The Stationers Guild

Last Christmas, a good friend of mine gave me a copy of Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta.  While I have always been fascinated by the rapidly changing world of technology, this well-written book about the short history of Google is both informative and a little frightening.  Google is the brain-child of two brilliant Stanford University engineers – Larry Page and SergeyBrin – whose vision and single-mindedness created a company whose very presence has changed the way human beings receive and process information.

Google is omnipresent and those who wish to learn more should certainly read Mr. Auletta’s intelligent “story” of “The End of the World as We Know It.”  While the beauty,  mathematical simplicity and clear-sighted vision of Google’s founders is to be commended, many feel that this newly engineered world may be lacking in substance.  This prompted me to get on another reading spree which includes You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier; Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel; and The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox by John Freeman.  These three books present a frightening view of this new technological society that most everyone is rushing forward to embrace without thinking of the consequences.  

Just a few days, a salesperson for some Internet marketing company told me that “libraries are for poor people who cannot afford Kindles.”  Does any sane person believe that libraries will continue to thrive if we uncomplicate our lives by reading books digitally?  Already, the Post Office is selling off prime real estate and closing offices and most likely eliminating Saturday deliveries.  Some will argue that this is good and, maybe it is, but maybe the postman, librarian and those inconvenienced by this change have a different viewpoint. 

The title of this article was borrowed frm Mr. Siegel’s book in which he gets progressively more alarmed at the influence of the Internet, where “knowledge is withering away into information.”   He goes on to point out that “Wikipedia . . . with its mountains of trivial factoids, of shifting mounds of gossip, of inane personal details, is knowledge in the process of becoming information.  Consumer participation in the creation of the news is information crumbling into particles of incoherence.”

Mr. Lanier is even more unforgiving, pointing out that “advertising is not singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come.  Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymized and decontextualized to the point of meaningless.”  I am embarrassed to quote Mr. Lanier out of context since he was the first to point out (at least that I know of) is that once Google manages to scan all of the books we will have one book that will “encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment . . .”  This is pretty frightening stuff indeed.

I have not slept well reading these books and was, therefore, most interested in receiving an invitation to attend a panel discussions just prior to the National Stationery Show on “Connecting with Tomorrow’s Customer and the One 10 Years from Now” with Paco Underhill from Envirosell as the Keynote Speaker.   When I inquired how they intended to approach the subject, I was informed that they would be talking about moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional communication.  Ummmmm . . .  Most interesting.  More coming soon.

Tags: Googled, Hohn Freeman, Jaron Lanier, Ken Auletta, Lee Siegel, National Stationery Show, Paco Underhill

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.