How The Web Ruined The Encyclopedia Business 623
prostoalex writes "Don't remember an encyclopedia salesman knocking at your door lately? Turns out, fewer Americans are purchasing layaway plans for heavy-bound multiple-volume sets (once sold at $1,400) and turning to the Web for answers, according to AP/Miami Herald. What's more interesting is that even the software encyclopedias are not selling as well, with Google changing the landscape of finding good reference information. 'Microsoft's $70 Encarta is the best seller but industrywide sales for encyclopedia software fell 7.3 percent in 2003 from 2002,' says Associated Press article."
Not just the internet (Score:2, Insightful)
In Other News... (Score:2, Insightful)
For some odd reason, this isn't suprising, since you don't need a heavy bookshelf or storage area for a stack of CD's.
Last time I used an encyclopedia (Score:2, Insightful)
Obvious news tidbit of the day... (Score:5, Insightful)
Never before have the key values of resourcefulness and problem solving been so apparant in individuals and the work place, where before wrote memorized knowledge was necessary.
Having the internet, and refined resourcefulness trumps anyone who has wrote memorized anything. With the internet as a resource, instead of a 30 book bound volume set of encyclopedias, a resourceful person can find answers and implement them in minutes, where before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.
i love the internet and everything it's done for me. I'm not a super genius, but being extremely efficient and resourceful, and knowing how to use google, has made me look like a fricken star both to peers and my employer.
-Jeff
Re:in other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
A few nits to pick. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, have you noticed that MS gives Encarta away with everything ?
Third: Duh! Universal free access to a worldwide information store is eliminating the need for large, expensive and quickly obsoleted books? My god stop the presses. In other news the Edison wax cylinder is no longer used in favour of a strange plastic disc read by lazers, wax salesman frieghtened.
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:5, Insightful)
Encyclopedia still useful though (Score:4, Insightful)
For very specialized knowledge encyclopedias are still useful, and it's hard (for me at least) to discount the pleasure of opening a volume at random and learning about something I never had the first idea about. Sure you can try the same trick with the web though I'm not sure the results would be the intended one...
For a while the Britannica was free online, but this is no longer the case.
In the future, veracity will be valuable (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody can type anything and have it show up on the web. Most of the time, it is even well-meaning information, eg, with the intent of being accurate. The issue is that people sometimes make mistakes. When you're writing about who your favorite Pokemon character is, mistaking the stats of Pikachu for Megamonkey isn't that bad. When you're posting information about a medical procedure or tolerances on a shear pin, though, being wrong can literally be the difference between life and death. The advantage encyclopedias have over web content is that everything much pass peer review and fact checkers.
I predict that while the 'paper encyclopedia' business may suffer in the future, the businesses that generate the content may begin to restore revenue by offering information that is in digitally signed chunks of information that an end user can be sure of or by offering fact checking services for people who can sacrifice context for finding out if a specific fact is true. Maybe a publically available article about gunpowder will give me all the steps needed to safely make it, but I might then pay $.5 to ask an intelligent software agent at Brittanica.com to read the URL of that public article and tell me if it's accurate or not.
I love encyclopedias, and I think there will be a market for them well into the future (people still buy dictionaries, don't they?), but part of capitalism is keeping your business relevant, and it looks like the encyclopedia companies have some challenges ahead of them.
in defence of paper encyclopedias... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, as a teenager, I got a full Encyclopaedia Brittanica from my grandmother as a gift. And the nerd in me couldn't keep me from picking up a random volume, leafing through it and waiting for something to catch my eye.
The variation on that would be that I'd look something up, and, in the process of finding the right page, some other entry would catch my eye and I'd read up on something (usually completely unrelated) after finding what I'd originally gone looking for.
Hypertext kicks ass. Ain't no arguing against that one. But search engines show you what you were looking for - it's a lot harder to 'stumble across' completely unexpected stuff on online reference engines. I ain't buying another paper encyclopedia, to be sure... at least not at the price my grandmother paid for mine... but, in the quest for pure, unadulterated trivia, there ain't nothing like it...
Freedom... (Score:5, Insightful)
1)The cost of printing. This is expensive when you consider the cost of 24 Hardcover books.
2)The cost of fact checking. Again, this is expensive, as your credibility relies on your information being correct.
