Why Google's universal library is an assault on human identity
Why Google’s universal library is an assault on human identity:
Why Google’s universal library is an assault on human identity. How’s that for a headline? Andrew Keen pull sno punches in this short ZDNet blog post. “John Updike put it best in his response to Kevin Kelly’s notorious 2006 New York Times magazine piece about Google’s universal library. For some of us,” Updike said. “Books are intrinsic to our human identity.” Exactly. So, by undermining the autonomy of the stand-alone book, Google’s vast database of indexed content is actually a blooming assault on human identity
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so… mr. updike believes that …. books are intrinsic to our human identity… thus it must follow that before there were books, there were no human identities?
I don’t think access to knowledge is an assault on human identity. it is an assualt on traditions and institutional forms, but that is nothing new. the book and everything behind it, is an institutionalized form of knowledge, it creates a wide variety of social disparities in relation to access to knowledge, including encouraging some of the current forms of anti-intellectualism… people have learned to dislike books and what books represent, as much as people have learned to love them. we just need to be careful when we think about these things.
