Thursday, November 17, 2005

Wallowing in the World Wide Web of morass

The original idea of the WWW was to contextually link the content on the net. Today the idea of contextual linkage has been totally abandoned and the hyper linking shamelessly abused. Today everything is linked irrespective of context. The garbage on the web is overwhelming. We have submerged deeply into this morass, yet, we – the society are not choking on it. Oh no! We’ve learned to breath it, chew it, swallow it and than excrete it back into our own cyber environment, and… consume it again. This cycle of consumption of our own data/information excrement is so intense that now even the alternative (non-online) news media and information sources offer little more than reproduction of what is found on the first page of Google’s search result.

I see and hear my colleagues around the water cooler, in the meetings or even in knowledge groups are quick to offer instant solutions sourced from the WWW search results. And everybody seems to find the same staff instantly. Somehow the garbage always makes to the 1st page of the search results. The management appears to be the biggest suckers for information sludge.

I see a bright future for those of us who know how to find the fine information on the WWW. However, for now we just have to keep our heads above the sea of cyber gunk.

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