With the freedom of information that the internet has provided us, (1) is a non-issue. (2) However, is still an important one. As we all know, just because its posted on the internet (in duplicate at times!) its not always true. In the end, you might just end up with what you paid for, or you might end up reading a factual, cutting edge lab study that was posted the week previous. Personally? I use wikopedia and everything2.com when im looking up something that piques my interest. When im writing a paper? I'm going to be hitting up a libray and dusting off an encylopedia. Sure i'd use internet sources (read:google) as a tool, but id be extremely carefull with my sources.
When the Web is Wrong? (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again, an encyclopedia produced just last year would report the nation of Iraq as a Democracy, not the currently accurate "Military Dictatorship". But, many web sites are out of date, as well.
I guess it all comes down to a modified version of the "library skills" and "critical thinking" we were supposed to have learned in grade school. Can you locate credible infomation and differentiate it from discredible information?
Re:What will save the industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Encyclopedias should go digital (Score:5, Insightful)
Encyclopedias date very quickly (Score:5, Insightful)
With the Internet, I could have that information in a few minutes, even seconds if I find a good source. Encyclopedias just cannot compete with such instantaneous and nearly cost free knowledge.
James Burke has touched on this phenomenon is his latest series of books. That the explosion and specialization of knowledge has lead to where we are today, that no one really "knows" anything anymore and that as soon as something is discovered it is obsolete. Those that will prosper the most in the future will have skills that lead to them the sources of knowledge they require without the need to retain that knowledge for themselves (his theory).
Computers are much better for looking things up... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the light of this I'm not surprised that the print sales are down. I'm perhaps more surprised that the electronic ones aren't doing better - results from the venerable Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (generally) excepted, I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research. It's not so much a problem for me, but young people don't have as finely tuned BS detectors as older folks; they believe anything they read on the net. It's near impossible to get them to limit themselves to peer-reviewed sources in their papers, and they really do come back with some absolute crap from some random website.
Parents would do well to consider this when weighing Google against a good CD/DVD-ROM or a subscription to britannica.com; it's a lot cheaper than the print version used to be, and it's guaranteed quality information. Google is an invaluable tool, but it doesn't replace traditional sources of information. (At least until Google Print [google.com] comes out of beta - then we really will be somewhere.)
Re:Lobbying (Score:5, Insightful)
A quote I have hanging on my wall:
That will only become more true as the pace of change quickens. Artificial scarcity be damned.
(Right beside that quote I've also got a few Singularity [kurzweilai.net] quotes, about the exponential nature of progress, and the likelihood [gmu.edu] of mankind surving these next few critical decades.)
--
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, would this lead to a tyranny of the majority? If something like Wikipedia were around in Gallileo's time, would it ever say that the earth is round?
Now, Wikipedia may very well have a method of dealing with this problem, but I am not aware of it. Can someone offer insights?
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
D
Re:In Other News... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's an analysis which has more to do with your standards for judging games, than on their respective quality. For example, complaining that the board version takes longer to finish seems a particularly... dubious criticism of something that's supposed to provide entertainment. ("I hate the extended version of LotR; it takes longer to watch!")
I don't have access to sales figures, but I'll bet that sales of traditional Monopoly board sets still outweigh sales of the electronic version. That's because a game like Monopoly benefits substantially from not only the ability to shuffle your stack of bills, tap-tap-tap your faux-pewter pieces around the board, and misuse the Free Parking space by putting a kitty in the middle from Community Chest fines; but also because of the non-linear aspect of play, with deals being cut while other players are rolling the dice, and so on, which I can't see working too well unless the software is multitasking and multiuser, with multiple control sets. The communal aspect of sitting around a board facing your fellow players is valuable too.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
One is that you don't see the collective result of *everybody* peer reveiwing the entry - you are only guranteed to get the result of the last person who edited the entry. So if 1000 people agreed with an entry that said "X is true", and one person edited it to say "X is false", if that one person is the most recent person to have touched it, then *his* version of things is all you'll see. You're only guaranteed to see a version which is in agreement with the previous viewer's opinions, not a version that is an average of everyone's opinions that came before him. One person can wipe out an entire years worth of peer review on an entry in a single moment.
