To choose sides in this debate is arbitrary because the internet is here and it is here to stay. I do typically adhere to the traditionalist perspective that the internet is depriving children of free time to play sports with neighborhood friends and enjoy the wonders of the outdoors, although in light of my present acceptance, appreciation and forecasted dependence on the internet, I might have assumed a hypocritical position from the onset. My initial view, or my gut reaction, is to embrace the perspective of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that the internet is compromising social intercourse, “blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life,” but as I use the internet for more and more complex, higher-education researching and information exchanging, I realize the beauty of such a tool that Vannevar Bush envisioned in his dreams of the “Memex.” A communication system that permits the individual to deliver his work to the masses without the financial burdens that the traditional publishing processes forced upon information sharing between individuals. My internet-facilitated use of upper level discourse and general fact gathering is what pleases me the most about the internet of today and for the purposes of this essay it is what persuades me to side with Vannevar Bush’s initial vision of a cataloging tool, used for the more precise recollecting, sharing and expanding of public knowledge collections. The only folly that remains with today’s internet, in opposition to Bush’s dream, is this myriad of entertaining distractions that engages the users for hours of strenuous and dedicated efforts toward frivolous ends. This is what discourages my embrace of the internet as the ultimate format of information housing.
I might resolve that the greatest issue compromising the success of Bush’s dream is a lack of scrutinizing of the materials (not that I’m in favor of censorship, far from it). There are no publishers vested in preserving acuteness and truth in internet content. The publishing house was an institution that set certain standards of quality of language and content upon material in order to merit the expenditure required to put the information into print. The forum of internet is wide open. It is open to distracting advertisements, gaming, and thousands of other forms of mind numbing entertainment that mute social progress. In fact, today’s internet embraces this culture of shock oriented, voyeuristic frivolity. Perhaps that channel is where the forum of internet publishers hopes to make their profits. Or maybe their aim is to brainwash the masses. I’m not yet sure what the aim of some of these content publishers is. Maybe they have no aim? Luckily enough for us, there are some groups of seriously dedicated individuals to developing quality navigating tools for the management and sorting of all the content of cyberspace.
Google, for example, among other search engines, has made diligent progress in organizing the confusion and providing access to academic material when desired, commercial material when shopping is the aim, and insight through the plethora of entertainment to assist anyone interested in recovering that particular bit of media they hope to find. They make the internet navigable and easy to use. These people are likely the group to whom Bush is referring to when he claims that there will be, “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” Luckily, the people at Google pride themselves on quality and deliver great results fairly often, but sometimes keyword searches that correspond to closely to a market product or pop culture phenomenon will only deliver shopping and entertainment. Professors and other faculty of academic institutes have, since I can remember, always warned against the acceptance of internet content at face value. The speech goes something like, “If you’re going to use internet sources they have to be from a reliable web site, and I’d prefer that you find multiple opinions that agree on the same thing. At least two books for every web reference...” And so on. Stop for a moment, and notice that all the users of the memex that Vannevar Bush refers to are professionals.
“The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.”
He also makes a note about how only the dedicated and knowledgeable human mind is qualified to
