My Word's Worth

Chances are, it's a song you've never heard of, by a band you've never heard of, but these guys are onto something, don't you think?

The thing is, I love the web, BUT...

I'm on the web every day, checking out the new sites, telling my faculty about the neat new stuff they should know about, BUT...

I even list the good sites on the net on my own page ("Where the Wild Things Are: a Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Web"), BUT...

The web makes me really, really nervous, too.

Americans have this unfortunate habit of falling in love with technologies, and rushing to embrace them, without having the remotest idea about how they might change our world. Like Neil Postman says, when you add a powerful new technology, you don't have your existing world PLUS the new technology. You have an entirely different world.

Don't get me wrong on this. I'm not going old foofish on you. I think in a whole lot of ways, the net will make the world a lot better.

I think it will be the biggest impetus toward starting up small businesses that the world has ever known. Hey, if you don't have to worry about local zoning laws, customer parking space, or being located in a large enough community of people who need your product or service (being able to translate Lithuanian is not that marketable a skill if you live in a small town in Iowa), why not start a business? All you need is a presence provider and a fax machine.

Already the net is a major advance for civic enterprise. I have been astonished that our government, which is still using vacuum tubes in its air traffic control system, has nevertheless done an outstanding job of putting its services and much of its information online for the general public to use. All the political parties, mainstream through crackpot, are on the web. And people are talking to each other on the web about how they can solve common problems WITHOUT government intervention.

Of course the net is a gold mine for people like me, whose business is finding information for people. The more people dump their private stores of information onto the net, the better a treasure trove it's going to be.

It's also going to be interesting to see what happens to science and invention. Historically, every major advance in transportation and communication has been followed by scientific and technical revolutions.

I'm going to be watching closely to see what happens as the net gets rid of the gatekeepers. People can publish on the web without convincing a publisher of the excellence of their work. Scientists can publish their work without going through lengthy review by their peers.

The down side of this is that a whole lot of junk is out there on the net, immortalized by the "Useless Pages" classification. And not everything that should be in the useless pages is actually listed there!

This is something academics are going to have to deal with. It will not be enough to tell people what the good sites are; it will be equally important to warn people about the unacceptable sites. And teach them how to tell the difference.

But the up side is that maybe it will reduce the traditional lag time between when a revolutionary idea is advanced and when it comes into general acceptance.

The gatekeepers, after all, have a stake in current accepted ideas. They may have arrived at them through scientific method, but many have ended up embracing them as a semi-religious belief. Scientific advance has often had to wait for scientists of the older school to die and get out of the way.

Gatekeepers have also, knowingly or not, screened out a lot of important work in terms of who created it. For instance, it's interesting to note that the most widely accepted new books on racism in this country have all been written by white men; equally valuable works by blacks have not been received with anywhere near as many ecstatic reviews and multi-page cover stories.

And many studies have shown that in competitions of all kinds--art exhibits, poetry competitions, journal submissions, etc.--the number of women whose submissions are accepted always increases when the submissions have no names or other gender cues attached to them.

No, I don't doubt for a moment that the net is going to do wonderful things for us.

But...I do wonder what we're we going to lose.

I'm so afraid it's going to be the private publishing industry. And I don't much want to live in a world without bookstores and libraries and magazines and and newspapers and newsstands.

I don't think Stephen King and Danielle Steele have anything to worry about, to be sure. Murder mysteries and thrillers and spy stories and romances and other escapes and entertainments--those should be safe. Who's going to curl up in bed with a good computer?

But I worry about the other stuff--the stuff that publishers can afford to publish because of the profits Stephen King brings them: the serious fiction, the nonfiction, the reference books.

Because much of this publishing will migrate to the web. That's not all bad, either. I don't much care whether I find the information I want in a magazine or a book or a computer, as long as I can find it. If a database is designed well, I can often find my answers faster on a computer than in a book. And right now, it's cheaper to find my answers there--a lot of information sources on the web are free now. Not that they'll stay that way.

But if we lose book-length nonfiction, that will be a loss. And it will disappear, because hypertext caters to people in a hurry. The internet may well do for ideas and thought what McDonald's has done for food.

Not only are people becoming too impatient to read entire books; they may become too impatient to read through an entire web text; instead, they will hypertext their way through the document, surfing from small fact to small fact. What will be lost is context, sequence, logical thought structure.

I used to teach writing, and it seems to me that writing compels you to think; it forces you to examine your ideas and experiences, organize them, assemble your supporting evidence, and present them as cogently and persuasively as possible.

But this requires patience: the writer's patience in struggling to come up with the best words in the best order to explain the idea or share the experience.
And the reader's patience.

It's the reader's patience that I worry about. Reading helps create mind. It forces the reader to follow a sequential thought pattern. It teaches different ways of ordering thought, by narrative, by argument, by analogy. And it teaches the mental discipline of staying with an idea, concentrating on its meaning, and critically examining it, comparing it with one's own experience and knowledge.

Reading has this power because the words on a page have the decency to stay there, ready to be re-visited and re-examined as needed. Words in hypertext do not. Indeed, you may never again be able to find the site again that held that special piece of data, or remember how you got there.

So, my feelings are very mixed about this hypertext world our minds are meeting in. I love it. But it makes me very, very nervous. Like Joke Flower said, "Man destroys the things he loves."

I really hope they're wrong.

Previous Columns: Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books

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