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Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there
is. A certain flower or a, a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences...
long forgotten. Books smell. Musty and, and, and, and rich. The
knowledge gained from a computer, is, uh, it... it has no, no texture,
no, no context. It's, it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last,
then, then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should
be, um... smelly.
Or, alternatively,
Some examples of the effect Internet Lies have on everyday lives:
In January 2001, an Iron Maiden fansite posted the address of an upcoming gig as the NEC Birmingham, rather than the Wembley Arena in London. The mistake remained on the site undetected and uncorrected. On the night of the gig, several thousand Maiden-Heads descend upon the fragile local transport system in and around the area of the NEC. Emergency service records for the night in question shows that the increase in traffic congestion led to slower ambulance response times, and to two deaths. One of these was from a road traffic accident, no doubt caused by the unexpectedly high traffic volumes, all caused by a lie on a website.
Both of which put me in mind of a couple of things that have cropped up on Barbelith recently. First, the Asteron thread. In this thread, a request for information on the word "Asteron" was responded to by somebody who, when the foundation of their knowledge was queried, blithely confessed to having got it from a web search on the word, and recommended Copernic, opining that it will "spare you a trip to the library".
Problem being, it clearly *won't*, because the information presented was incomplete and at times simply wrong. Of course, so might the information in the library have been. So what separates the two things? An attitude to information, perhaps? Does the easy availability of data make it more or less valuable?
Next up, the birth control thread, now useful largely as an exemplum. Before withdrawing my participation in a shrug of Miltonic (Meltonian?) despair, I responded to a keen young man's assertion that:
Same thing (infanticide) happens in India - in Whitechapel, for instance, there's an unspoken rule that you don't show Bengali families an MRI scan of a fetus if its sex can be seen. They tend to abort if it's a girl.
With a request for a little more information on the "unspoken rule". Before the source could be verified, another bright young fellow delivered, with a degree of disappointment, a set of reports on infanticide in China and India. The fact that neither of these worthy coves had twigged that Whitechapel was not actually *in* India is surprising, but only tangentially relevant. Bengalis are, after all, Bengalis, wherever they lay their hats.
However, when I pointed out (in a post now lost to futility) that the same report seemed to undermine even the contention that unborn female Bengalis were particularly at risk of being killed, it emerged that, although these texts had been presented in factual support of the aforementioned infanticidal tendencies, the proferrer had not in fact read them, and the Google search had taken ten seconds. A major philosophical difference emerges here; one man (as in our cases above) will present the quickness of the search as a justification of the presence of inaccurate or misleading information within it, and another will see the presence of inaccurate or misleading information in the presented fruits of the search as a sign that not enough time was spent searching.
This got me a-wondering. To go back to our second quote - this, I suspect was inspired by the fact that this utterly fallacious Obituary of Richie Neville that is now at the top of a Google search for "Ritchie Neville". So, a casual researcher doing a quick Google search for an article, for example, may be momentarily caught out, and a sense of unheimlichheit or similar generated, by this article. But its writer has received at least one stricken fan begging him to tell her it is not true. Which, on the bright side, he can do with pleasure. But it means that as a result of the rules governing Google, every so often a teenager with emotional problems is made to feel the same way many of us no doubt felt when we heard the first inconclusive reports on the deaths of Kurt Cobain or Baroness Young.
So, the Internet provides a wealth of information, at the same time providing no immediate means of verifying that data; one is forced to fall back on one's own abilities to determine whether a source can be "trusted".
But, at the same time, the information available through any route has the same problems - the history book I read in the library may have been written thirty years ago, before a vital piece of information on the period being described was discovered? Or, alternatively, it may have been written by a wildly doctrinaire author, whose ideas would be revealed as utterly left-field if placed in a context, but if that is the only book of theirs I have ever read...well, then.
Of course, the Internet provides this context, in the sense that a plethora of other resources are available at the same keystroke. So, is there something that makes this canon unsafe, and if so what? The ease with which it can be obtained (like monks and Latin or like matches and children - you decide)? The absence of some broader view-based index which might tell you where to start looking?
Does it matter where information lives?
Discuss.
Not too heatedly. |
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