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Web 2.0 - Erudition, Not Hoarding: Response to Sam Vaknin

Michael Hart - 4/27/2007

It is the last sentence in Sam Vaknin's article that I reply to in the greatest spirit, no matter how his earlier, important, and well-taken points might be. Sam might well call me one of the hoarders, except that I give away as much as I can. However, I am one of the few who believe a local storage system is preferable to depending on a sometimes flaky network connection.

Even before the new terabyte drives became available, I stated that the principal idea is to OWN your own data, to have it locally just in case you couldn't access it when you needed it. I can't tell you how many times my friends have been unable to get their work done simply because their connection was down. To me it is pretty much the same as "My dog ate my homework," something you could have predicted and prevented does not an "accident" make.

Another quotation I recall on this subject goes something like:

"Please understand that your failure to plan ahead does not create an emergency situation for me."

With terabytes under $400, and the average computer under $500, for under $1,000 there is little excuse for not buying a new one that can back up every book you are going to read in your life, or if you really can't afford it, buy a used one for half that price.

So, ultimately, I do recommend hoarding, or at least not depending on outside sources any longer than you have to, keeping your own content for your own use, just in case. After all, it only costs a quarter, even to store a relatively large file.

At $400 for a terabyte, 40 gigabytes cost $1, and these are gigabytes, I hardly need to remind you, that are reusable whenever you need a bit more space, and have completed your project.

Is it really worth even thinking about making a backup when it hardly takes a dollar to back up your files?

If you are really serious, an offsite copy is well worth it.

As I converse with scholars, experts, and just plain folk about my work creating ebooks and elibraries, the one thing they worry about is that people will not read - and what good is a library if the people don't read?

However, as Sam points out: the new generations have an attention span the size of a gnat. Where people used to sit down for hours, even days, to read a book, the new generations are unlikely to sit still for an hour (though this actually may save them from some of those physical ailments doctors are always telling us about for which an easy cure is simply to get up and walk around a bit in 45 minutes).

While I have certainly read more books, and more 1,000 page books, than the average person, most people would say that I have a short attention span. . Still, obviously there are things that can hold my interest long enough for me to read those 1,000 page books.

I can't guarantee what will happen with the new generations, but I can, as well as anyone, tell you that they do have their own power of concentration. Video gamers, for instance, make great fighter pilots. But, is there any positive correlation between this and scholarly performance? I have heard that there is such a correlation, but I do not know how strong it is.

I grew up somewhat the same as Sam in respect to believing that my "knowledge and education will set me free" though I think I made a discovery pretty early on that it would NOT be a "glamorous world of happy learning," and yes, I agree even more with Sam that illiteracy has become rampant throughout the world, and that perhaps we need some definition of literacy beyond being able to write one's name in order to do justice to the older recorded literacy rates.

However, I can point out from personal experience that graduations from high schools, even in the wealthy suburbs of America, characteristically comprise 1 person in 8 who can't read even at this level, and I think that the figure is actually somewhat higher.

Sam says, "The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the retreat, back into the ivory towers of a century ago, their place has been taken" by a whole list of bozos (to paraphrase him).

My own inclination is to say that there are all too few scholarly, intellectual people in the world, inside or outside ivory towers - and that they all do too little for the real world as far as benefiting the real world goes.

Obviously any one of these scholarly intellectuals could have made Project Gutenberg a reality and should have created such a reality had he or she only dedicated 1% of the time and resources at their disposal on such a project, and then you in the real world would never have heard of Project Gutenberg eBooks.

However, this did not take place in any of the thousands of colleges and universities around the world, and I worry quite a bit about that.


Sam Vaknin comments, "the fare served up by the electronic media everywhere now consist largely of soap operas, interminable sports events, and reality TV shows." Still, he does not give credit to this independent effort by thousands of people worldwide to bring a new kind of library to electronic doorsteps everywhere.

Sam then goes on to say:

"Even the ever-slimming minority who do wish to be enlightened are inundated by a suffocating and unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data, comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no way to tell the two apart, so a "democracy of knowledge" reigns where everyone is equally qualified and everything goes and is equally merited."

I break Sam Vaknin's quotation here so I can reply, hopefully with equal effect, to both portions of his argument.

I, personally, feel it is the responsibility of the reader to accurately evaluate what is read and what is real. This cannot be relegated to become the responsibility of anyone else, be it teacher, preacher, professor, author, or madman.

Once this responsibility is accepted by the masses, the ability of anyone to mislead them is severely diminished.

It is only the failure to accept this responsibility and follow it to its logical conclusion that allow the false politicians, prophets or any number of other false gods or demigods to interfere with the rational functioning of humankind.

I tell all those who fear to email me with something they feel I must have already heard a hundred times to send email of this nature anyway, for it is better to hear important topics even a hundred times over than not to hear about them at all.

If one cannot judge, cannot evaluate, cannot assimilate or chooses not to assimilate, then one is simply awash in a sea of words Sam has described above.

However, if one has enough judgement, courage, and willingness to cast one's own anchors, raise one's own sails, make one's maps to one's own specifications, and to sail "The Seven Seas of Liberal Arts" as "The captain of your own fate, the master of your soul" ...

Sam Vaknin's final quotation concludes here:

"This relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new "Dark Age," hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine enlightenment."

Here we come to the actual crux of the issue. . . .

"A New Dark Age" is certainly what many are hoping for. This hope, hidden though it might be in the profit motives of Capitalism, revolves around a new ignorance on the part of the masses, the purpose of which, sad to say, is to make them ever easier to lead down the road to greater enslavement and to ascertain their continuing support for policies that increasingly entrap them and others.

"Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it."

The purpose of all "Dark Ages," new and old, is the same: to make a civilization based on ignorance.

These "New Dark Ages" are not fostered by the masses. They are the outcome of the abdication of the intellectuals, those who could have been great teachers and scholars, great librarians of the Third Millennium's multi-billion book libraries.

If you take neither side, then you, too, have abdicated humanity.