At the time, the Net wasn't the finely polished tech superpower it is now, it was a bit ragged and had more of a Wild West feel to it. I assume that the fears were founded in the belief that information pulled from its pages wasn't necessarily on the level and were prone to a "here today, gone tomorrow" rule.It wasn't uncommon for students who came to the writing lab where I worked to have printed copies of the cited pages as backup in case a site went down, went bust or wasn't easily accessed by the faculty. In some cases, that was just the norm for the professors as they tried to rein in the new technology.
While the mild hysteria surrounding the Internet has ebbed a bit, there are still plenty of shortcomings to address. Wired has a good culture review this month addressing the assertions that the Net makes us dumber, citing the history of new ideas and technologies as precedent.
On the contrary: The explosion of knowledge represented by the Internet and abetted by all sorts of digital technologies makes us more productive and gives us the opportunity to become smarter, not dumber. Think of Wikipedia and its emergent spinoffs, like Wiktionary. Imperfect as they may be, the collective brainpower contained within these kinds of sites — and the hunger for learning and accurate information they represent — is something human history has never known before. (Even Encyclopedia Britannica will soon be accepting user contributions.) Or consider the Public Library of Science: By breaking the publishing industry's choke hold on the circulation of scientific information, this powerful online resource arms scientists and the masses alike with the same data, accelerating new discoveries and breakthroughs. Not exactly the kind of effect one would expect from a technology that's threatening to turn us into philistines.
That's not what worries me, though.
It's not the anonymous nature of posting, not the deliberate misinformation that's placed into the data stream, nor the need to strike first with breaking, though incomplete news that clouds the issues for readers.
It's the tendency for the Web to cultivate echo chambers where all the common reader gets is affirmations of their previously held notions. That sort of informational stagnation can't be good for anyone.
While newspaper readers have always been subject to the real and perceived biases of their hometown newspaper - the Chicago Tribune essentially owned up to a shortcoming in their coverage of the 1968 Democratic riots in a special Sunday feature looking back 40 years later - it's magnified exponentially with online content.
Take Frank's example from last week where he wrote of his daily news intake in the form of two papers on a train ride. On any given week, he probably jumps on the sports section first and works his way back out through Metro and on to National and World news. Some days the train runs on time and he misses a story here or there and some days the train takes forever and in order to keep boredom at bay, he digs a little deeper into stories he'd normally skip.
In either case, he's more likely to see at least a headline that he'd miss completely with online content. My point is that with traditional newspapers, the readers are exposed to more things outside of their normal sphere of interests.
In contrast, my morning routine begins with three pages loading on my laptop - Boston Dirt Dogs, Deadspin and my fantasy baseball league (for the record I totally wanted to fudge my homepages to make me look cooler). From there I expand out, depending on when I need to be at work, but there are many mornings that I could completely miss news on the scale of another Chernobyl because my routine doesn't call for the Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle or other newspapers unless I have enough time.
Compounding the problem is the need to streamline content to avoid overwhelming the reader, which forces newspapers to offer a handful of the freshest content on the home page, making some of the second-tier stories hard to find and off the reader's radar.
Back to Frank, he would see references to conflict in some small island nation well before they become front page news and I would catch on.
All of this is predicated on the idea that the sites we're visiting have that content available in the first place, hence the echo chamber effect. To be completely honest, there's not a lot of room for the opposing viewpoint in a traditional web surfing session.
It's obviously not a lack of available content - as evidenced by my Google reader which is currently busting at the seams - but I think most of us have hit a point where we just can't physically put our eyeballs on even a fraction of the information that comes our way online.
Instead, we rely on aggregation sites to keep us in the loop. God help us if those gatekeepers fall behind or start rejecting stories outright because of personal or organizational blind spots.
It's an interesting paradox for me, where there is more information available and it's easier to access than at any point in human history, but the saturation point is miles beyond what even the most dedicated reader can sift through.
It's beautiful and a little heartbreaking to know that the truth is freely available to anyone in the world on virtually any event - especially with the explosion of citizen journalism - but the din of thousands of other stories make it impossible to find it in most cases.
I can only imagine the stories that would have been sent to all corners of the world from Poland in the late 1930s or the pictures that would have appeared from soldiers with digital point and shoot cameras from Robert E. Lee's army, had the same technology been in place.
The big question is what we would have accepted and what would have been written off as junk posted by alarmists and radicals.
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