Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge?

serutan asks: "How much do you rely on the Internet for information? Since getting online 7 or 8 years ago, I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information, to the point where they've pretty much disappeared from my life. I'm a geek, but at age 49 not exactly a child of the Information Age. I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life. I still read fiction in book form, but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject."

Dead trees are still the way to be

For news, and timely information certainly the internet is the place I turn. The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported [barnesandnoble.com] that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information. Besides, I don't really know exactly what I get out of keeping up with how many people were murdered or died in fires in the tri-state NY metro area (there is a LOT of that on the news). So, I've just stopped watching. I was never much of a newspaper reader, but of course there is always the New York Times [nytimes.com] and many other newspapers that bring the information to you with a nice bow on it so you don't have to go scouring elsewhere. But if scouring is your style and you are a real information junky, the scouring certainly isn't that hard.

But if I am going to learn anything in-depth certainly books -dead tree media- is the way to be. My upper limit of reading an article on the crt is about 10 pages. Your mileage will vary there, of course it's highly individual. But maybe that's why places where the information is in digested [slashdot.org] for you allowing you to scan many stories at once and sample them all, because lengthy readings on a computer monitor are more tedious than kicking back and reading a book.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

Exactly. For quick, one-off type stuff the Interweb can't be beat. I have no idea how I ever planned a vacation, found a movie, got directions, bought airline tickets, or hooked up with others who share my interests before the internet. On the other hand, I can only read so many 10 page Wired articles before I just want to buy a book.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

Well... isn't that really what the internet was made for? To be a network of information? Then when it was put into the public... it was made to be a place where anyone could post anything about anything. The fact that it is now such a huge source of information (and bullsh*t) is a sign of its success. I mean.. who cares who makes money on the 'net. Although I wouldn't mind if I did. ;-) But it is the fact that you can get all the legitimate information you want AND get all the crap you could ever want that makes the 'net such a good place.

Yay.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

I can certainly agree with the parent poster's opinion. Dead trees for in-depth knowledge.

However, I like to take it a step further. I use the Internet to choose which books to read!

An example, recently I decided to participate in the 'Employee Stock Purchasing' program where I work. After a few years of business courses, I still feel like a n00b when it comes to trading stocks, so I decided to buy some books on the basics of stock trading.

Rather than go straight to Barnes and Noble, I went to Amazon.com and read up on the customer reviews of different choices. I knew Amazon reviews can easily be skewed, but rather than just look at the overall rating, I actually read the reviews to see what people are saying. By taking the step to read the reviews, usually you can pick out the bull shiite canned reviews.

I ended up with a couple of books I decided to buy. I then headed to the book store with a list so that I could get one last look/see before plunking down my cash.

When I got home last night, I was very happy with my purchases. I usually perform the same process when picking books on just about any topic, especially development (my trade).

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

In total agreement, I've also seems that with the Barnes and Noble, brick and mortar edition, that came about contemporaneously with the internet, the dead tree vendors have either completely disappeared or become absolutely piss-poor, filled with nothing but massive stacks of fluff. On the other hand, the on-line versions of even the most sterile retail bookstores like B&N have available an enormous amount of new books in the relatively esoteric corners of specialized fields.

As for finding information online, it more often than not takes an informed researcher who knows the physical location of the appropriate repositories as well as the biases of those sources to dig up high-quality information over the net that may or may not even be possible to search for via any general search engine. I've seen far too many people, certainly first-year university students, who when asked for "research" to back up assumptions respond with nothing more than:

http://www.google.com/search?q=high+quality+info rm ation

Librarians do a good job of debunking that idea, but sadly, post-Google, I don't think most people see, much less speak, to librarians even once a year anymore, much the way they don't think a securities analyst is of any use when they have E-Trade.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

I've been in several classes at my school [wpi.edu] that require research projects of one sort or another. If the professor thinks it's important enough, he takes a day off so a librarian can come in and teach us the basics of researching. The major topic is how to find stuff on the web (including an overview of the various paid databases the school has access to), and how to know if you can trust the info when you find it.

Most of this I had already learned in highschool, but there were certainly people in those classes who were clueless when it came to doing any kind of real research.

Librarians - the original database managers

Reference librarians are one of the finest research resources available in the US.

My degrees are in hard science (chemistry, physiology) and law and I could never have completed my undergrad or grad degrees without the assistance of these professionals.

When I'm faced with difficult legal issues I'll ask the reference librarian BEFORE I start to avoid wasting time. I know that I talk wth librarians more than just about any other professional and they are invaluable.

As I said in the subject line: librarians are the original database managers. Dewey is dead and the OCLC / Library of Congress rule - but it takes a professional only a few minutes to narrow my searches where I might well have spent hours getting to the same place.

