Sunday, January 08, 2006

The internet is shit

The internet is shit:
"...I can name 20 people from my old school class who aren't in Google. I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling. I can go into a bar and hear stories Usenet hasn't come close to in its 22 years of waffle. 'Oh but what about the stuff you CAN get on the web?' the netheads say. But they're missing the point.

The internet is not the sole basis upon which you can determine existence. It sounds simple but people are starting to forget. If it doesn't have a website, that doesn't make something low quality. If you can't Google your blind date, that doesn't make them a freak. If one website says something about anything, it's more than likely pure invention and shouldn't be taken seriously. Checking your sources does not mean finding another website that says the same. Fiction is self-perpetuating.

...And then what? Then we can move on. If we truly understand that the internet is shit then maybe we'll go back to looking elsewhere to check our information instead of just Google. Maybe journalists will do proper research again. If we remember that the medium isn't the message then maybe we'll stop aimlessly surfing for something amusing when we could actually be doing something fun. And, crucially, if the internet is just seen as occasionally unavoidable, maybe those websites that give us something special will be all the more amazing for it."

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