accessibility trump those stuffy old things called libraries. More nonsense, nonsense on stilts, in fact. It assumes that everyone has the time to read and understand what they're reading; it assumes that making Dan Brown more accessible to vast swathes of the population is in some way a good thing. More is better, always better. As with television, I think this greater 'availability' will just continue to fragment consciousness, overburden our senses and transfix the gaze.

In the society of the spectacle, this will be just one more to note. As Franzen notes, already the thought of reading a book linearly-from start to finish-is somewhat old fashioned. With thousands of books to browse on any one topic will we be able to do anything but surf this vast wave of information?

The British Library has some 17 million books in its vaults, the Mitterrand, 12 million, and the Library of Congress, 30 million. Are these stupendous projects, these great temples to the human mind, an attempt to preserve the past , what every person has ever written down or thought, or are they the engines of the future, the 'knowledge economy'? There's an element of Pharaoh's despair involved in such desperate attempts methinks and one wonders if this is related to what Steiner calls a core tiredness in western sensibilities: the fatalism that tells us there are no new beginnings.

An interesting article in The New Yorker has someone suggesting that many of the solutions to the world's (scientific) problems already exist: one only has to trawl through the mountain of publications and make the connections. But like an astronaut who has to push further and further out to escape himself and the world, the hypertrophy of the mind demands new thoughts -and it matters little if we cannot integrate that knowledge in either our minds or, more importantly, in our lives. Scatter brains, indeed!

http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html