Quick: find me authority for the legal proposition that an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the material stored on a computer used in the workplace - and, while you're at it find me authority for the rights to the data where the original computer used in the workplace was purchased by the employee but the data from the first machine has been transferred through three upgrades to the employer-owned computer. Let's add a dollop of employer policy that they recognize certain rights in the employee's work - and add that the employee is a public-sector employee with tenure.

Find that --- good luck on the web.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

For research in physics the internet is definitely the way to go. Services such as Nuclear Science References and the National Nuclear Data Center make it easy to find references for particular subjects. At the same time major journals such as those published by Physical Reveiw/APS and those published by Elsiver are avalible online. If you have a subscription (or at least your university/lab does), you can frequently find articles which are not avalible in "dead tree" format. For example, Physical Reveiw has nearly (if not all) of its archives online.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

Another invaluable resource for physics and some other hard sciences (I believe, as I only have first hand experience with physics) is The Web of Science [isinet.com] (yes sort of a lame name), which is so superior to SCIDEX indicies it makes them almost laughable.

Unfortunately this service comes at a very steep price from what I've been told, and as such is only available to institutions willing to cover that cost (though most moderate sized and larger universities will have a subscription).

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

I agree, we're still along way off from completely replacing printed media. I buy a newspaper most days of the week to read during lunch. In the 45 or so minutes I have to read the paper, I cover the opinion columns, comics, advice columnists, and more...

except for the "news" stories. It's very disheartening to look through a newspaper at headline after headline of stuff you read about yesterday on the 'net.

So for me, I don't look for "news" anywhere but on the 'net...but there's still plenty out there to read that you won't necessarily (or easily) find online.

William

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

Dead Trees are NOT just the way to be... ...at least in the medical professions.

Several medical studies have shown that physicians that use medical online databases such as UpToDate [uptodate.com], provide better patient care. The medical literature changes so quickly that many books are outdated before they are released to the public.

In residency it was amazing how many "rare" diagnoses were made based on the ability to quickly look up a condition or situation on an online database. Plus, if you can't find it in uptodate or similar online consult references, you can always access PUBMED [nih.gov] and review all the medical journals for the latest and greatest information on a disease process.

If you are a patient, you want your doctor going to the online databases and journals for information...

Davak

Re:Corrupt Health Care System

I get the impression you don't work in the health care industry. As someone who does work for a city and county run hospital in a very large metropolitan area, I can tell you that your lines about hospitals operating with "maybe 20% the number of doctors they currently employ" is a big hunking wad of crap.

If you actually visit a hospital and work with doctors and nurses on a daily basis, you will see that those who are not currently doing pure research work, but instead clinical work, are constantly in contact with patients or administering the programs they work with. Doctors and nurses are acutely involved in the care of patients spend a huge amount of time with them. Having one doctor take on five times as many patients is not going to work simply because he has access to an online database. In fact, there has been research done, especially after mortality rates increase in individual hospitals in an effort to improve the care given at those hospitals, which shows that as the number of patients each nurse is responsible for increases, the mortality rate increases by double-digit percentages, especially in ICUs.

You seem to be greatly confused about just how weighed down with information doctors and nurses are; doctors, for one, go to school that long for a reason. The human body is a very large and complex set of systems that isn't easily mastered. It's simple to sit at a terminal and type in a list of symptoms; it's quite another thing to know how the diagnosis pertains to the patient, whether or not the diagnosis is correct, and how the treatment will affect the patient. Doctors aren't simple databases that accept symptoms and wads of cash as an input and spit out diagnoses and treatments.

You betray your own argument with this line, as well:

Many hospitals are owned by corporations and they will not be able to resist moving to technology to increase their bottom line, much to the dismay of the AMA and medical schools

By removing doctors to increase their bottom line, wouldn't they then still be charging the same, or at least a similar, amount? You state that "technology," this magical panacea, will cause the demand for doctors to go down (wrong, because care-provider to patient ratios are definitely linked to the health of patients), and again cause the salaries for existing doctors to go down (in some weird scenario of yours, because it seems to me that when a field becomes more specialized, the salaries of the specialists goes up), which will drive down the demand for medical education (which doesn't make sense either because of the above and because people enter health care, every now and then, out of the pure pleasure of helping others, not out of obligation), which will drive down the price (which again doesn't make sense because universities are either private or public: public tuition rates generally do not fluctuate in that manner, and private schools are going to charge private school costs, the same as they always have; you don't think that Art History majors pay significantly less than Biology/Pre-Med majors at private schools, do you? Why then would the cost of post-grad private education go down?). If what you say is true and those costs do go down and the hospitals do remove doctors, how can they increase their bottom line by any way except charging more than the care costs?

