Nicholas Barnard PHL 399: Internet: Smuler 1 October 14, 2002
I've been “on” the Internet for eight years, almost as long as the World Wide Web has been in existence. I am a net addicted person. I've used the Internet at many places, for all different types of uses, using an extreme variety of programs. In addition I've created services and websites that utilize many different programming languages and protocols. While I chide from calling myself a net expert, I tend to think of myself as someone who knows his way around the Internet. Given my experience, Dreyfus's argument in Chapter One appears to have avoided details that would have hindered his argument, but nonetheless should have been considered.
Dreyfus has made the assumption that the Internet has had an adequate amount of time to develop an organizational system on par with the two to three thousand years that library systems have. He also assumed that the Internet has achieved the same stage in development as libraries and books in general are. Ergo given the fundamental reliance of Dreyfus's argument on comparing how the Internet and libraries are organized, a brief examination of the history of libraries seemed necessary to any discussion of library or Internet organization.
The first libraries were essentially too small to require organization; patrons simply just browsed the shelves.
The first organizational method for a library was a simple list on a clay tablet. This was quickly followed by a two list system; One list of the holdings, and the other listing the locations. (This incidentally resembles hyperlinks, hyperlinks do not require underlying organization in the location of the information, but for them to be useful the holding list should be clearly organized.) Eventually a colophon, essentially a small meta data block that was added that made retrieving them much easier, as the pages needed not to be read to determine the contents. This information remotely resembles the spine information of a book, or the meta tags of a web page.
After a few hundred more years libraries finally started shelving the scrolls by categories or authors, instead of just a haphazard system.
What is apparent in all of this research is that information does not and never has organized itself without human intervention, until the advent of the Internet, and crawler search engines. Before the Internet there was always a human in charge of organizing information. Dreyfus wrongly assumes that a human organized system (ex. Libraries) are comparable to a crawler created system.
If libraries operated like crawler search engines, their usefulness would be diminished. For example, in a crawler search library a patron would place a request with a librarian, who would then have a team of libraries skim all the books in the collection to determine if any of the patron's keywords appeared in the book, and if so deliver these to the holding shelf or create a list of all the “hits” for you to pursue. Either way the effort becomes incredibly labor intensive, and if the hold desk option is impractical because the hold shelf would encapsulate a much larger section of the library. An additional problem is how to handle one book that must be placed in two patrons' hold shelves (presumably the search would happen during the evenings, or maybe during a whole week.)
The above description of a crawler search library is obviously an impractical way to utilize libraries, but it is a practical way to utilize the Internet. This is possible due to the multi-user nature of the Internet, its ability to store information in a computer searchable format, and the speed at which searches can be performed. Therefore the Internet has made a new way of accessing information available, the mega-index, and index of all of the holdings, or at least a large portion of the holdings.
In looking at automated searches, Dreyfus ignores human created indexes such as Yahoo! Directory, the Open Directory project, About.com, and an extensive collection of printed and online lists. These are more closely related to library classification systems, than the crawler created systems.
Given the several hundred years that libraries took to arrive at their current status, the Internet has made a substantial amount of growth in an extremely short period of time.
One of the reasons that the Internet is an easy target for the likes of Dreyfus is that during the mid to late-90's prognosticators of the Internet were predicting among other things that:
Everything is going virtual. The old-school phone system will be gone within 18 months and we will have HD video on demand delivered via
wavelength services to every home in America.
This prediction was made in 1999. At last check, SBC, Verizion, and the other “old-school” phone system operators seem to still be in operation.
The futurists have missed the ways in which the Internet will be used. Fundamentally the Internet is only a new way of retrieving information that already existed. It has not created a significant amount of new information, only made the existing information more easily accessible.
But herein lies the essence of the Internet, but not the future of it. All this information has been stored and is accessible. What new technologies will be created to use them? The Internet has done for information what drilling did done for oil. Oil was drilled and made consistent by Standard Oil by aggressively pursuing the railroad industry, but because of the vast existence of standardized oil products it made it feasible for Henry Ford to create the Model-T, which enabled a massive shift in American life known as surbanism. Ergo, if we are standing at a brink similar to the one provided by Standard Oil, what is the future of the Internet? If history is any guide, predicting these effects is a futile effort.
The stores of the Internet wait to be tapped, what the next Model-T will look like, is debatable, although it decidedly will be made of flowing electrons and not steel.
I am relying on Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson.
http://www.lightreading.com/boards/message.asp?msg_id=52496
The one caveat to this statement is in some fields the Internet has obsoleted the previous information delivery method, thus the information is only available on the Internet, not because it couldn't be made available somewhere else, but because people wouldn't look at it in the older form. (For example, computer information brochures.)