The other problem is that even if it does reflect accurately the opnions of all the 'peers' who reviewed it, the entry will then only be accurate in those areas where public opinion reflects the truth. This is often not the case when the public is poorly informed. I'd much rather read an encyclopedia article on nuclear power that was edited and approved by nuclear scientists than one that was edited and approved by a collection of J. Random Users. Science is one area where this can be a problem, and any area where stereotyping by the public is common is another. (For example, let's say I (an atheist) got invited to witness someone's pagan summer solstice celebrations. Before I decide if I want to do that, I'd like to read up on what those celebrations entail. I'd trust a source that I kenw was written by actual pagans on the matter before I'd trust a source that was written by the public at large, given that such a source is likely to contain incorrect stereotypes.)
Persistence (was Re:Freedom...) (Score:3, Insightful)
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny that somebody pleading for reliability in scientific knowledge believes that Galileo's unpopular theory was that the earth was round.
mastery (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really where the power of the internet is, as you point out - in the specialized reference engines that are freely available to just about any college student and most high school students. For home use, there are other specialized reference engines depending on what you want to look up (www.mdconsult.com comes to mind for physicians). But remember, we're talking about general information here, not writing a thesis - usually you'd use an encyclopedia just to get an the basic idea of a topic, something that a quick google scan or a free online reference site can almost always accomplish.
Re:in other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll have to take your word for it. I've spent enough time reading Ayn Rand's ravings -- time I'll never recover. Her political writing vacillates between the blindingly obvious and the blindingly stupid, and I doubt her fiction is any more meritorious.
Re:A few nits to pick. (Score:3, Insightful)
The future of SE's is in distributed search & trust systems, which doesn't require a centralized Google to crawl the web to determine relevance based on link popularity. Much harder to game webs-of-trust than Pagerank.
--
Web Is Incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love it if Google and the Web were able to produce comprehensive survey articles and concise in-depth analysis. But, as much as is out there, and as good as some of it is, it's not yet a replacement for much of dead tree literature.
Just searching the indeces on SciSearch for articles gives a lot more references in technical areas than just searching what's been put on the web so far (what, maybe 20-50% of what's been produced between 1992-2004?).
Unfortunately, copyright restrictions will prevent my ultimate dream from being realized: having everything that has been published put on-line and indexed and freely searched and accessed. I mean things like Lord Kelvin's papers, the collected notebooks of Ramanujan, the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, etc.
Wikipedia and attribution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What will save the industry (Score:4, Insightful)
My motivation for home schooling would be that I disagree with the curriculum of public schools and the bureaucracy of standardized testing. However, I also worry about friends and socialization. This is probably a common dillema.
IMO, public schools do a terrible job of teaching history and literature, but they do a barely okay job at math and science. I also think the zero-tolerance rules at many schools create a very perverse and highly unnatural environment for socialization. However, home-schooling by conservative born-again submissive-women alcohol-is-hell-spawn Baptists, for example, would be no better. I can just hope I'm more competent than the state government and less bigoted than religious extremists.
To this end, a tangible off-line bound encyclopedia could be a good tool. A child can take a volume of an encyclopedia and just "soak in it." Flipping pages in a book can be a good discovery experience. Just googling for a topic can be less rewarding, because of the amount of time spent sorting through the chaff. As an adult, I can deal with this pretty well, but kids might have less intuition to know what is probably good information and what is bunk.
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what gets the creationists and the flat-earth types all in a twist; they can't present credible evidence to the scientific community to support their claims, so they claim that there is some sort of conspiracy against them, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Many middle-class households (the only ones who could afford a traditional print encyclopedia) bought them for their symbolic value: they showed that you were reasonably well-educated, that you valued education, that you could afford encyclopedias. They also bought them because of pressure not to "let your kids get behind" in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
These are precisely the reasons that many parents bought (and continue to buy) home computers. Just look at how personal computeres were marketed in the early 1980s, when it was not at all clear why you would want one. Look at how they are marketed to parents today.
A lot of content is not free as in beer (Score:3, Insightful)
In this, non-porn searches are similar to porn searches: the good stuff costs. (Not that I'd know anything about this, of course!) Lexus/Nexus search, anyone?
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:2, Insightful)
Unlike the web, where any idiot (or ideologue) can self-publish. (This post being a case in point). Makes it very difficult to authenticate "valid" information.
Who did use encyclopedias? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone remember that long-blonde-haired teenage encyclopedia pitch guy in the late 80's? He was even more annoying than the Dell dude.