It seems to me that what you're saying is it's the insurance companies and the health care institutions that are over-charging and that they will continue to do that no matter what happens with the number of docs out there. So who's to blame? The doctor who puts in 80 hour weeks and has to juggle 20 patients a day, and as a reward for improving the health of people is given the opportunity to own a Porsche, or the executive of a health insurance company who said little Jimmy couldn't get the liver transplant he needs to survive because mommy's health plan doesn't cover that, and is given the opportunity to own a Porshe a

Re:Corrupt Health Care System

I agree that healthcare is astronomically expensive, but these days, it's not doctors making it that way.

A BIG part of the problem is actually the legal system. The doctor charges a lot because he has to pay more than many people make a year in malpractice insurance.

Then there's the way that every single thing costs 5 to 10 times as much as it should because it is a 'medical supply' and so possibly the target of litigation. The doctor has to use those (and pass the high cost on) since otherwise, some lawyer will pounce on that, even if it couldn't possibly be related to a bad patient outcome.

Then, of course, there's the medications themselves, and the hospital (which, in turn costs so much because it also has to carry a heavy insurance policy) and because it has to treat patients who can't pay. The latter should be handled by a national healthcare system, but instead the polititians choose to hide the cost through unfunded mandates.

Finally, there's the need to run every test in the book just to make sure there's no way for a lawyer to claim negligence.

In turn, the insurance is outrageously expensive because of the considerable risks and the staggering payouts.

The net result is that some people get really over the top medical care, and the rest get none at all. There is no middle ground, and there can't be as long as the current legal climate prevails.

One thing that might help would be if the doctor didn't have to hire a small army of administrators just to handle the insurance claim forms.

Eliminating the doctor won't help. Much of the doctor's fee savings will be absorbed elsewhere in the system to pay for the extra insurance coverage needed now that the doctor's policy isn't there to pay out.

Re:Corrupt Health Care System

"Now if only technology could some how re-direct pharmaceutical r&d into actually curing diseases (when was the last time that happened, like 50 years ago?)"

That's a load of crap, troll. Think for just a second and you'll realize this statement is horribly wrong, and so are all the comedians and political pundits that like to spout if off. The reason few diseases are "cured" is because the vast majority of diseases without a cure already are viruses. A massive number of diseases were cured when antibiotics were developed, but that doesnt help against viruses. Killing a virus is an order of magnitude harder. Furthermore prescription drugs can only be patented for a relatively short time (why we have generic drugs). The first company to come up with a way to reliably cure viruses stands to make millions more then they could ever hope in treatment drugs. Treatments which cost millions to develop are often replaced by new more effective treatments in short order. If they released a safe, effective cure, the market for it would be huge, and more benefitial then blowing billions to be one of a hundred potential treatments. As for vaccines, imagine how much money would be made from holding the patent for the HIV vaccine? It'd be like a license to print money. The real reason drugs cost so much is the massive R+D costs, plus the massive FDA certification costs, plus the often large production costs (Many new drugs are extremely volatile and difficult to produce in mass), plus the need to recoup all those costs in the short period in which they are the preferred treatment. Drug companies aren't saints by any means, but it is just good business sense for them to develop and release the best medicines within reach of our technology.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

I'd rather read large chunks of info in the form of a book but unfortunately books are always out-of-date and tend to be dumbed down. It's hard to find anything in-depth about the latest technology. By the time it reaches being a book I already know the information so it isn't worth reading the book.

If they'd perfect those book printers they were working on that'd be great. To just be able to go into a bookstore and load the PDF or whatever and have a real book come out would be perfect.

Even then though I'd still use the electronic form for a reference just because it's so much easier to look things up with a computer.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

I still find myself getting most of my in-depth information from the printed page, but in the form of printed out pdf's of papers I download. I can walk out my lab door and be in one of the most comprehensive medical libraries in the nation in a less than 2 minute walk, with most of it spent waiting for an elevator to get downstairs, but I still find myself looking for online info. It is certainly where I do the searches. I can't remember the last time I used the card catalogs at the library for anything other than a place to set my notebook.

It gets addictive. There are times when I've found myself spending 15 or 20 minutes searching for a source of a pdf of a rare or old paper online, when I could have gotten the paper from the library 3 times over.

