Own Your Own Words
Tomorrow's New York Times Book Review has a new piece of mine, running as their back page essay. It's a rumination on the role of the public intellectual in the age of Google that begins with Raymond Williams' classic book, Keywords. Hilariously, the official Times style demands that the "keyword" be spelled as two words, even though the Williams book, and most modern search engine usage, spells it as one. But don't let that stop you from reading it:
But one immense change separates us from the semantic battles of the mid-70’s, a change visible in the term “key word” itself, which is now most commonly used to describe computerized search requests. In Williams’s time, if one was seeking the real-world associations or usage of a given term — to see a specific word in its native habitat, and not the caged environs of Roget’s Thesaurus or the Oxford English Dictionary — the options were limited. Today, however, we type our key word into Google and instantly get an entire field guide to its present usage: in op-ed columns, advertising blurbs, blog posts, MySpace pages, diaries, scholarly publications, wherever.
Interesting, but not amazingly groundbreaking..
An editing note, there is a typo (lack of a space actually) in the final paragraph -- "ofrelativity" should be two words.
Posted by: nickb | October 28, 2006 at 10:24 PM
Popularity and authority entail two distinct dynamics, even in a (purported) democracy. Google's manipulations of the former don't necessarily strengthen its claims to the latter.
Funny, in the NYT piece you pooh-pooh the OED, yet Wikipedia is, after all, modeled after the "caged environs" of an ordinary encyclopedia, prettified a bit with hyperlinks and invitations to contribute, and I don't see how Google, Wikipedia, and the like are any more "real world" than old, rarely consulted books, or gossip, for that matter. Your argument seems to equate shaping popular opinion with flooding the medium with default definitions, analyses, histories, etc., as Google is apt to do. Won't nuance flourish, anyway, despite the ranking campaign? Is Google's field guide always comprehensive? Your last-minute qualification about the "mainstream understanding of complex issues" facilitated by these popular tools--a careful adjustment that illustrates the point of my first paragraph--presumes that an orthodoxy of error and misunderstanding could be nevertheless "relevant," as if by definition.
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | October 29, 2006 at 01:57 PM
An interesting piece although Williams may not be very much read today. I comment and mention the recently published 'New Keywords' at
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001187.html.
I wonder if there will continue to be a revival of interest in his novels.
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/oclc/4833360&tab=reviews
Posted by: Lorcan Dempsey | October 29, 2006 at 06:18 PM
An interesting piece although Williams may not be very much read today. I comment and mention the recently published 'New Keywords' at
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001187.html
I wonder if there will continue to be a revival of interest in his novels.
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/oclc/4833360&tab=reviews
Posted by: Lorcan Dempsey | October 29, 2006 at 06:20 PM