Slashdot Mirror
Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge?
serutan asks: "How much do you rely on the Internet for information? Since getting online 7 or 8 years ago, I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information, to the point where they've pretty much disappeared from my life. I'm a geek, but at age 49 not exactly a child of the Information Age. I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life. I still read fiction in book form, but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject."
For news, and timely information certainly the internet is the place I turn. The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information. Besides, I don't really know exactly what I get out of keeping up with how many people were murdered or died in fires in the tri-state NY metro area (there is a LOT of that on the news). So, I've just stopped watching. I was never much of a newspaper reader, but of course there is always the New York Times and many other newspapers that bring the information to you with a nice bow on it so you don't have to go scouring elsewhere. But if scouring is your style and you are a real information junky, the scouring certainly isn't that hard.
But if I am going to learn anything in-depth certainly books -dead tree media- is the way to be. My upper limit of reading an article on the crt is about 10 pages. Your mileage will vary there, of course it's highly individual. But maybe that's why places where the information is in digested for you allowing you to scan many stories at once and sample them all, because lengthy readings on a computer monitor are more tedious than kicking back and reading a book.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Yes. I have done this as well. I'm bored by the morning newspaper now. I already have read all the stories the day before on various news Web pages. We use the Internet as our TV guide and don't even bother saving it from the Sunday paper anymore. Stock quotes? Why does the newspaper even bother. And I'm all caught up on sports the night before I get the paper as well.
I am seriously considering cancelling the newspaper, except it is really the only good source of very local news. I find that a few casual minutes of browsing every couple of hours keeps me infinitely more informed than most.
I feel out of touch when I do not have decent Internet access. I get frustrated when I see people sitting around debating some fact (news, gossip, celebrities, sports...) and just want to drop some Cat5 wherever I am so we can hook up and resolve the issue immediately.
The weird thing is that I think I have good intuition about reliability of sources, etc. And I have proven this to be true over time. However, I notice that many, many people are not very good at this skill and end up getting hood-winked pretty easy by junk they read on the Internet.
The inherent naivete of the masses is the Achilles heal of the Internet becoming THE source of all info.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
The Internet (well, the web in particular) is a fine tool for quick research, and has supplanted dead-tree media for me in that regard. No longer do I have to go down to the local library to look up a quick fact, or have a huge pile of reference books next to me with well worn indices. The true strength of the web lies in search engines, which provide an index to essentially every written work on it.
/random-access/ media yet developed, but is lacking for long serial accesses.
Similarly, it's supplanted making phone calls or poring through paper records to get service from another party. There are no more hold times for customer service reps or having to wait for business hours to get information. The computer is there, 24 hours a day.
The one thing that it hasn't supplanted, and I doubt that it will for a while, are long writings. If I want to read a book, rather than use it as a reference, far better to have it in print form where I can carry it with me anywhere and read it on something other than a computer screen. In short, the Internet is probably the best
I think overreliance on the Internet for information is why so many tech stocks bubbled and why so many techies are so insensitive to the effects of technology on people, as well as a sort of social darwinist ideology that the free market correlates perfectly with ability (even at the same time as M$ is bashed albeit often for anti-free market principles) or with public taste. If you don't see it on the screen, it doesn't happen.
That and getting information from games like SimCity (software is the cleanest and highest value of all industries) and Civilization (limited liability is an important moment of progress). The general conclusion is that corporate expansion and economic growth means greater efficiency, which is the way that all people become better off. This seems so self evident based on most of the information you get from the Internet that as soon as I write it I realize that the mere questioning of it will seem absurd to most people. The fact that the vast majority of people in human history did not believe this to be true is something you would have very little indication of from the informatoin available from the Internet. That is to say that the Internet is suffused with a Taylorist, efficiency based ideology.
This is just as true for my work, as a research scientist, as for general information and news. There has always been one large university library or another within two minutes walk of my office but over the last five years I could count the number of times I have been in it on my hands. Most of the time if I can't download a paper off the web I will just give up and decide it isn't worth reading. After all in the half hour it would take to walk over to the library, search through the journals, read the paper and walk back I could download, print out and skim through a dozen other papers.
It isn't just speed of access either. If I want a copy of a paper journal article I have to muck around with photocopying etc. where as for an electronic article I can download a pdf in seconds and if I want a hard copy I can print it any time I want. Of course there is always the odd really annoying case where there is some data I must have but its only in a table in a 20 year old paper in an obscure hardcopy only journal. That is when you have to resort to scanners and crappy OCR software but again it isn't actually of any use until it is in electronic form.
However on a more serious note there is such a vast amount of stuff, like catalogues of 100's of millions of objects that was just impossible before computers and only really useful using the internet. In some way it is making people lazy but the advantages are just so huge that they out weigh any disadvantages. We have so much data now that there are huge advances to be made just by finding better ways to sort and correlate it (data mining etc.).
On the news front the effect of the internet is just as profound. Not so much in speed as in variety of topics and points of view. Potentially everyone can be a journalist and contribute. Where things are lacking are in the searching and filtering aspects? The infomation may be there but even with Google it can be hard to find. Sites such as Slashdot in a way try to fill this niche but obviously there is only so much news they can cover.
What is really needed is some sort of distributed and semi(or fully)-automated system where good sources that individuals find can be distributed to everyone who whats them. It would be best implimented as some sort of web of trust where you would select a number of individuals whose opinions you trust and base on their recommendations and those of people they trust etc. new sources would be suggested to you which you can then rate etc.
Reference librarians are one of the finest research resources available in the US.
My degrees are in hard science (chemistry, physiology) and law and I could never have completed my undergrad or grad degrees without the assistance of these professionals.
When I'm faced with difficult legal issues I'll ask the reference librarian BEFORE I start to avoid wasting time. I know that I talk wth librarians more than just about any other professional and they are invaluable.
As I said in the subject line: librarians are the original database managers. Dewey is dead and the OCLC / Library of Congress rule - but it takes a professional only a few minutes to narrow my searches where I might well have spent hours getting to the same place.
Quick: find me authority for the legal proposition that an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the material stored on a computer used in the workplace - and, while you're at it find me authority for the rights to the data where the original computer used in the workplace was purchased by the employee but the data from the first machine has been transferred through three upgrades to the employer-owned computer. Let's add a dollop of employer policy that they recognize certain rights in the employee's work - and add that the employee is a public-sector employee with tenure.
Find that --- good luck on the web.