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

Whoever it was that said "you cant grep a dead tree" was dead-on, in my opinion. I'm 24 and have stumbled through maybe 1/4 of a college education, so take that to mean I have no well defined research skills. As such, if I can't google for the information I want, then it doesnt exist to me. My eyes are probably 3/4 shot by this point, but I'll (not gladly) sit here reading on the crt for 8 to 10 hours, scattered with hefty half hour breaks throughout. To me, the web/whatever will be ready for prime time officially when the default assumption is that the dead tree version of whatever has already been converted to digital. With google, I get my instant gratification. As long as I can remember the slightest detail to whatever it is I am trying to remember, odds are severely in my favor I can filter out the noise until I have my answer. Last week I was able to google for a song we sang in 4th grade -- the lyrics were all Hewbrew and I was able to find the lyrics phonetically! I agree that all the major news sources seem very biased. That's why I like slashdot, which still has the sketch factor of a corporate bias. My take on it, the more typos and cursing, the closer you are to the truth :D

Re:Dead trees are still the way to be

As such, if I can't google for the information I want, then it doesnt exist to me.

Which is sad, because that means you are willingly shutting yourself off from 90% of the information available.

With google, I get my instant gratification. As long as I can remember the slightest detail to whatever it is I am trying to remember, odds are severely in my favor I can filter out the noise until I have my answer.

I know you young folk might find it hard to believe, but there is a *lot* of stuff not available on the web. (case in point: Today I was researching some detailed information about the history of SLBM guidance systems and the decision to use stellar intertial vice straight inertial. Almost nothing on the web about it, yet one of my dead tree books dedicated a whole *chapter* to the topic.)

Try a Corporate News Experiment:

The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information.

Agreed. Here is an interesting experiment to try. Find a major news story, preferably on Iraq or Afganistan. (It can be something else, but Iraq and Afganistan will yield more results.)

Check the story first on CNN

Then check the subtle changes in perception on the same story from these sites:

BBC NEWS [bbc.co.uk]
Globe and Mail [globeandmail.com]

Then note the radically different opinions on:

Aljazeera [aljazeera.net]
Antiwar [antiwar.com]

Note, I am not asking you to agree with any of the above opinions, or websites. Just begin to notice the different perceptions you can gain insight to on news stories on the net. This kind of insight cannot be gathered by watching local news, like NBC, CBS, or even the "most trusted" views of CNN.

Yes

But I'm always wrong.

I don't know.

Google says: Your search - "is the internet my source of knowledge?" - did not match any documents.

Google

how many of us could replace the word "Internet" in this posting with "Google"?

Re:Google

They aren't the same thing? :)

Here's a

great website for information [infoplease.com]

Resources

I use the internet for a lot of fact lookups. i.e. how do I setup so and so. Also for news headlines its a handy resources but I'm carful about opinion.s IMHO ( :) ) one of the strenghts + weakness of the internet is that anyone can put up information about anything. How do you check they are right?

This is why I still find resources such as paper encylopidias or the digtal counterparts a better resource. Also for some things such as book it is better to have paperback as you can sit out in the sun and enjoy life rather than being stuck in front of a computer screen

Rus

Agreed

I am 31 and have spent most of my life on computers. I use the internet as almost my sole source of information. I haven't been to a library in years...
But I also find the internet to be a better source of information. I can read multiple opinions, thoughts, and comments on most any topic. This gives me a better grasp of the situation then reading one book at a time.
I am not worried about this fact, I just see it as a newer way of gathering information.
-R

Around my house...

...we don't call it "the Internet" anymore.

We refer to it as "the source of all Truth and Knowledge." (I am not making this up.)

We never use the phone book... We never call anyone to make travel arrangements... We never write checks and mail them to pay bills...

I often wonder how anybody did anything prior to the advent of "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."

Re:Around my house...

I often wonder how anybody did anything prior to the advent of "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."

They bought their porn at that seedy porn shop downtown.

Re:Around my house...

I always felt awkward buying porn at a store, and never mustered the courage to walk into a dedicated "Adult" establishment.

I don't like the "seediness" you mention... I mean, I'm a regular guy, not some prevert. I just like a little latex, and livestock from time to time.

I much prefer the current porn delivery method. ;)

Funny, we used to call it "The Net of 1,000 Lies."

Back in the day, at least.

The rumors of a thousand ill-informed people do not add up to the knowledge of a single well-informed person. So be careful to verify what you read before accepting it as Truth.

And never, never trust MapQuest.

Jon Acheson

Re:Funny, we used to call it "The Net of 1,000 Lie

I recall a time a friend was going to come visit me. I spoke to him on the phone, and started to give him directions from the main highway. It went thusly:

Me: Ok, take the HWY eastbound until you cross the toll bridge, then take the first exit and...

Him: No I looked it up on MapQuest.

Me: MapQuest has our area all screwed up, just write this down, take the first exit, go straight, take the second right and...

Him: nah, I already printed the maps out on mapquest

So, the day comes when he's coming over. I get a call..

Him: Hey, I can't find your house.

