But upon closer inspection this quote seemingly isn’t in Table Talk after all, suggesting that Claude’s initial response was right. However what’s interesting is how they both immediately backed down when challenged. They also made claims about their searching (as if they were consulting a database) which simply aren’t true:
Because when I eventually went back to Google and found a search term which helped me get through the masses of low quality quotation sites, I found that it was actually in Coleridge’s Bioographia Literaria 🎯
But it’s not going to do that is it? It’s once again affecting a capability which it doesn’t have. Which is wonderfully productive as a generative interlocutor but is actively dangerous if people aren’t using it in the weirdly abstract way I’ve been advocating. The problem is that these systems are directly and indirectly contributing to degrading Google search in a way that will lead people to lean on them instead because of their seeming utility.
I recalled an effort a few years ago to identify the source of the phrase ‘making the familiar strange’. As Ash Watson references here, it was a distributed team effort which eventually concluded this actually goes back to the german romantic poet Novalis from the late 1700s, in contrast to a tendency to attribute it to C Wright Mills (by sociologists) or T.S. Eliot and Russian formalists (by many literary scholars). This experience of a distributed ad hoc search process, led by me but with many willing contributors united by nothing other than a shared curiosity, represents the lost promise of social media. In the information environment we are now entering into, it’s really sad this promise will never be realised.
Mark Carrigan 