The Internet - critical mass?

• February 9, 2006
• James Skemp
• philosophy, Internet

Having moved from items written in January of 2006, to items written in late-2005, then to 2001, and then back to mid-2005, I have realized for myself what many have already realized. There's a problem with the Internet.

A week or so ago, the Wisconsin State Journal had an article about the restructuring of the Internet. According to whomever was interviewed, some are thinking that it's time to create another Internet, a secure Internet.

The problem with the current Internet is that it's just too full. As I may have pointed out before, or pointed out elsewhere (notice that even this alludes to the problem), there's just too much information for people to handle. Before global communication it wasn't so bad - there were only so many news sources, for example, to be had. However, now, at the press of a couple buttons, you can have thousands of news sources, from around the world, in sight.

Not only is new content being created at an enormous rate, but the old information - the archives - stick around and are, in fact, mixed in with the new. While some sites may list information chronologically, such as a news site, not all sites can follow this, such as a search engine's results.

The archive itself is not 'editional' - id est, it is without revision. Forums, or boards, were one of the first forms of information, if you will, on the Internet. As such, they deny revision, as they are like the spoken word - they are chats.

If you and I are having a conversation and I say 'x and y', I can not go back and say 'x and not y' - rather, I can only add to the conversation that 'not x and y, rather x and not y'.

Of course, things can be deleted (which is not to say they can be erased completely) so that fewer learn of the original information, in the same way new editions are released to revise and expand upon previous editions.

But, because of the enormous amount of material being created, most of the previously created content is never touched - whether it be for revision, deletion, or expansion.

On the one hand, this is beneficial. A problem I had a number of years ago was content that was being removed from the Internet. If a news story references something, or even worse, if a physical product references something, online, one would hope that it would be available. Yet, even though the Internet takes comparatively little space (for the amount of information stored), material is removed, moved, and changed. While archives may exist, there are no laws that say that they must. At the blink of an eye, whole libraries, in fact, can disappear.

Now that I've completely lost my original thread of thought, I'll end it with this: Which is worse, to have information removed, or information that is out-dated?

Despite it all, I still say the former ...