When I was young, if I wanted to research a topic, I had to get a bus to the library or look in my encyclopedia. Now, it’s a simple case of switching on the computer and using a search engine such as Google. Where was Christopher Columbus born? What’s the population of Libya? How does a light bulb work? The answer is at your fingertips. The results given are vast and varied; it’s mind-boggling how much information, on any subject, is available. Ask the right question and you’ll have an answer immediately.
Emails, a frequent reason for using the internet, have only been available for 26 years and have dramatically changed our way of communicating. We no longer send a letter and wait days for a reply. Send an email and most people expect a response within hours, which suits our present, fast-paced lifestyle.
It’s easy to think that the internet is progress and a wonderful resource with a mine of information for anyone in the world, and this would generally be a correct assumption. However, it isn’t always as it seems, for there’s also a mass of misleading information on the net.
As an exercise, I Googled ‘robinwrites’ and within 0.12 of a second there were 20,500 results. My blog site appeared on the second page. Changing the search to ‘robin writes’ increased that dramatically to 38.6 million results (I made the third page). This made me wonder, with so many responses, who looks beyond the first couple of pages and are most of the pages irrelevant, and never read? The first page didn’t necessarily have the most recent information and some was out of date. Is the internet a wonderful resource yet at the same time the biggest rubbish bin in the world?
Many new websites are added daily and hardly any will be erased, even if they are misleading, incorrect or become out of date. The old encyclopedia was replaced frequently and a library will regularly update and replace material, but not so the internet. There are few regulations that police the constantly increasing pool of information growing by the second and no one to delete details which are obsolete. Thus, the amount of information just grows and grows.
What is the answer? Should there be a time limit for unused information that will then be automatically deleted? The internet may be paperless, but surely the rubbish bin will overflow with useless information at some stage.