Re:in other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a Randroid or an Objectivist, but I have read and enjoyed both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead; her two first real novels, as I recall. Both were fantastic, and both made very solid points about a number of good things -- the power of the unfettered mind, the crime of stealing the fruits of one's labor, and the travesty of assuming that the best world is one in which everyone is equal. We need our geniuses, just as we need our burger-flippers.
The problem is, after these were written, Rand started buying into her own press. She started writing crap like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. She took some good general ideas, and made very bad hard-and-fast rules of of them, completely ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
In this, Rand is an example of exactly how one should not handle criticism. Instead of reconsidering her viewpoints in light of constructive critique, she violently lashed out at anyone who questioned her Divine Word.
But that doesn't mean that she didn't have some good ideas.
Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can read the editing history of the items, and see the political battles raging as different groups try to promote their versions of history.
As for the rest of the net. The majority of pages are opinion pieces. Since the search engines judge sites by link popularity, provocative opinion pieces often get a better billing than factual pieces--more people link to provocative sites than to facts.
The good thing about the old encyclopedias is that it is easy to guess the publishers point of view, making it easier to filter the facts from intepretation.
Re:At one time... (Score:2, Insightful)
Universities.
Libraries.
Govt. agencies.
Newspapers.
TV stations.
etc.
Re:What will save the industry (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would they have said it was flat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Students are supposedly taught English as well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not still teaching myself, but I've heard a lot to suggest that the upsurge of the internet has exacerbated problems which were only starting to appear in my day. My girlfriend teaches final year school as well as third level, and besides the plagarism issue, many of her students just can't get it into their heads why a random page on the internet should not be given as much weight as an expert in the field. She has gone over it with them, but they are lazy - they want to use the internet exclusively for research as it's easy, whereas going to the library is too much effort.
Part of the problem is that here (in my experience- in the humanities), any half-serious research methodology classes only appear at the postgraduate level. It might be touched on slightly earlier in certain subjects such as history, if you chose a manuscripts option. I agree as to the importance: at a minimum it should be the *first* thing taught in university, and preferably should be introduced even further back in the school system. Research methodology is the humanities is like 'planning' in programming, and it's insane that it just isn't emphasised early enough.
Yeah, minutes to find the wrong info as well... (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's good from your point of view, but all to often someone that spouts how they 'looked it up' on google has no basis for the information they found.
How the Automobile Ruined the Buggy Whip Business (Score:2, Insightful)
Saying the web ruined something makes the Encyclopaedia companies appear to be the hapless victims of tehcnological aggression.
So, tell the pointed headed encyclical editors to "giddy-up" and get with the times. Obviously the market has moved AWAY from them not because of some devilish scheme from Tim Burners-Lee but because what they have to offer in the way they are offering it (and I refer to the on-line, CD and paper editions) is just not needed/desired as much as in previous years.
The biggest problem with the Encyclopaedia Companies is that they saw themselves as Encyclopaedia Companies and not information dispensers. If they saw their task on a deeper level than thick leather-bound volumes (i.e., content-focused not package-focused) they would have been on the forefront of the evolution of information cataloguing, referencing, and accessing via the WWW versus being plummeled by the shifting times.
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't play to their strengths... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mainly, what I'd like to see is encyclopedias that have a large variety of extensive multimedia. One picture for each topic doesn't exactly cut it... If I could look up "Ferrarri" and find 30 minutes of video-clips, along with plenty of audio recordings, and really detailed information on the cars, I'd be happy to buy the CDs/DVDs, because it's not easy to find that information elsewhere. Unfortunately, digital encyclopedias just tend to be a digitized version of the physical encyclopedias, with an audio clip thrown in here and there.
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:3, Insightful)
Either you use the 'net as a source of information and teach kids how to discern good sources from bad, or you give up on the internet entirely. There's no trying to "fix" the internet. You could do some form of whitelisting and only allow access to an approved list, but that's basically the same thing as discerning good information from bad. It also turns the internet into a small series of electronic books.
Personally I think forcing kids to scrutinize early on is the best thing that can happen to education. The pass the buck till later phenomenon goes on until College, and even then it often never gets addressed. You then wind up with people watching Fox specials on "Was the moon landing faked?" and believing it.