Me: Where are you?

Him: I'm at a WalMart

Me: WalMart? What city are you in?

Him: [name of city and closest street sign]

Me: Dude, you passed my street about 75 miles ago. Turn around, go back, take the last exit before the bridge and..

Him: No, that's wrong, MapQuest says..

Me: I FUCKING KNOW WHERE I LIVE!

Him: But but mapquest! ....

Though, as long as you stick to the more travelled areas, and get directions to businesses, MapQuest more or less comes through. It's just the rural and residential streets it sucks at...

Re:Around my house...

Around my house we don't call it "the Internet" anymore. We refer to it as "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."

Interesting - we are your neighbors and refer to your house as "the Dwelling of Eternal Dorkitude".

Dictionary-less

Yes, definitely. I just started college, and my roommate brought a dictionary with him. I stopped and realized that I'd never even considered bringing a dictionary or thesaurus with me because I've got M-W.com [m-w.com] and even a second opinion with Dictionary.com [dictionary.com], and then some non-words that should be at PseudoDictionary.com [pseudodictionary.com]. It simply never occurred to me to bring a hard copy of a dictionary, because I've grown so dependent on those websites.

As far as encyclopedias go, Google [google.com] has basically redefined the concept of an encyclopedia for me. With a little query-practice one can find a huge number of resources for just about anything imaginable. Google's almost like an encyclopedia to a library of encyclopedias.

Later,
Patrick

Well, It all depends.

If I want deep historical data, the internet isnt the place I look for it. If I want a "google" on something I'm unfamiliar with, then yeah, the internet is all I need.

I think the real issue here should be "Why are we trying to sum up all the knowledge of a subject in one or two webpages?"

My last report came from 2 books and a video. No, I didn't have to use non-internet sources. But yeah, I chose to get concrete, in depth stuff that I could use.

hmmm.. to post anon or not to post anon.. oh well I dont care.

Definitely

I'm not even 20 yet, and we adopted the internet fairly early, so I've definitely grown up using it as an information source.

I was too young to be interested in watching the news or reading the paper when we got the internet, so when I finally became interested in news, the internet was right there.

News on TV, and in the paper especially, is just far too slow and outdated for me. Google News, /. and Fark are where I get my information about the world. Because of this, I never hear information about local happenings, but I live in a pretty boring city, so it's all good. Well, at least I think it's a boring city.. I don't really know...

A source, but not an EXCLUSIVE source.

I rely on the Net to provide me with a great amount of information, but I don't rely on it exclusively for any matters more important than just satisfying my curiosity.

As with other media, some Internet sources of information may be biased. Different websites may still rely on the same, possibly flawed, information. Others may intentionally attempt to spread false information.

And even when I can get accurate information, I may not be able to get all the data I need....or even if I can, I may not know exactly what to do with that information (think WebMD).

In short, the Net is a great tool for research but it is far from being a one-stop source of information. Thorough research will still require access to offline data in the form of subject matter experts and publications not available in electronic form.

Advantages and disadvantages

Online, I can get the news quicker than waiting for the news or the morning paper -- and better yet, I can compare it from several different sources (thanks, Google News [google.com]). I can find discussions which sometimes point me to additional sources. I can search for terms that I'm not familiar with. Plus, I'm on the computer eight hours every weekday, and the latest news is just a few keystrokes away.

On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website. (I live in Peoria, Illinois [pjstar.com] -- a city, but not a metropolis -- so the online news is only updated when the morning edition comes out.) It's also a little lacking when you're looking for non-contemporary topics -- the kind of thing that a good paper encyclopedia or the shelf at your local library gives you more thoroughly, because that kind of research costs money and most of the Internet is still free. More importantly, information online is often generalized and condensed, so if you're looking for in-depth facts on a particular topic, you usually need a book on just that one topic.

In short, information on the Internet is quick and broad, but rarely very deep or complete. A good trade-off in many cases, but certainly not all of them.

Absolutely. Yes!

Yes. I have done this as well. I'm bored by the morning newspaper now. I already have read all the stories the day before on various news Web pages. We use the Internet as our TV guide and don't even bother saving it from the Sunday paper anymore. Stock quotes? Why does the newspaper even bother. And I'm all caught up on sports the night before I get the paper as well.

I am seriously considering cancelling the newspaper, except it is really the only good source of very local news. I find that a few casual minutes of browsing every couple of hours keeps me infinitely more informed than most.

I feel out of touch when I do not have decent Internet access. I get frustrated when I see people sitting around debating some fact (news, gossip, celebrities, sports...) and just want to drop some Cat5 wherever I am so we can hook up and resolve the issue immediately.

