So Pew Internet has a new report out on people’s use of public libraries. This is the kind of thing Pew does, and while they need to fire whoever it is that slaps cutesy names on the demographics that shake out of their surveys (because “cutesy” has a really bad habit in their hands of shading into “offensive”), what they put out is generally at least worth reading and pondering.
The biblioblogosphere is usually pretty good about reading and pondering Pew stuff, but apparently Pew isn’t satisfied by its penetration therein, because they’re courting bibliobloggers in email behind the scenes. A few of the bloggers who have commented on the report thus far have noted that they were approached; most that I’ve seen have not. That doesn’t mean that anybody’s hiding anything; we can’t know which of them responded to Pew’s email and which just read the report and spontaneously found it interesting enough to comment on.
The email I got was fairly classy, as these things go; definitely not the kind of idiot PR spam that gets my back up. It addressed me specifically. It indicated more or less how my name came up and why I was chosen. No quid pro quo, not even wink-wink-nudge-nudge style. No arrogance. Really nicely done.
And it still bugs the crap out of me. I’m sorry, it just does.
One of the nice things about using blogs as a professional filter is the confidence I had that I was following people’s genuine interests, influenced by no more than their own curiosity and intelligence and the environment they exist in and interact with. These weren’t, in a word, people who were being told what to think, much less paid to think it. They weren’t being filtered, in turn, by any particular establishment, no matter how well-meaning, much less a vendor or other organization with enough dogs in the hunt to create actual bias. That’s useful, that is.
And now I don’t know how far I can trust the filter any more, and that’s a loss to me.
A number of bibliobloggers I respect have written policies about reviews and whatnot. I’ve resisted that here, because hell, I’m just a one-horse blogger with an antique (in web terms) theme, too ornery to mess with and too inconsequential to court. Best I can tell, in fact, I’ve lost readership in the last year or so; it’s been kind of a weird year, personally and professionally, and I can well believe old CavLec hasn’t been up to scratch lately.
But in the interests of transparency, I may have to change my mind. Here’s the deal. I value my bloggy independence, as I have from the very beginnings of CavLec, and I’m ornery as a kicked mule. If you push me to read and talk about something you have a direct interest in, not because you think it’s useful to me, and not because you intend to put my input to some sort of practical use (as with, say, a standards draft), but because you want to create buzz? To hell with you. I won’t just not read or review it, I’ll be more than a little tempted to call you out in public, as I’ve just done with Pew. That goes double if you try to hide your interest from me (which Pew was smart enough not to do).
Don’t mess in my biblioblogosphere, hypesters. I resent it. And bibliobloggers: it will help me, for one, if you disclose this stuff. Nobody has to be as ornery as I am about it, but as a blog reader, I would like to be able to take these faux-grassroots stunts into account as I read.
