07-23-2004, 07:38 PM
So, is the net still the "Information Superhighway" that will make us all informed beings, or is it an accident saturated, hopelessly gridlocked, tangle of paths leading to nowhere of interest?
It's somewhere in between. At least in our corner of the world, people's interest level is often the limiting factor in their pursuit of knowledge, rather than access or learning capacity. I think that was true before the internet days, so the internet could only be evolutionary rather than revolutionary in terms of building an educated populace. The libraries have been there, and really are not too inconvenient, but only those who have enough interest in the specific information are going to use the resources available. I suspect the same thing could be said in most countries where internet access is now widely available.
The internet leads to many places of interest, but one man's interest is another man's tripe. The key, then, is to be able to refine methods to cut through all the tripe that someone else apparently thought was worth putting on a {website, email, listserve, etc}. Our searching capability needs to be able to keep up with the pace at which the information swarm grows. The system is still working at this point, but it could certainly be better. The google-style search engine was built for a much smaller information system than the one it is now asked to navigate, but I'm confident that it will be replaced in time with something more up to the task. Of course that is only one way out of many to find what you are looking for. This site started with a set of useful, related links, and I notice that many people use the posters of this forum as a portal to find useful sites for just about anything.
It's somewhere in between. At least in our corner of the world, people's interest level is often the limiting factor in their pursuit of knowledge, rather than access or learning capacity. I think that was true before the internet days, so the internet could only be evolutionary rather than revolutionary in terms of building an educated populace. The libraries have been there, and really are not too inconvenient, but only those who have enough interest in the specific information are going to use the resources available. I suspect the same thing could be said in most countries where internet access is now widely available.
The internet leads to many places of interest, but one man's interest is another man's tripe. The key, then, is to be able to refine methods to cut through all the tripe that someone else apparently thought was worth putting on a {website, email, listserve, etc}. Our searching capability needs to be able to keep up with the pace at which the information swarm grows. The system is still working at this point, but it could certainly be better. The google-style search engine was built for a much smaller information system than the one it is now asked to navigate, but I'm confident that it will be replaced in time with something more up to the task. Of course that is only one way out of many to find what you are looking for. This site started with a set of useful, related links, and I notice that many people use the posters of this forum as a portal to find useful sites for just about anything.