The weird thing is that I think I have good intuition about reliability of sources, etc. And I have proven this to be true over time. However, I notice that many, many people are not very good at this skill and end up getting hood-winked pretty easy by junk they read on the Internet.

The inherent naivete of the masses is the Achilles heal of the Internet becoming THE source of all info.

Internet is my primary source

The Internet is my primary source of knowledge, and has been since I was in high school. The school never ended up teaching much that was relevant to.. oh.. anything, and the Internet had tons of freely available knowledge to eat up.

I still rely on the Internet, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to do so as Google is the best search engine, and has become barely useful any more due to the search engine spammers.

I do think that a good search engine is key to extracting information from the Internet, and I look forward to a day when we once again have a good search engine.

Incredible for research

The Internet (well, the web in particular) is a fine tool for quick research, and has supplanted dead-tree media for me in that regard. No longer do I have to go down to the local library to look up a quick fact, or have a huge pile of reference books next to me with well worn indices. The true strength of the web lies in search engines, which provide an index to essentially every written work on it.

Similarly, it's supplanted making phone calls or poring through paper records to get service from another party. There are no more hold times for customer service reps or having to wait for business hours to get information. The computer is there, 24 hours a day.

The one thing that it hasn't supplanted, and I doubt that it will for a while, are long writings. If I want to read a book, rather than use it as a reference, far better to have it in print form where I can carry it with me anywhere and read it on something other than a computer screen. In short, the Internet is probably the best /random-access/ media yet developed, but is lacking for long serial accesses.

Re:Incredible for research

There are great research options available on the Internet; the problem is that a lot of people think Google is one of them.

While it is useful for finding information, it is important that you realize the integrity of any source of information.

Yes, but not without it's limitations

The internet is a great wonderful thing....
I use it for the following:
- Yellow Pages
- Map to locations
- News
- Local Weather
- Learning new technology

One thing I've come across is that not all subjects are available in equal formats... meaning that I can find a pleuthra of info on programming in almost any particular language, but I find some difficult in finding that same kind of info about plants of woodworking. The more technical and closely related to computers the subject, the more I find. But as I go from away from computers, the less I find, and less consistant the quality.

It will still be some time to before we have wonderful resources for major subjects online.

Primary Source of News but Not the Rest

The big moments were nytimes.com and news.google.com. As you go back in time it gets harder and harder, however. If you want to learn about steelworkers in the 1890s, you're better off going to the library.

I think overreliance on the Internet for information is why so many tech stocks bubbled and why so many techies are so insensitive to the effects of technology on people, as well as a sort of social darwinist ideology that the free market correlates perfectly with ability (even at the same time as M$ is bashed albeit often for anti-free market principles) or with public taste. If you don't see it on the screen, it doesn't happen.

That and getting information from games like SimCity (software is the cleanest and highest value of all industries) and Civilization (limited liability is an important moment of progress). The general conclusion is that corporate expansion and economic growth means greater efficiency, which is the way that all people become better off. This seems so self evident based on most of the information you get from the Internet that as soon as I write it I realize that the mere questioning of it will seem absurd to most people. The fact that the vast majority of people in human history did not believe this to be true is something you would have very little indication of from the informatoin available from the Internet. That is to say that the Internet is suffused with a Taylorist, efficiency based ideology.

Internet?

Are you talking about the Web?

The Web cannot be beat for current events. It's also a great source for directory information: phone numbers, locations, maps, and the like. But it falls flat on its face for in-depth information, unless you're looking for computer and related geekery in all 31 flavors.

Are you talking about USENET?

Great place to find an expert. On anything. This expert may even take the time to talk to you. Since the advent of Google archiving, it's become easier to search newsgroups for back posts--and there is a *lot* of good data passing through USENET.

Are you talking about P2P?

Right now, it's all pr0n and thr33z. I'm not sure this is what you're talking about when you say "information."

Are you talking about subscription-based database and index services, like LEXIS-NEXIS, CompendexWeb, PUBMED, and WorldCat?

These are where the professional and research quality information is on the Internet. They are useful, but expensive, and chances are you don't have access unless you are at a university or a company that pays for a subscription.

Are you talking about intranets?

These can be a source of good information in large companies and organizations. NASA has an excellent one, some of which they mirror to the Web where it's available to all, but the really spiffy stuff is only available to employees.

So to answer your question, I use the Web to follow the news, USENET for hobby interests, P2P for pretty much nothing, databases and intranets for some professional work.

But nothing beats dead trees for in-depth information--if you can find where it's been published. I went to my thesis advisor to tell him I couldn't find a paper that had been published only in conference proceedings from the 80's (it's notoriously hard to get your hands on conference proceedings), only to have him root through a file cabinet and hand them to me. This was in 2002. Professors are scary.

