Agnotology is a term that has been invented to describe “the cultural production of ignorance”.

A call for papers explains further:

Examples include the ignorance of cancer hazards caused by the “doubt” peddled by trade associations (Brown and Williamson’s “doubt is our product”), the non-transfer of birth control technologies from colonial outposts to imperial centers (by virtue of successive chains of disinterest and suppression), the non-development of certain technologies by virtue of structural apathies or disinterest, impacts of disciplinarity on agnotogenesis, etc.

…The idea is that a great deal of attention has been given to epistemology (the study of how we know), when “how or why we don’t know” is often at least as interesting-and remarkably undertheorized by comparison.

Checking out the term, Google took me to a blog, Bloggence, Cunning, Exile, that explains more, (also here).

Another blog provides the example of doctors losing the ability to turn breech births.

An historical example: Towards the end of ancient Egyptian civilisation, it lost the ability to make “proper” mummies. The technology had always been closely guarded, and it must have been during a period of political and military turmoil that a few key people died, and that was that. (Incidentally that’s how we come to call them mummies: the Arabic word mumiya was applied to the later “mummies”, which were simply coated bodies with bitumen and wrapped.)

Who’d have thought it? Philobiblon is one year old.

The curious thing is that I really can’t remember what it was that prompted me to go to Blogger and start it up – I don’t think I was even terribly clear what a blog was.

But I do recall making those first couple of posts, when I was thinking mainly of putting up fascinating little snippets of historical information – stories, mainly of women’s lives – that I felt should be broadcast, but didn’t fit within the other work I was doing.

And that’s still a large part of what Philobiblon is (and it will probably get larger in the coming months, when I hope to get back to intensive research).

The book element has grown in recent months when, in large part due to my involvement with Blogcritics, I’ve started to write formally formatted reviews. That, combined with recent events, has also probably boosted the political content – I’m not sure how much of that will remain in the long term, or indeed if I should split that off in a separate blog, or leave the posts just on blogcritics. (Any comments, complaints?)

I started off saying that I didn’t care about the level of readership – and in some ways that is true: one of the values of Philobiblon to me is simply its push to make a personal record of what I’ve read and seen.

But I doubt there’re many bloggers who, once they’ve found a web counter, don’t check it at least semi-regularly, and it is nice to think you are part of a community. For all of the complaints about the decline of civil society in the information age, there could hardly be a better way to gather compatible people together. (And it would be nice to regularly top 100 readers a day some time – such a nice round number.)

I thought the occasion should be marked, so I’ve done a little redesign – nothing too flash – Philobiblon has improved my HTML skills, but I’ll never be a full-on geek – and I’ve only just worked out photo posting. (And yes I know it is showing my age, but I do marvel at the ease with which you can post to Flickr, get a URL and drop it in your blog. They even give you different sizes to choose from!)

And I’ve, finally, got around to cleaning up my blogroll and at least partially updating it. I still have many more Femmes Fatales I should add (and indeed a whole FF section in the sidebar), which I will get too soon. As indeed I WILL get to updating my website, which has been shamefully neglected in the past year, as several people have pointed out to me.

So for the next year? More of the same, I expect. Blogging and blog reading has, for good or ill, now become a fundamental part of my life. I’m probably kidding myself on the downward side when I say I spend two hours a day at it. (But it has led me to get rid of the TV that I never got around to switching on, so I count it as the equivalent use of leisure time – and it is considerably more productive and stimulating.)

Vive la blog!

My post earlier today here and over on Blogcritics provoked a small and perhaps predictable, storm.

So some more thoughts.

More than 3,000 people are killed on British roads each year. Now we could save the relatives and friends of those people all the agony of loss if we say reduced the speed limit nationwide to 10 miles an hour and enforced it with prison terms. (And yes I did lose a loved one that way, so I admit to being rather more than averagely concerned about the issue.)

That would be a good thing, wouldn’t you say?

No?

Well even though I’m broadly anti-car, I don’t think so either.

The point I am trying to make is not to diminish the suffering of the victims and their families, but to point out that all of the measures proposed and undertaken have a cost (just as reducing the speed limit would have a cost.)

Flood the streets of London with armed police – more innocent people will get shot, everyone will become more fearful, the police will start to become more and more assertive. (As The Economist points out this week.)

Abolish rights that have belonged to British citizens for decades – you have a less free, less civilised society.

Target the Muslim community with obtrusive surveillance, verbal attacks etc – you’ll get more terrorists.

My message: Don’t act in the heat of the moment; don’t react to the “flurry of opportunistic demands” from police, civil servants etc to increase their power and budgets; don’t destroy what you are supposed to be trying to protect.

I’ve been calling on and off for the past three weeks for calm and commonsense over the London bombings. The fact is, whatever might have happened; however many scary photos of nail bombs might have been leaked by the American security services to the American media (you have to ask why did that happen – media management if you ever saw it); 52 people have died, less than a week’s death toll on British roads (the average was 67 last year).

If someone reported a week of road tolls in the same detail what might happen? Possibly some good things – a ban on city 4WDs (SUVs), more restrictions on new drivers, lower speed limits on residential roads … etc etc. Oddly enough I’ve never heard a comprehensive set of calls like that.

But now the government, having already nibbled away at civil liberties throughout its terms, is planning to take huge more chunks out of them, as set out in The Guardian by one of the lawyers who has worked with Guantanamo Day detainees.

It really is time to hose down the official hysteria – for a good slap around the chops, as traditionally delivered to hysterical women in bad movies – for Tony Blair et al.

But there is hope … I’m listening now to The Now Show on Radio 4, which is running some wonderful jokes on the subject. I enjoyed the description of stranded commuters walking home as though they were a herd of wildebeest, with mini-cab drivers cutting out the stragglers …

Varying circumstances today took me to web resources on two fascinating women:

1. Louise Michel, a 19th-century French anarchist and social activist, whose web-biog has been put up by the International Institute of Social History to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her death. The illegitimate daughter of a maidservant and an aristocrat, she was given a good education before being thrown on her own resources by her stepmother. I won’t summarise the life here – check the link! – but this snippet pretty well sums it up …

The next five years were spent alternating between attending meetings or in prison. There was even an attempt on her life during a meeting in Le Havre, in 1888, when the extremist Pierre Lucas shot her, but she quickly recovered.

(There’s also a French version.)

2. Mary Lamb, the English writer who suffered from periodic fits of madness, during one of which she stabbed her mother to death. Hers was perhaps the perfect Romantic life – she and her brother were friends with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Mary Shelley. One of these days I must put up a review of the excellent A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb by Sarah Burton, but in the meantime, there’s this interesting web biography, structured something like a mind map, but with full use of hyperlinks. (If that’s a bit conceptual for you, there’s a short narrative version here.)