Nuts and Bolts

At long last, we come to the actual creation, marketing and maintenance of websites and blogs.  Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig provide an adequate introduction to the concepts underlying the creation and design of web pages. Many of the problems with content creation and marketing that Cohen and Rosenzweig laid out seven years ago are still important to understand today. From creating a coherent URL structure (Cohen and Rosenzwieg rightly bashes Jstor.org for failing to do this, Jstor being a holy abomination of a website in almost every way) to maximizing your Google search results.

Is Google Evil?
Image Courtesy of techrepublic.com

Google.com, which has become ubiquitous in culture as well as the academy, is also a topic of debate among digital historians. Having captured the verb for internet search ("google it") in a way similar to the branding successes of Kleenex and Band Aid, it does not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. But its growing status as the premier public domain book provider to the academy as well as general public has drawn criticism from Geoffrey Nunberg, who calls Google's book search a "Disaster for Scholars". In the article, Nunberg's very legitimate worries about private profit seeking company Google's "ownership" of a huge selection of out of print and orphan books gives way to whining about metadata results which anyone doing serious research would not be seriously affected by. My thoughts were stolen ahead of time by Dr. Larry Cebula of Northwesthistory.blogspot.com, who writes that "Nunberg has a number of good points--point he gathers together to form a molehill, from which he conjures up a mountain."

Is Google making us stupid?
Image Courtesy of http://iont3ch.wordpress.com

The power of Google in the realm of the academy leads us to charges that it is changing the way we think. In the Atlantic, Nicolas Carr writes that the way he, and many others interacts with the world has been altered in a fundamental way by the internet. "I’m not thinking the way I used to think." says Carr, "I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages." While not really about Google itself, it is more an argument that the short blocks of text and the skimming technique of that most use while on the web is making people less able to focus on longer narratives. Carr backs up his claim by showing how other technologies such as writing and the printing press changed the way humans thought. Its an interesting theory. One that should give us pause before jumping brain-first into the digital world.