Knowing More and More About Less and Less

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.

Let us take one example. The country is now in a financial crisis that, in terms of the number of housing foreclosures, has not been seen since the Great Depression. Do a search on the internet for mortgage foreclosures and what do you get? The first ten of an estimated one million results, including the helpful information that the Minnehaha County sheriff holds mortgage foreclosure sales every Wednesday at eleven a.m. Narrow the search to government response and the list falls to a more manageable, but still impossible, 187,000. But you already knew that mortgage foreclosures were a major problem during the Depression, and you wonder what government did about it then. You type in 'New Deal' after 'government response,' and the number goes down to a mere 105,000 sources you might want to consider.

If we did not have to find our way through this mind-numbing thicket, if we could still ask someone like that student clerk at Borders where we ought to start, we could actually learn something that might bring some clarity to the present confusion and help us decide what to do. In l932, according to the author of The Coming of the New Deal, more than a quarter millions families lost their homes through mortgage foreclosures; this at a time when the population of the United States was not much more than a third of what it is today. The first response of government, Herbert Hoover's Home Loan Bank Act of l932, like Republican proposals to meet the current crisis, offered financial incentives to lenders. This did nothing to cure the problem. When Franklin Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the November election, the rate of foreclosures had risen to almost a thousand a day.

What did Roosevelt do? In his famous first hundred days, he created a new agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which bought mortgages from the lenders who could no longer carry them, financed payment for taxes and repairs, and "rewrote the mortgages to provide for easy repayment over a long term and at relatively low interest rates." One out of every five mortgaged homes in America benefited from this program. The real estate market was saved from collapse and banks, instead of failing, once again began to lend money to people who wanted to have a home of their own.

There was a time when a bookstore clerk in Ann Arbor could have told you all that, and members of Congress and other candidates for office, might have known what they were talking about by first having something to read.

Comments

[Jude2004]

I'm a librarian, working both in a high school and doing online reference. People aren't good at searching the internet. Students aren't taught how to search effectively. But librarians will guide you through the online searching process or help you find a book that you need. We've always been here; we're still here, now in new formats; and based on my experience, we will always be needed. We're better than a Borders salesman could ever have been. Many libraries offer online chat reference. Even if they don't, you can always go to a library. We can help. Just ask.

[Herrington]

The index file of the library is becoming obsolete. Along with that obsolescence comes chaos and liberty from a tyranny of authority on subject matter. It is actually a grand challenge to the intellect and skill of the Library Sciences to separate the wheat from the chaff without the publishing dynasties as your pre-emptive censor.

The internet publishing atmosphere is like a giant family fight, with all relatives voicing an opinion with no more qualification than just being related and being there. Wikipedia does a great job of arbitration on issues with the public, admittedly the more informed part, as editor in chief. Far from being a detriment, the wild west of the information age is a boon and opportunity unlike anything since the Guttenberg printing press. Go with it, live it, and God forgive us if we stifle it.

[rixhex56]

What exactly is the point of this article? It would seem to be that our citizenry is less educated, less able to logically formulate research projects and decipher what information is pertinent and what information is not. Oddly, this point is never made in the article. Instead, the availability of more information is criticized, and the lack of somebody who can do our thinking for us is criticized. Personally, I am happy doing my own thinking. I would hope the same is true of our elected officials.

The real problem is that we have become a nation of incurious consumers, led by an incurious idiot, supported by greedy, self-interested, self-serving, "Christians" who simply don't care about anything intellectual, and actually belittle those among us who are intellectually inclined. I recently heard an acquaintance discussing her grandson who, at the age of six, has developed a fondness for CHESS. I also love chess, and thought this was a great development. She did too, but noted that the child's father was worried about how this development would likely lead to the child being teased as a nerd in school by other kids. All I could do was shake my head in hand and groan.

The problem is NOT availability of more information – it is a citizenry that simply has little intellectual curiosity, and often demeans intellectual pursuits. So, the solution is to create a social environment that appreciates intellectuals instead of despising them, and encourages critical thinking.

[StephenSmoliar]

The point you seem to have missed is about the negative relationship between quantity and knowledge. The point of the Ann Arbor story has less to do with the "search result" and more to do with the mini-conversation that ensued. This is the same sort of conversation you can have with a good librarian, before total conversion to "digital libraries" makes such librarians as obsolete as the dodo. Such conversations are not about finding "somebody who can do our thinking for us" but about the premise that knowledge is grounded in our social behavior. Search engines, whether in bookstores, libraries, or our own computers, ignore that premise when they are used to REPLACE socializing agents, rather than SUPPORT them. So your final sentence is on the right track, but you got to it by a slightly muddled path!

[rixhex56]

I got the point about a negative relationship between quantity and knowledge, I simply disagree that more availability is negative. It is only negative if people are incapable of sorting through it on their own, which seems to be the sad case.

You say, "...knowledge is grounded in our social behavior." What does that mean? That statement says nothing to me. Are you a sociologist? Social behavior and knowledge are not nearly as bound together as this statement would seem to indicate you think it is.

While I can appreciate the value of conversation, I don't see that as a necessary factor when I'm researching sometihng. In fact, conversation can become a bit of a distraction, or even an obstacle, when I'm on a mission to find info on a topic.

I don't see that the main point of the article was missing conversation with the librarian -- if it was the point, this author took a far more "muddled path" to get there than I took to make my point in my post. The last couple of paragraphs seem to clearly opine about a general lack of knowledge, not a lack of conversation.

[homesteader]

I agree on both counts.

Although a lot of people working in the "local" to me (only a hundred miles away) Borders do have their own strengths--one woman knows all the local authors, for instance. Not sure at all but what Borders has overgrown--too many stores in too small an area--even if it truly isn't my local area. And then there's the 500 pound gorilla of books--Amazon. But I believe that a bookstore that my mother owned part of in the 1950's is still in existence--several owners and locations later.

I'd look at books for history, been trying to understand the roots of the early 21st century mess by reading (and listening to) history. Johnathan Alter's The Defining Moment, for instance. 1984 and Animal Farm. And something about Napoleon in Egypt (Juan Cole--it needs tables and better maps). Even For Whom the Bell Tolls seems oddly relevant.

I learned about most of those from the net, but not from a general search.

[moodpost]

People are still reading books. They just aren't buying them in bookstores as often as the on-line alternatives.