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Treating the Web As an Archive
An anonymous reader sends a link to a blog post by David Eaves discussing how the ease of finding information on the web affects how we analyze history. "... nothing is different per se — the same old research methods will be used — but what if it is 10 times easier to do, 100 times faster and contains a million times the quantity of information? With the archives of newspapers, blogs and other websites readily available to be searched, the types of research once reserved for only the most diligent and patient might be more broadly accessible." As an example, he points to an almost 10-year-old article detailing the events surrounding the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which some believe was a significant contributing factor to the current financial crisis.
Yes theres alot of information on the internet, its easy and fast to find it. But its also easy and fast to find a great deal of crap on the internet that isnt actually of any use to you. Filtering the wheat from the chaff can often take as much or more effort as finding the information in the first place. How many times have you had to re-word your search phrase, try several search results, and use ctrl-f to actually select the usefull information from all the extra crap.
No, you can't believe everything, but if you check the sources you can classify it as being acceptably reliable or not.
The web contains a great deal of information but you still need a search engine to deal with it - like Google. Unfortunately - or luckily - Google does filter out some pages with insecure and/or inappropriate content. This is of course negative for some researchers but positive for most people on the net.
And it's never wrong to double-check the information provided. It may be correct, but there may be opposite views too.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Yes theres alot of information on the internet, its easy and fast to find it. But its also easy and fast to find a great deal of crap on the internet that isnt actually of any use to you. Filtering the wheat from the chaff can often take as much or more effort as finding the information in the first place. How many times have you had to re-word your search phrase, try several search results, and use ctrl-f to actually select the usefull information from all the extra crap.
However, it's part of the fun. When it takes three tries to actually find what I wanted, I felt like I did it, not the search engine on it's own. A silly sort of a man in the machine thing.
The power is YOURS!
Too bad it takes so long to read the article... (Not that long, just a few minutes of shock afterwards) Then your would see his premise. The web as an archive is only a small part. A bigger part is how journalism is changing to quick payoff, not truly investigative. (Verifiably true) And that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it (also true) and we did. And that this is not the machinations of one party but both. (Also provable)
Perhaps you should change that to "Don't believe something just because it was on the internet."
The problem is that this only works if the information is valuable enough for people to actually copy it. With by far the most information on the net, that just never happens. And even if you copied it, you don't have any way to check that its authentic and not a manipulated copy and neither do you have a way to keep your copy online for the general public, as DMCA takedown notices will make sure that the information can only be found in obscure places.
I think the biggest problem with the Internet is the lack of unalterable static publications. You don't publish a thing on the Internet and then move on. You publish it, apply some bug fixes later, alter this and that, move it over to a new framework years later and so on. Things on the Internet just aren't static enough for proper archival, webpages evolve over time and even if you would do daily backups of webpages, you would miss plenty things. Things might look different when there would be a way to directly access the databases driving the webpages, but most of the time thats not the case. Even popular "open" projects fail at this, Wikipedia for example has all the history of edits stored and viewable, but they don't have that for deleted articles, those are purged and unviewable by the general public.
"Spooky" would imply that there was some mystery to it. To anyone who was paying attention, it only required enough common sense to know that foxes shouldn't be allowed to guard henhouses. There wasn't any mystery.
Just like there wasn't much of a mystery about the lack of WMDs in Iraq before the war to anybody who was paying any attention at all to how the Carlyle Group and Halliburton's subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root were going to make hundreds of billions of dollars of profit from Cheney's unabashed manipulation of the intelligence coming out of the CIA:
http://www.counterpunch.org/shor0521.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold03202003.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/vips03152003.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern06272003.html
Amazing notion... money can corrupt?
Um, not.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
But I thought the Republicans were to blame for this economy
The repeal of Glass-Steagall was one of many pieces of de-regulation that lead to this mess. The loudest voices I hear championing the call for less regulation, smaller government, etc is the republican party. If you read the article the vast majority of the opposition came from the Democrats (with only 1 Republican Senator voting no). It was pretty weak opposition to be sure.
So sure, Democrats can share a lot of the blame here. But don't ignore the fact that Republicans are largely the ones pushing for de-regulation (many still want even MORE).
Anyway, I think the thing to take home from all this is not one party over another, but rather one set of ideas as being wrong. I always hear the main argument against regulation being "unintended consequences", like it's some kind of magical argument to wave over everything. What people seem to forget is that ANYTHING can have "unintended consequences", including doing nothing.
AccountKiller