Blogs vs. Books for learning

October 30, 2007

This post is rather abstract. It depicts me being puzzled about choosing between blogs or books. The question is if these two media could even be compared at all? Today I heard a presentation on which it was said that the internet is no medium, in the way that you absorb no knowledge from it, and so, only printed publications make you reflect the content.

Flickr giandoObviously, I have doubts about the previously said, but there are many differences between blogs and books. Just to describe a few, here, on blogs, links give further information and also feedbacks are commented directly. On books, the content stands for itself and in many cases only the bibliography shows a reference. Blogs are quick and informal, hold personal–short or long–reflections and often try to keep up with the rapid pace of the web. Books are well thought and take months or years to be published, and are based on a framework of hypothesis. Books were for centuries the ultimate way to share and acquire knowledge, but this has changed with the Internet fundamentally. In the early days, the Internet was great as a book searching tool, yet the overall knowledge offered was rather weak.

Nowadays, the Internet offers tremendous resources to learn and even allow us to share and create new knowledge. This is a way of how we process knowledge and learn completely different, as indeed Philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann points out in this quote I translated into English:

We do not approach things causal linear. We do not try to tap a text from its inner structure, instead, we approach associative information; we sample much more, we work much more on the principle of collage/montage. Peaces of knowledge, texts, photos, all we find in Internet, we rearrange, sort it individually. We do not tap and understand things in the classical approach of the hermeneutic, simply because this new medium supports much more to tackle problems in an associative manner.

This is an interesting description which shows how networked learning can look like. Blogging, therefore, is a mean to start reflecting the sheer mass of information or bring it down to some puzzle pieces. The sheer incredible pace of information, however, cannot be reflected just by blogging and linking. Books give still space for reflection although on the next page there are not dozens of links to follow. To read a book from beginning to end is consequently a very different experience than to read blogs. I do not want to miss any of them, but I start wondering how to keep up with the pace of information.


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Comments

3 Comments so far

  1. JKE on November 1, 2007 1:26 am

    Oh I am feeling you on this one, bro.

    Books are a great resource, and I guess that due to the nature of the internet, their focus has to become another. What kind of books are sold today? Most of them are fiction, so my take on this is that they are meant for a different market / needs and deliver content different to the one found online.
    Who is using e-Books, btw?

  2. Kevin on November 8, 2007 10:41 pm

    Hi Christian
    I think you are in danger of setting up a false dichotomy here - books and blogs have their place, it all depends what you are trying to do with them.

    Comparing their relative merits however I think you miss an important dimension which is beautifully put in this posting http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_1.html#isaacson

    Print As a Technology

    I am very optimistic about print as a technology. Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution, and consumer product. That is why I appreciate the fact that many Edge forums are transformed into books, and it’s why I hope someday that there is a gorgeous Edge Magazine that I can flip through and touch. Imagine if we had been getting our information delivered digitally to our screens for the past 400 years. Then some modern Gutenberg had come up with a technology that was able to transfer these words and pictures onto pages that could be delivered to our doorstep, and we could take them to the backyard, the bath, or the bus. We would be thrilled with this technological leap forward, and we would predict that someday it might replace the internet.

    WALTER ISAACSON
    President & CEO, Aspen Institute. Former CEO, CNN, Managing Editor, TIME; Author, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

    BTW, interesting that you quote a modern Austrian philosopher in support of the changing paradigms of learning. I’m not convinced that his talk of hermenuetics adds very much to your thesis but on the subject of reading, erudition and learning a “must read” (yes, really) are the essays of Schopenhauer (Parerga and Paralipomena) - I came across this jeremiad in which he seems to attack the whole culture of blogging ;-)

    Incredible are the folly and perversity of a public that will leave unread writings of the noblest and rarest of minds, of all times and all countries, for the sake of reading the writings of commonplace persons which appear daily, and breed every year in countless numbers like flies; merely because these writings have been printed to-day and are still wet from the press. It would be better if they were thrown on one side and rejected the day they appeared, as they must be after the lapse of a few years. They will then afford material for laughter as illustrating the follies of a former time.

    It is because people will only read what is the newest instead of what is the best of all ages, that writers remain in the narrow circle of prevailing ideas, and that the age sinks deeper and deeper in its own mire.

    More fun with the old curmudgeon here: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/schopenhauer/Schopenhauer-8.pdf

    Tscheuss!
    Kevin

  3. Joitske on November 11, 2007 12:55 pm

    Hi, christian, me too, I believe in the power of both. I wouldn’t want to miss my books for blogs! I see blogs as the informal communities that work as infomediaries to point towards interesting books. I remember I have to blog some of the books I read!

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