The Book Tower

I recently watched a television documentary on the great Samuel Johnson. Although generally an excellent programme, I was annoyed with some of the terminology used. Terminology that equated everything with the web and computers.

Dr Johnson, and I didn’t know this, apparently suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. An expert came on to explain what possibly causes this condition. Impulses in the brain are kept in check, with only the appropriate ones being let through at the right time. With Tourette’s, the checking system doesn’t work as it should. The part of the brain that polices all of these impulses is sometimes known as a filter although the expert suddenly exclaimed “or a firewall!”

It seemed that he had to make a reference to the modern world of computing to make his point.

Fair enough, but the documentary later became bogged down with trying to compare Samuel Johnson’s methods in compliling his dictionary first with a database and then with Google. Dr Johnson and his team were the first ‘search engine’ as they busily put the dictionary together from their various sources. Because of the way he worked, Johnson was ‘like Google’. Slightly nervous with this analogy, the documentary makers had accompanied the voiceover with images of Johnson and the first edition of his dictionary culled from a Google image search. A crazy man appeared to suggest more comparisons with the web, via a Skype broadcast, to really get us in the mood.

I’m finding this type of thing commonplace, with documentary makers jumping at the chance to compare things that happened long, long ago to computing terminology. Is it because people can only understand things if they are put into context with the modern word, such as being similar to either an early type of computer, the first search engine, downloading, a computer programme or iTunes?

I recently did some work on my family tree and discovered that a very distant relative of mine was an active political campaigner and diarist. Not sure if anyone would understand this, though, so I’ll put him down as an ‘early blogger’.