Too true

[andrewducker]

The internet is shit.

It must be true, I read it on the internet.

Comments

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Cool. The 'net is great but it isn't everything (or even all human things). It's a tool. Use the right tool for the right job.

I dont' know whether the author agrees with me, or thinks (mistakenly, IMHO) they are being cleverly ironical by making it a website. Maybe both.

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

Thats a fun article, but I think he's made a fundamental mistake in his analysis. The internet is just a very good mirror of society, its society that is 'shit'.

He talks about the sense of wonder when the internet was new (thus tipping his hand as a cynical old net veteran) but goes on that people have done crap things with it, like adverts for candy bars and vast amounts of inaccurate or false information.

I think what the internet has done is allowed everyone the freedom of publication that was traditionaly restricted to a few. If you were to line up 100 random people from the street and question them on their knowledge of a variety of subjects, I think you'd find an amazing number of mistakes, assumptions and outright garbage. They would probably also know more about (and be more interested in) thier favorite candy bar, then they would more worthy intellectual topics. All the internet does is make the average persons level of knowledge and interest widely published.

This might seem a picky point to make, but if I'm right then his quest to have the internet remade in a better form is utterly doomed. If it reflects people, the only way to fix it is to fix the people. Unless we want to restrict access to it in the way access to print media has always been restricted, which would destroy the fundamental point (IMHO).

[andrewducker]

I agree entirely.

I mean, look at livejournal - check out some random journals and you'll realise how appalling most of it is. Surfing random websites has much the same effect. There's an awful, awful lot of dross out there. Back in the olden days we had editors to filter out the worst of it, but nowadays that doesn't happen. Thankfully we do have online friends to keep us pointed in the right direction.

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

It actualy touches on something that I've been thinking about more and more of late, and which I've heard of as a new approach to education.

In these days of ever advancing availabillity of data, the crucial skills life are less and less the things you need to do, but the ways to successfully and accuratly research data.

I can learn about almost any topic that takes my fancy in just a few minutes. This makes much of traditional teaching by rote irrelvent (although I've long though lots of traditional teaching was irrelevent anyway). Why spend weeks of a childs life at school drilling into them facts and figures, when they can get those facts and figures on demand in a few seconds should they ever need them.

I would be very interested to see a move towards a more broad ranged education system which tried to broaden peoples horizons and make them aware of (and hopefully interested in) the range of things that are out there to be learnt, coupled with a good carefull course in how to discriminate bad data from good, and how to research into topics that interest.

Obviously not all topics would be suitable, e.g. basic maths is a day to day requirement. But I think if properly implemented many things could be done this way.

Saying all that, I'm not at all sure it could be successfully integrated into society (i.e. how would you grade it, and how would those grades be used by potential employers). Its also possible this would only work with some people and leave others hopelessly behind. Although the current system does that anyway.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I definitely agree - give people skills in obtaining, understanding and reporting on information and then help them educate themselves.

I'm not sure what percentage of the population this would suit though. I'm not convinced that everyone can learn that way.