`It's so easy to find information on the Internet"; "it's impossible to find information on the Internet". Both these statements are heard frequently, sometimes in the same breath, but which is true? Well, it would depend on the value you place on the information in question, how determined you are to find it, and whether or not it exists somewhere independent of the Web.
The best and most useful information has traditionally not been easy to find, extract and use. What's of highest value must be earned. Part of the joy of information-hunting used to be the honing of essential research skills, after which the thrill of the chase kicks in. These research skills include: knowing exactly what information you're looking for; how best to go about finding it; and what to do with it.
Ongoing Internet improvements, in areas such as navigation, search engine efficiency and faster downloads, will almost certainly result in a great deal of information becoming easier to find. While these advances are welcome, we must remember that we tend to have less respect for something, or someone, that's always there, willing, faithful and easily available. Changes in our attitudes towards information-hunting are therefore inevitable. The question is: how drastic will such changes be?
There has been a marked increase in the incidence of exaggerated comments such as: "By 2020, all information will be found on the Web." This sounds preposterous now, but if people believe it in the future, we may end up imagining that if something can't be found on the Internet after a quick, painless search, it does not exist.
Once the supposedly longed-for information is found, more often than not, due to the ever-decreasing attention span of the average Internet user, the text is skimmed rather than read thoroughly. This leaves the impression that the information is of little value.
One would think that if time was spent searching online, a researcher would make sure to examine closely any hard-won gems of information. Even if text is badly formatted, it could be cut and pasted into a Word document and reformatted if necessary. Awkward indeed, but when has the most valuable information ever been easy to find and decipher?
Think of the (soon to be extinct?) historian or scientific researcher, who wanders through libraries, examining reams of old documents that have been recorded on scratched and worn-out microfilm. Inevitably, the reading conditions are bad, and it's likely the text was written in a dense, old-fashioned style. But such a researcher must persevere because this particular information may not be found any other way. In the future, if some kind person does not go to the trouble of publishing such information on the Web in an easy-to-digest format, will it be assumed not to exist?
Librarians and teachers have already noticed changes in the research habits of students, young and old. An exasperated librarian in Ontario, Canada, tells the story of a class of 13year-olds that had been given a "Snakes of the World" project. The children rejected out of hand the excellent reference books in the town library, along with the librarians' years of expertise, preferring instead to spend hours in an ultimately fruitless search on the Internet.
Apparently, the children found some relevant information online, but by this stage they were so hooked on the searching game that they were unable to appreciate the fruits of their search. No doubt the children's Internet navigation skills improved, but this was to the detriment of their research and recognition skills.
For some college students, the story is much the same. A tutor in a Dublin university tells how she set her pupils an information-searching project and despaired at the results. Students were asked to compare how long it took to find, using the Internet and/or traditional methods (whichever was most efficient), certain types of information such as the author of an obscure book or the name of the gardener in the Japanese embassy. Every student, except those over the age of 25 or so, made a dash for the computers, logged on, and skipped any questions the answers to which could not be found online. Using the telephone, or - God forbid - asking a human for help, was out of the question. Just as the tutor feared.
Where do we go from here? Will the "World Wild Web" be domesticated as a result of this apparent ease of searching and finding? Or will this be a pyrrhic victory in which we win the information battle at the expense of our research skills? Maybe in the end we'll be able to forage only for those scraps of information that are thrown at us while we're rendered incapable of reaching that which remains hidden.
Catherine McDonnell writes about technology for www.nua.ie. She can be contacted at catherine@nua.ie