One of Life's Minor Irritations

[jsburbidge]

The Android ecosystem by default comes with Google-driven alerts for news and blog-type posts.

One thing they may not have thought of is the effect of some of these pushed posts on people who actually know something about the topic.

I was just pointed to a post on "the best French authors". It is (naturally) not entirely wrong: it has Balzac, Voltaire, Camus, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo ("hélas"), de Beauvoir, and Dumas.

It does not have the following, all of whom I would certainly place above Dumas: Villon, Rabelais, Ronsard, du Bellay, Diderot, La Bruyère, Bossuet, Lamartine, Zola, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Proust, Céline, Aragon, Apollinaire, and Perse.

It's a bit like writing a list of the best English authors and omitting Swift, Sidney, and Sterne while including Conan Doyle.

It's a reminder that posts which look informed, and probably intend to be informed rather than misleading, are not to be relied on.

Comments

[ndrosen]

You know French literature better than I do; I do agree with your final paragraph, and concur that what is presented as informative and sound may genuinely be so, or may contain omissions and oversimplifications, or may be entirely wrong.