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
This is known as the Problem of Induction. In a nutshell, it states that inductive logic is itself not valid; e.g., we can not make statements about anything unknown by looking at things that we do know. In addition, even our knowledge of the past and future are suspect; we have no knowledge that the past is static, and no proof that our estimates about the future will ever come to pass. We have no non-inductive proof that dropping a ball from a tower will cause it to fall, because assuming that the world will continue to work as it always has (e.g., previous balls dropped from towers did fall).
This can be handled one of two ways.
The first is that one can state that we can (and do) know absolutely nothing -- the universe could have been a fruitcake ten seconds ago, and changed form in such a way that we never knew it. Some deity could have created things; or the universe could have congealed out of Lime Jell-O. Logic is invalid and useless.
The problem with this viewpoint is that, if one were to really subscribe to it, there would be no point in making plans. No reason to even live; after all, you don't know whether or not your existence is itself real, or if it will just stop in a second when the universe becomes solid Jell-O again. This is not a very practical viewpoint, nor one compatible with our biology or psychology -- we inherently use past events to predict future results. Ever gotten sick from eating one type of food, and avoided that type of food in the future? Exactly.
The second way of dealing with the problem of induction is by making one assumption -- that things we have observed in the past did happen, and will continue to happen in the future. Note that this means that the events occur -- we may be wrong in our interpretation of said events. This is the principle upon which all of the knowledge of Man is founded, including science.
We can make a lot of measures in a lot of different times; we can apply statistical measures, making our theory more and more "scientific". But we can never say that it is absolutely "scientifically proven". Gravity at 9.8 can be the "best" Scientific explanation. This is totally subjective.
Any human viewpoint is, by this definition, subjective; we are not omnipotent nor omniscient, and therefore cannot ever see every single aspect of every single problem we encounter. We are limited to using the tools at hand; namely, our senses, and our ability to reason, which is derived solely from the assumption of pragmatism.
In fact, it is this admission that none of our knowledge can be 'truly objective' that renders scientific facts so strong. Whereas dogmatic sources of knowledge claim to hold perfect truths, scientific theories have the built-in intellectual credibility to allow for our human weaknesses. Scientific facts change as our understanding grows; they allow for us to make mistakes. In fact, the scientific process rewards those that find mistakes, and the greater the mistake, the bigger the reward. It is a self-correcting process.
Occam said that the simplest theory was the best. But is it really the truest?
What William of Occam said was that, given two or more competing theories with equal support, the most simple of all the theories is the best one to assume correct, because it will have less loopholes to check, and will be less likely to have mistakes. The important part is that the competing theories require equal evidence -- Occam's Razor does not apply in any other circumstance.
It's not a matter of being the, er, 'truest'; it's a matter of being the best theory that fits the data; shoul
You THREW OUT books? (Score:3, Insightful)
2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out.
No offense, but paper books have value, even if only as relics of a bygone age. But to think that you threw out a set of encyclopedias breaks my heart. Okay, so much of the information would be hopelessly out of date (geography, for certain), but there's still a LOT of useful info in even a 20-year-old encyclopedia, and it's criminal that you just threw it out. Didn't you at least think about donating to the Salvation Army or Goodwill?
When I was a kid, my parents bought two sets of paper encyclopedias (one for grownups and one for kids). I read the kiddie one until I got to about 7th grade and needed the better info in the grownup set. Keep in mind that by the time I graduated high school, those encyclopedias were already 15 years old, and by the time my youngest brother graduated, they were almost 30 years old, but they STILL HAD SOME VALUE.
Clearly, you never thumbed through encyclopedias at random when you were a kid and stopped to read about tornadoes or the social life of ants. I want my kids to have that enjoyment, and I'm personally looking for a set of paper encyclopedias to share with my kids. Sure, we'll Google the Internet for current info on any topic they need to research, but nothing beats lying down on the floor and opening a random volume of the encyclopedia to a random page and reading something fascinating about the history of dogs.
Re:You are correct (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to assume that 'creational evolution' is another variant of the Intelligent Design argument[1]; the problem is that, not only is there no data backing Intelligent Design up, there is a huge pile of data contradicting the theory. It just doesn't hold up under any form of scrutiny. What's worse is that the Intelligent Design community intentionally 'forgets' certain facts (such as Peking Man being exposed as a hoax within months of discovery, or the fact that it is possible for chimpanzees to learn and express abstract concepts), or completely misrepresents others (such as using the wrong type of radioactive dating[2]).
Evolution is still taught because it is the best theory we have that fits what we have found, and nothing that the Intelligent Design people have come up with works even close to as well as the adaptive landscape model presently used to model evolutionary change.
