Much material on the internet is of very high quality. As an example, Wikipedia is extremely impressive, and in fact seems to have eclipsed print encyclopedias not only in amount of content, but in accessibility. And it is generally trustworthy. But it is picking up an alarming amount of biographical information on individuals that are primarily important in their own minds. Obviously there is a tremendous amount of quality control involved with running businesses such as Amazon, or any other commercial enterprise that must deliver products on time in good shape for money. But even here, such things as supportive comments from users are questionable. As an example, new authors are smart enough to have their friends send five star raves to Amazon.
But problems abound due to such things as processing the sheer amount of material on the internet, intrusive and annoying ads that lie, and people who delight in hacking the system. I just received an excellent example of the latter yesterday, in the form of an e-mail seemingly from a good friend entitled “salutations”. Maybe you had the honor of receiving the same one. The message consisted of a link, and my friends often send me amusing links, so I opened it and it presented me with an extraordinarily repulsive and very long promotion for a new miracle diet. It was brilliantly designed to be almost impossible to get off of my computer. I finally was driven to restart the computer, only to be told the Firefox would not allow me to. Pulling the plug worked.
But I did not endure the entire message. It was babbling on as I pulled the plug. If it was a prank from my friend it was a very good one, in that I fell for it, but it was flawed because it lasted too long for me to realize it was a prank. I fear that it was actually an attempt to sell something, and unfortunately for the creator, I hated it so much I do not even remember the details of it. If the message was designed simply to annoy people, it was successful. It was not only an intrusive ad that lied, but clearly involved a hack that came up with my friend’s name and e-mail address, probably from a social network.
The major problem with internet quality in the long run is due to the interface between the amount of information on it and our limited brains. Many people seem to believe that their brain has been amazingly improved by having the material on the internet connected to it. But they do not allow for the amount of processing their brain must do to sort through the internet. The situation is way beyond drinking from a fire hose. Browsers and search engines are amazing, in that they instantly bring sites of interest to ones one’s attention, but they tend to drown one in them, and do not offer much help in evaluating the content in the sites.
As an example of a fire hose, no longer are book proposals necessarily sorted by people that we accept as experts before the decision is made to publish the book. The old system could be criticized because it was heavily influenced by profitability and the biases of those reviewing the proposals. But what are we to do with the hundreds of thousands (and increasing) self-published books each year, most with accompanying web sites and lists of raves? We are told of the astoundingly successful books that emerge from the pile. But whose comments do we believe? And since bookstores that made choices on which to stock and enabled browsing are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, do we try to browse hundreds of thousands of books on the internet? Give me a break! As Richard Saul Wurman pointed out in his Information Anxiety book years ago, information is data that can be used to accomplish something. Too much information on the internet is data that accomplishes nothing. And worrisomely enough, there is no motivation for anyone to delete it.
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