Gormangate or Son of Revenge of the Blog People

Last February, president-elect of ALA, Michael Gorman wrote a clearly scathing attack on bloggers, "Revenge of the Blog People!" Since then, he has drawn heavy fire from librarians, the blogging community, and technophiles slamming him for his portrayal of librarians as anti-technology. The consensus among readers who wrote letters to Library Journal was about 99-1 against Gorman and very few seemed to find the piece humorous, as he said he intended. The April 1 issue of Library Journal has published an editorial, "The Power of Blogs", mildly criticizing Gorman and grappling with their decision to publish his column in the first place. Another article in the same issue, "Is This Gormangate?", plays up how libraries and librarians are often technological leaders. It concludes with:

Gorman, meanwhile, remained defiant in the face of his critics. "It is the oldest trick in the world to conflate the special - reservations about the efficacy of the Google digitization project and the worth of blogs - with the general - a hatred of technology - and call the object of the conflation a Luddite or worse," he observed. "But saying it doesn't make it so."

But if you say such things enough times, as Gorman has over the years, maybe it does.

Posted by Tom on April 05, 2005