Google is the white bread of the mind part 2

I’m always impressed by good public speaking. 2 speakers whom I‘ve yet to see surpassed are Professor Lord Giddens and, you guessed it… Mr Steve Jobs. I’m captivated when they’re on stage. So intoxicated by their modus operandi that for the duration of the talk I suspend any critical facilities I possess, and in the round up and applause I find myself almost besotted.

piccie of Giddens

At Tara Brabazon inaugural lecture she gave a great performance. But like the other two, what I find amazing is that, and this is particularly true of Giddens, the performance itself is so energetic, convincing, dynamic etc. that there’s this while, where I shelve my analysis in favour of being totally impressed by them and their intellect.

Here’s a synopsis of her lecture as I understood it.

Tara began talking about what she calls “the seagull effect”. You know when a dirty fat gull swoops down and nicks your ice cream, right out of your hands. When it comes to reading, writing and thinking, we’re all racing to take the last chip off the plate in case it goes. With a super-size portion of irony she used the image of the cover of Malcolm Gladwells’ Blink – “Thinking without thinking”. The audience sniggered; thinking without thinking is the stooooopist funniest thing ever to an audience of professional intellectuals.

The idea of the collapse of time and space has been knocking around since Daniel Bells seminal “The coming of the Post Industrial society”, perhaps even a tad before when the invention of papyrus by the ancient Egyptians ignited globalisation 1.0. But according to Tara the events of 9/11 have seen a parallel trajectory with the speeding up and condensing of information. We expect everything bite size and quick about it.

Academic expertise will crumble under web 2.0 & I will end up as a cheap talking head, according to her. Experience is now much more important than expertise. Oh dear.

Her beef with Google is that it ranks on popularity not importance and therefore we can no longer tell the difference between popular and significant information, especially, because to be popular you need to be popularist. And finally in a passionate call to arms to the academic world she urged the community to improve the calibre of scholarship online. Google, she said, has provided the infrastructure and it is down to us to improve the social structure.

Part 3 coming soon...where I’ll actually share my thoughts.