-Carolyn

My work is the same

This is just as true for my work, as a research scientist, as for general information and news. There has always been one large university library or another within two minutes walk of my office but over the last five years I could count the number of times I have been in it on my hands. Most of the time if I can't download a paper off the web I will just give up and decide it isn't worth reading. After all in the half hour it would take to walk over to the library, search through the journals, read the paper and walk back I could download, print out and skim through a dozen other papers.

It isn't just speed of access either. If I want a copy of a paper journal article I have to muck around with photocopying etc. where as for an electronic article I can download a pdf in seconds and if I want a hard copy I can print it any time I want. Of course there is always the odd really annoying case where there is some data I must have but its only in a table in a 20 year old paper in an obscure hardcopy only journal. That is when you have to resort to scanners and crappy OCR software but again it isn't actually of any use until it is in electronic form.

However on a more serious note there is such a vast amount of stuff, like catalogues of 100's of millions of objects that was just impossible before computers and only really useful using the internet. In some way it is making people lazy but the advantages are just so huge that they out weigh any disadvantages. We have so much data now that there are huge advances to be made just by finding better ways to sort and correlate it (data mining etc.).

On the news front the effect of the internet is just as profound. Not so much in speed as in variety of topics and points of view. Potentially everyone can be a journalist and contribute. Where things are lacking are in the searching and filtering aspects? The infomation may be there but even with Google it can be hard to find. Sites such as Slashdot in a way try to fill this niche but obviously there is only so much news they can cover.

What is really needed is some sort of distributed and semi(or fully)-automated system where good sources that individuals find can be distributed to everyone who whats them. It would be best implimented as some sort of web of trust where you would select a number of individuals whose opinions you trust and base on their recommendations and those of people they trust etc. new sources would be suggested to you which you can then rate etc.

It's not just the info, it's integration...

I've been online since Delphi & MCIMail, The Well, AppleLink Personal Edition etc... I believed everything in "As We May Think" and in the Knowledge Navigator video(s).

Using OSX on a 'lowly' iBook 500 with a carefully cultivated suite of apps is getting close enough to the dream that I should stop dreaming and just revel in it. And get more done. Which I do.

It's not just the info at fingertips. I watched someone try to scan a book for a 60 year old article, then import it, try to OCR it and reformat it... nice, but it's on the web in text and I had it within seconds. Priceless.

I'ma teacher at a very non-traditional place with lots of need for proposals, classes, results, and lots of techie things happeneing anyway, but it's the everyday access that's needed, and the ability to do it all literally at your fingertips.

I can order the model rockets (in one typical case), check the weather for the best launch date, email all the parents to come see, fax the bus company to get the transportation, video and still photo the activities... create a summary of lessons that my students have done, download the stardust launch for them to see on a projection screen as part of class, prin their junior rocket scientist certificates, edit, compose and post their movies and pics to the web for all the parents to see, email parents or sms them or fax them to get all this done in the time it would take a staff of three twenty years ago.

could i just build the rockets,. launch the rockets and see how jazzed the kids were? sure. still do all that. plus add value to what the parents can get out of it too.

it's a faster more accessible source. i know i have the estes catalog around here somewhere, but where...

i know i have videos of other older launches, videodiscs of all of the apollo and shuttle test programs, but the batteries in the ldp remote are crusty, and well, this way all the kids can play the video to their heart's content...

i can send proposals as pdf attachments to email, submit all my nsf stuff online, if I don't know where I'm going this evening (vaguely know it's around yale somewhere) I jump to watson, get the address, see a map, add the location to my address book, sync my ipod before i leave and i'll get there one way or another. beats the big spiral bound map and hundreds of slips of paper i'd have carried around even 5 years ago.

i can do travel better. way better.

i can buy a car by driving around or going blind with classifieds in the local fish wrap

my wife and i can specify the house we want and get the info delivered to us without having to drive down roads nobody else drives down for days at a time trying to find that out of the way house or having to actually talk to a bevy of real estate agents ( i actually hear one of them refer to a old local place as an antique house - grrrrr... i prefer tocall them 'used houses' as in 'used cars' but don't get me started)

for that matter i can find out that a wedding can cost $1K or $100K and how to make it what we wanted, instead of taking someone's word on how much we should have spent.

ditto real estate. there's a wide range of what it will all cost when they fire the starter's pistol at the closing, and we know much more from the web - we could have just taken a single sources word for it, or bought a dozen books. an hour with safari and a broadband connection and we are much wiser. we hope.

i can get references to anything from various sources...

i can have my kids go research the mountains of little white lies us teachers have been spouting for years in the name of shorthand lessons... columbus, magellan, the pilgrims, abner doubleday, the wright brothers...

will i ever get rid of my books? never. ditto the back issues of bicycling or wired, my berke breathed paperbacks.

