Quantity Drowns Quality On Web

The Age

Tuesday March 18, 2008

Graeme Philipson

The web is a disordered mass of random information - but that's not all bad.

I was once visiting a branch office of a well-known computer supplier. In the foyer, in big letters above the visitors' chairs, was some clever quotation meant to indicate how the company's products were an essential part of the modern world. I forget the quotation but I vividly remember the attribution.

Underneath the words of wisdom were written the immortal words: Source: The Internet.

How stupid is that? Somebody has found some silly quotation to put a veneer of timeless respectability over what is essentially a marketing exercise, and then they illustrate their ignorance by failing to realise the difference between a source and a medium.

The internet is not the source of anything; it is simply a handy way to get to the source. But this company's stupidity achieved one effect: it got me thinking about the nature of information and attribution, and how the internet has changed things.

In my job I receive dozens of newsletters, magazines and opinion pieces. I read books, newspapers and newsletters. I ingest vendor blurbs and independent analysis, news stories and op-eds. I go to seminars and conferences and other events; some boring, some interesting. I am an information junkie. The material I get from all the printed sources I use is of variable quality, as are my own contributions to the genre, but at least I know that it is likely that someone has vetted the information before I read it and given it structure.

This is not always the case with online material. I spend hours every week trawling the web. Sometimes I have a particular subject, at other times I surf aimlessly to see what turns up. It is hard to find quality amid the dross. This has always been one of life's greatest challenges, but it is vastly exacerbated by the internet, which has no respect for quality or order and makes it easy for the loopiest and most poorly expressed idea to be propagated.

Anybody who regularly looks for information on the internet confronts this problem. It is all very well to say the web is the world's largest library, and your computer the key to it, but that is not strictly true. Libraries are not just repositories of books and other information - a big part of what makes a library so useful is the way the materials it contains are catalogued and categorised.

I started my working life, more than 30 years ago, as a library cataloguer, an immensely rewarding experience which instilled in me the love of intellectual order that I retain today, and which is affronted every time I sit in front of a web browser.

The web is a disordered mass of random information, thrown together with little thought or care. It is as if someone has taken all the contents of the world's greatest libraries, and the back catalogues of all the newspapers and magazines ever written, and of the contents of all the world's porno shops and car clubs and sporting societies and backyard historians, and thrown it all together into a big pile on the floor.

It's a bit quicker to sift through than a physical pile, thanks to search engines, but it's still a pile.

It is hard to see any solution to this problem. It is the way it is because that is the way it is, and it is the web's anarchy and failure to respect any hierarchies of rank or intellect that is one of its great charms and great advantages.

For every racist conspiracy theorist peddling hate and filth, there are dozens of honest people with worthwhile opinions. And, by crikey, they are going to express them.

As much as it is frustrating to encounter the vapid crap and plain misinformation on the internet, it sure beats the alternative.

The idea held by some people that there should be a central registry that catalogues and orders web content is ludicrous. Who would manage it? Who would fund it? Who would determine its taxonomy?

Try to answer those questions, and you immediately see the extent of the problem.

Quality is one of the most valuable things in life, and one of the most difficult to find. It is not so difficult to determine in the physical world, where price is a reasonable indicator. Generally speaking, so long as you steer clear of fashion, the relative price of a physical object is a good indicator of its value.

The marketplace soon sorts out the good from the bad, even where governments subsidise shoddy or inefficient producers in the name of the national interest, as often they do.

But in the intellectual world there is no relationship between price and quality. The most valuable information is free, or nearly so (the daily newspaper remains the world's biggest bargain), while individuals and organisations can and do charge a fortune for information that is arcane, poorly expressed or presented, or just plain wrong.

We are drowning in information and starved of knowledge, goes the plaintive cry. True, but that is much better than being starved of both, as has been the case through most of human history.

-- graeme@philipson.info

© 2008 The Age

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