The Net effect

Google allows one to riffle through facts, history and the pages of our culture's collective knowledge. It is like an external hard drive containing the everyday knowledge we used to carry around in our heads. (Last week, Google announced a $125-million settlement with authors and the publishing industry for the right to scan thousands of titles and make them available online.)

While planning her most recent book, "The Zookeeper's Wife," author Diane Ackerman used the Internet "to know what animals the Warsaw Zoo kept, what animals called when, what they sounded like, smelled like, looked like and so on. 'Gibbon calls,' I thought. I Googled them, and heard their duets! I needed to know what birds would have been there, so I used the Internet to discover the aerial flyways over Europe in 1939. Previously, I would have made a trip to Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, and spent hours there."

In theory, a tool like Google should free us to be more creative. In reality, there are pitfalls.

Jan Frel is an editor at the progressive news site AlterNet and a cultural critic who takes a wider perspective, holding that writing in general, rather than a reliance on oral tradition, has had a deleterious effect on culture. "This is a weird aberration," she says, "all these people writing instead of one story being written by many people."

Frel likes the open-endedness of an Internet where "you can imagine knowledge and then find it." But there is a downside, which, according to Frel, is rather dire: "Pretty good has become the new perfection."

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn memorized passages of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," he had no choice but to enact the modernist version of oral traditions. This was not an expression of collective culture so much as an extreme example of what T.S. Eliot called "the individual talent."

Today's blogs are a mutation of Solzhenitsyn's modernist mythmaking -- where the merely personal becomes a matter of permanent record. Increasingly, mainstream writers cite blogs. Political journalists use them as sources. According to CommonSenseMedia.org, 74% of journalists recently surveyed regularly read blogs, and 84% "say they would or already have used blogs as a primary or secondary source for articles."

"A seasoned reader," Crooks andLiars.com founder John Amato claims, "can learn more about a political issue than a person who sticks to the old-style pros."