Information and the Internet

2011-01-03

I use the internet for so many things that I find myself believing that the internet has the best information about nearly everything. If I'm looking for an image, I'll search the internet. If I'm looking for an explanation about math or physics, I'll search the internet. If I want to know about something that happened in history, I'll search the internet. Certainly, the internet is often a really great source of information.

But I'm realizing more and more that the internet is quite limited for many types of information. Images are one of the weakest aspect of the internet. The quality of search results for images is often incredibly poor and homogeneous. Take a look through books or image archives at your local library or museum and you will find many wonderful and valuable images that you cannot find on the internet. The selection will likely far surpass what is online. Really, go try it.

Like traditional sources of information, the internet has a lot of poorly organized or incorrect information. The internet has correct and organized information too. But information on the internet usually comes in separate disconnected bits. Books on the other hand usual attempt to relate many different data and arguments as a coherent whole to the reader, which can be immensely valuable.

The internet lacks many important historic sources of information. Services like Google Scholar and Google Books have helped bring older (but not necessarily less relevant today) sources of information to the internet, but still have a very long way to go.

Resources are carefully organized in library and museum catalogs by trained archivers. in contrast, the internet largely relies on computer algorithms to guess at how to best catalog information. For this reason, internet searches might not return as good a selection of materials.

Living in wealthy (by world standards) urban places, it's easy to forget that 2/3 or the world population doesn't have access to a computer or the internet. Even in wealthy countries, many people, especially the poor and older people, are not connected to the internet or use it rarely. Further, until recently, publishing to the internet required either substantial technical ability or enough money to hire a web-developer. In short, the internet is visible to only 1/3 of all people. A smaller minority have a voice on the internet. A much smaller minority have a voice on the internet if we count out social networking like Facebook. Of course, the same issues of accessibility can largely be said about traditional forms of media, although most are significantly more affordable.

Online job postings have made finder certain jobs opportunities much easier. But those posting also subsequently become more competitive. We might also forget that not all job opportunities are posted on the online. Whether looking for work in a restaurant, an office, or a university, a lot of hiring happens in only in person. Some jobs are created simply because someone looking for work personally makes a proposal and the employer agrees.

Lastly, the experience of using is the internet is vastly different than the experience of searching through physical media for information. Last year, while in graduate school, I started to notice that I'd often search the internet rather than physically opening a book (on the bookshelf next to me) and physically flipping through the pages to find the information I was looking for. I realized that searching the internet was often slower and often yielded lower quality information that the books I had. The internet seems so easy, but its not necessarily easier or more efficient. It's just really really physically passive. One simply stares at the screen and wiggles ones hands and fingers on a keyboard and mouse, without moving the rest of the body. At least for me, not physically moving is really addicting, but also really gross and does not promote productive work or thinking. I really like the physical experience of talking to people or walking around a library.

The internet is new. It's largely about popularity, marketing, and commerce. For many things, there's simply a lot of homogeneous, poorly presented, and redundant information. Non-internet sources are still vastly important. We need to remind ourselves to sometimes take a break from using our computers, to go read an old book, to look through archives at the library, or talk to another human. You might be surprised at what you can learn.