When ARPANET (the proto-internet) was created, it was mainly made for communication during the aftermath of a nuclear attack, it was also made to easily obtain information. While it’s debatable how effective that’s been over the years, I don’t think it’s an unpopular opinion to say that finding information on the internet has gotten so much worse.
Example 1: Type in any question on to google. Chances are, the first article you are going to get is a garbage article that starts off by telling you what you already know with a recap, but then afterwards padding everything out with fluff and just barely scratching the surface of the topic. That article was not made to help you, it was made to get revenue for some person.
Example 1a: You are hungry and looking for a recipe. The author really feels the need to waste your time by telling you about their life and you scroll with despair (and hunger) just looking for the ingredients.
Example 2: You look for a hobbyist forum on the internet. Since reddit has swallowed a good chunk of forums, chances are, your only hobbyist community is only on reddit. Let’s use the Sega Dreamcast as an example, though it has many good surviving forums elsewhere. When you go to the Sega Dreamcast subreddit, instead of posts about dreamcast hacking, homebrew, new releases, its games, a good majority of the posts are: “Look guys! I bought a Sega Dreamcast!”. Reddit intentionally and unintentionally by design is built to promote posts like these over others. I cannot tell you how much I loathe reddit’s upvote system.
What I’m trying to say with all this is that when finding information on the internet, you are best getting very small factoids about things. Learning about larger topics is much harder, and you often run into articles that just barely explain what you want to know. When you you go to hobbyist forums, a good chunk of the time you might get some useful facts here and there, but you are often surrounded by people who don’t fully understand the topic either, and posts are usually filled with beginner questions.
It’s really weird that despite the internet being made for information, the best way to use it to get that information is to download books off of it. Somehow, someway, in the year 2023, the best way to gain information is by book, and books are often paywalled. Some of the best information you can find outside of a book on the internet is also paywalled. Wiki’s are decent for getting information, yet a good chunk of the time they still don’t fully cover a topic.
There has to be a way that we can make wiki’s that are super indepth and will answer most questions people have about a topic.
Or maybe not even wikis: In some cases I wonder if it’s best to confine information to just text, that can more easily fit into hard disk space and be read on any device, old or new.
What do you all think about this?
You’re missing a point though. You used Pubmed as an example of good information being available, but it’s only useful because you know it exists.
In your example, there’s a real life librarian who would walk you past the lifestyle magazines to show you where the ‘real’ information is. On the internet, the search engines that act as the librarian take you directly to the lifestyle magazines and tell you that they’re the best source of information available, because they’ve been paid to do so. If you push them, they might show you something better, but it can be hard to find.
Google has a specific search engine to only return scientific journals and similar ariticles: https://scholar.google.com/
That’s a handy link, thanks 🙂
Fair enough, yes there’s a lot of noise and reliable guides and teachers are rare. However, I don’t think the responsibility is on the ‘internet’ to get people to ask better questions. That’s the role of mentors, educators, librarians, etc. as you describe.
The meme-based analogy is the difference between the questions:
How is babby formed?
-and-
What are the biochemical mechanisms at work during conception?
Both questions originate in the same curiosity but on G**gle the latter is going to take you quickly to sources like PubMed. The first one is only going to yield Flash-based internet jokes from the old days.
I think what I was trying to express is that if you want to use the internet for real, deep learning, you have to learn the question-asking and information-filtering skills common to any scholarly discipline. There’s just no substitute for this literacy and you are right, it’s hard work. As a lazy man, believe me, I’ve tried to find shortcuts too.
No matter how good the search engine, a vague or overly general search phrase will yield poor results. If one desires to move beyond being a passive consumer of lowest-common-denominator content, change starts within because the information is out there waiting to be found.