There are many many scientists who dispute the alleged "scientific evidence" to support the idea that global warming is a threat, but in the mainstream press, global warming is presented as undisputed fact.
Blame the media for that one, although there is some credence to the fact that nearly all of the scientists who state that global warming is 'not a problem' all work for large chemical companies, whereas most of the scientists pointing out the problem often do their research for little or no money. But this is a different topic entirely. *grin*
Reliance on "Junk Science" is a huge problem internationally and here in the US. I believe in relying upon empirical evidence to support our beliefs in this world, but I don't share your naivete that the scientific community is doing a good job governing itself and protecting its integrity through consensus based only on scientific evidence.
Oh, it's not naivete. The problem is that the "scientific community" is not represented by the mass media; very few, if any, widely-used textbooks contain 'junk science', but it permeates our movies, sitcoms, and news broadcasts. What's worse is that very few people bother to take the time to learn about how science works at all. There are people graduating from high schools who can't tell you what the acceleration of gravity is, or understand the chemistry behind the formation of rust, or explain why a car tire loses traction when it is sliding instead of rolling.
The problem is not in the science; it is in our culture's overall naivety towards scientific knowledge. People take scientific facts for granted, instead of asking questions, or doing experiements, or even learning about how we came by those facts in the first place.
[1] E.g., everything was made by a god, and he had an active role -- he didn't just set the laws of the universe in motion, and let evolution happened as a part of the universe unfolding.
[2] Each type of radioactive dating has a certain range within which it is accurate; many creationist websites either fail to mention the dating methods used in their arguments, or use a dating method with a range of 6000 years to 'prove' the age of the Earth.
Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember in my childhood fondly looking through an encyclopedia from the 1930's,not because the information was necessarily the most useful because it wasn't current, but because it was a priceless snapshot of the era. It remains to be seen of the Internet will preserve this kind of snapshot of a time or will information always churn, so it is always current which is good for current research, but will it tend to develop some amnesia about the past. By this I don't mean it will lose the great works, because it wont, but will it preserve the smaller but still interesting details of each era.
The way back machine is a very noble effort at trying to preserve this kind of snapshot of the Internet but will it survive and build for 100's or 1000's of years like great books and libraries have?
Enlightened societies have fought hard to preserve books from destruction especially by onslaughts from violent and ignorant warrior cultures. The question is will we be both motivated and adept at preserving digital information. Books last 100's of years. Do we have digital storage media that will do the same or will have to rely on constant duplication of information to preserve it. It seems possible the Internet may preserve information intuitively because it tends to replicate and disperse useful information.
The other obvious problem with the Internet is it is causing an explostion in the volume of information which has to be filtered and preserved. Will the quality information lift its head above the sea of garbage when it comes time to preserve it. Google rankings tend to lift up the quality information but is that enough or do we need an army of editors to raise the valuable so it doesn't drown.
Something is right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine if the same principles applied to the RIAA or SCO - you don't see these guys lying down quietly. What would things be like if Britannica cited their encyclopaedia as prior art for the internet, slapped down a patent on "method for storing and retrieving information by categorical reference in text and illustrated formats" and charged everyone $699 for using the internet? The RIAA should pay a little attention to World Book, Funk & Wagnells and Britannica. The RIAA is going down next, right?
Re:encyclopedias worse than MS Ofice racket (Score:3, Insightful)
My Dad bought them new in 1959 when I was 3.
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:3, Insightful)
If a teacher asks students to write a paper on Martin Luther King Jr, that same teacher ought to have at least a passing familiarity with history. Consequently, he or she should be acquainted with the notions of propaganda, bias, and people with sociopolitical agendas who lie.
Surely these kids have heard of World War II. Propaganda isn't a new idea. Any teacher who assigns 'impressionable' children any sort of research project should recognize the opportunity to teach kids that propaganda didn't end when Hitler (sorry, Godwin) died. Incidentally, even if you block the worst sites on the school network, how are you going to keep the kids off these sites at home? They're not all going to write their papers in the lab on campus...
Progress (Score:3, Insightful)
If you laud this and pan outsourcing manufacturing jobs, you Don't Get It.(tm)
Technology is changing existing models in nearly everything. To embrace it when it's convenient for you, and decry it when it's not, is the height of hypocrisy.