On books and the internet

Books have an advantage over the internet that they will are not likely ever to lose: they cost a lot of money to produce (and, consequently, to buy). Because of this expenditure, books are not published haphazardly, but as the result of a rather long and involved editorial process. Most of the ideas of a book never reach beyond the idea stage. Hopes are dashed and frustrations are raised: puslishing a book is an exercise in Darwinism, and the books that are published are not necessary the best ideas that were proposed. All these are considerable advantages, it goes without saying.

The most immediate consequence of the eidorial process is that, by and large, books are produced with a certain standard of quality. I am not talking about the content of a book (in that area, you see pretty much everything), but of its form. Even a Barbara Cartland book is edited with the same care as "The phenomenology of spirit" and if the occasional typo appears here and there is only because to err is human, not for want of effort. Compared to this, the language that one finds on the web is almost criminally sloppy.

Books come with a series of markers to activate certain "cultural filters" that we have created for ourselves so that, many times, we know a lot about a book even before opening it. If a book on, say, the Templars, is placed in the academic section of a library and is edited by Harvard University Press, we can bet quite safely that is not a conspiracy book that traces all kind of hermetic sects. Even if the author is completely unknown to us, we can make certain assumptions based on the publisher or, even if the name of the publisher means nothing to us, based on the fact that the
bookseller placed it in the "academic" rather than in the "esoterica" section. Of course, there is nothing special about academic books: the same filter work, in the opposite direction, if one is indeed looking for esoterica books.

These filters do not exist in the case of the internet, where everything is superficially the same, where any place is reachable from any other place through anonymous links. In some cases, such as Wikipedia (why don't they have a British
version called Wikipaedia?) the distinction is impossible because all the entries, no matter who wrote them, are invested with the same imprint and authority (or lack thereof). Who wrote the Templar entry of the Wikipedia? By the looks of it, the
entry seems more of the Harvard kind than of the esoterica, but, what do I know? On the internet everything looks the same. I bet I can enter a library in any country, even if I don't read the language and, by the looks of it, more or less distinguish the various sections, but on the internet I am blind.

If we want to make an effective use of the material that is available on the internet it is necessary to start creating a series of cultural filters of the type that allow us to select books. The problem is not that there is too much information on the internet: the problem is that we have to go through so much of it in order to find what we are looking for. This problem will not be solved by simple search engines, since they are as undiscriminating as the web pages. One possible solution could be that of "personal" seach engines, which will replicate, on-line, the filters that we use when looking at things. But, even before that, it is necessary to find out what
distinguishes, on-line, the Harvard scholar from the conspiracy theorist. If anything, of course.

This is not a blog

The reasons why this is not a blog (and the reason why nobody should call it such) are linguistic: I simply do not accept the etymology of the utterance "blog". Let us revise it.

In the beginning was the Middle English logge, from which the ENglish word log, in the sense of a length of a tree trunk ready for sawing and over six feet (1.8 meters) long (Merriam-Webster). A round block of wood (a piece of log) was often used as the main part of the device used to measure the speed of a ship, hence the acception of the word log to indicate the record of the rate of a ship speed and then, by extension, the diary of a ship's captain.

From there, the word log has passed to denote any kind of chronological account of events. When people started putting these accounts on the web, the same illiterate who created blurts such as e-comerce or e-education (a bunch of e-diots, if you ask me) started use the term weblog and then, since these people seem unable to deal with any polysyllabic word, they cut it in the beginning into blog.

I'd rather not use a word with such poor etymology so, as I said before, this is not a blog. Call it a diary, an opinion column, a cuaderno de bitacora. Just don't call it a blog. And if you think I am too picky about language, be warned that I can do much worse, as shown in this article that appeared a few years ago on the IEEE Computer magazine.