The Internet vs. books: Peaceful coexistence
BOOKS
The instant knowledge provided by the Web is invaluable, as is the deeper communion provided by books.
"On or about December, 1910," Virginia Woolf once wrote, "the world changed." Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift. The pyramid of media hierarchy flipped -- top down became bottom up -- and people-powered content started to change the way we think.
In 2002, I owned a small independent publisher, Context Books. That year, we published a beer coaster of a book titled "War on Iraq." The substance was a hybrid: part-book, part-blog. Former U.N. Special Commission inspector Scott Ritter had spent the summer of 2002 telling anyone who would listen that President Bush was going to start a war in Iraq and that it would end in disaster. We boiled that down into a punchy project -- concept to bookshelf: eight weeks. Six months later, the president was on TV telling America about the war he'd just launched.
What we did in 2002 is now an everyday occurrence on user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia (founded in 2001), Daily Kos (launched in 2002), MySpace (launched in 2003) and Facebook (launched in 2004). Internet users have very specific notions about what they want to know. But in this new world of mob-rules media, how do we know if what we're reading is quality news, junk opinion or psychotic confabulation?
It used to be that the printing press was the final arbiter, a micro-layer of ink adding heft to words. Certain websites can do the same thing (the Christian Science Monitor just announced plans to go to a Web-only daily publication model), but there remains a chasm between virtual texts and their printed counterparts.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think." It was about a hypothetical machine called the Memex, a mechanized desk attached to microfiche scrolls that could potentially store entire libraries.
Sixty-three years later, the Atlantic featured another essay, by Nicholas Carr, called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The answer was an emphatic, if not altogether wistful, "Yes."
Many old-schoolers fear that the Internet means the end of them. For the rest of us, suggests Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga, founder of the political website the Daily Kos, "Google makes it possible to learn anything, near instantaneously. Like natural selection, there are species that adapt to the changing environment around them and thrive, and others die off."
- Some See a Challenge to Microsoft in Google's Sites Apr 14, 2004
- Lawsuit against Google revived Dec 27, 2007
- Goliath vs. Goliath May 07, 2006