I'll always be able to put my hand on 'the compleat angler', 'a winter's tale'or the beaten copies of 'andromeda strain', 'banner in the sky', o

1984

Remeber in 1984 how it was somebody's job to go back and modify all public records of an old "inconvinient" fact. Just imagine being able to control dictionary.com / cnn and a few other heavily hit sites. You'll be able to remove any record that something existed.

Problem with Definitions

I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life.

Here you define dictionaries, encyclopedias, and similar sources for information to exist only in book form. My guess is that these days when you want to look up a word's meaning, you still use a dictionary, except that it's online. Perhaps there should be a pair of categories; one that includes dictionareies and encyclopedias, and one that includes the ways in which they are presented. Either way what I basically want to say to you is, "don't be such a technophobe."

My 0.02 Euros...

With around 425 replies so far (including trolls and flaimbait) I don't expect anyone to reade this, but I'm bored, so I'm going to write it anyway:

I've become *almost* entierly dependent on the internet for news and information. Everyday, there are about a dozen sites that I load up (including slashdot, google news, and my local news paper's site) to get my news. When I want to look up information, I always spend time wading through the internet, looking for it there.

I do, however, use real books for programming (O'Reilly mostly) and physics (my text books from college). I also tune into BBC World News every evening to get my overview of world news (and it doesn't hurt that anchor girl Mishal Husain is rather attractive). :)

Okay. I'm gonna go do something else now.

Yep - I'm 99% Internet for my news and information

Being a 32 year old "computer geek" myself, I'm also finding I use the Internet as almost my only source of information for most things.

I don't get the local newspaper, for example. I do occasionally peek at the Sunday paper when I visit my parents (mainly for the advertisements). I'm sure I do miss out on a lot of "local news", but honestly - the Internet makes me realize how unimportant most of that is anyway. The newspapers and TV stations have been brainwashing us into believing we need their "fix" of local information, or else we're going to fall behind. In reality, I think I'm spending my time more wisely keeping up with bills in Congress that might affect our privacy rights, change copyright/patent law, or what-have-you, than knowing which building downtown caught fire last night, or the fact that (as usual), someone was killed in a fatal car crash on one of our highways.

Even for such things as "how to" guides for home improvement, I find better, more relevant information on the net than I do in the $20-40 books on the subject.

I've really found the net useful for learning about problems with my car and truck, too. Most problems seem to be experienced by at least a handful of other people, who talk about them on Usenet discussion groups. I may not want to do the repairs myself, but at least I can get a real good idea of what's broken - and feel like I'm not getting ripped off when they diagnose it and quote me a repair cost.

For computer or electronics purchases, there's absolutely no better method of research! Just do a Google search for "product-name opinion" or "product-name review" and you'll get everything you need to know, just about every time.

books are still the best

I started on Usenet in 1991, and the web in 93 or 94. I've used the web heavily. I consider myself to be a bit of a pseudo-academic. Though for years I immersed myself in the Internet, I have steadily gained a new appreciation for print media.

Print media takes time to produce. Internet content takes little to produce. On average, analytic content found in print is better than web-only content. Raw data is different. For example, if you want economic data, there's little sense in waiting for the BLS report to be published. Just pull it off the web. If you want something that someone has spent time on, lingered over, then you want print media.

Eventually, you realize that the Internet's best feature is the ability to find basic info. Let's say you've never heard of something, like hysteresis. Search Google for it. Use another search engine. You'll quickly find basic information. You will learn that hysteresis is an economic phenomenona with certain details, etc, etc. You will have to look very hard to find much more than basic info, however.

Content on the Internet is a mile wide and an inch deep. It's a dictionary of everything. Yet, if you want something that is in-depth, there is no easy way to find it. If there were a search engine that would give you lots and lots of in-depth info on your search terms, that would be great. That's not what we have today. Today, all you can expect is basic info.

Furthermore, on the web, you have to go looking for opinions that are contrary to yours. You have to think, "Hmm, I believe that the minimum wage should be increased, so let me go find someone's essay that argues that it should not be raised." It is really difficult and counterintuitive to think that way all the time. As a result, you tend to visit web sites with content that you tend to already agree with. In this way, your intellectual experience is sub-optimal.

Books are different. When you open a new book, you don't know what you're going to get. When you walk through a library or a bookstore, you will find books that you've never heard of. Then you will pick them up and be surprised and often challenged.

In conclusion, the web is useful as a dictionary of everything. The web is not useful as an in-depth encyclopedia of everything. Books are still the best.