Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?
George W. Bush
Here’s the difference between getting a book published and writing something on a web site: one is a whole lot harder. To get a book published, you must convince a book company that you’re a fairly safe bet. You need a proper editor. For non fiction books, you need to research, cross reference, have appendices, and do all that small print stuff.
To post something up online, you don’t even need a website anymore. Just an internet connection, or 5 minutes at an internet cafe.
So, why is it, that when I want to find out something, I google it. The library comes way down the list. I was talking to a friend who teaches first year students at the architecture school. She said a lot of her students haven’t even been into the faculty library yet. If they want to find anything out, they just go online.
While the online world is more accessible and immediate, I think I could be sacrificing some quality by using websites over books. After all, books have more accountability. They’re more permanent, and therefore hopefully are better researched.
A lot of research online involves seeing what other people online say about things. And where do they find their information? You can sometimes run a google search and see the same article edited or rewritten three different ways in three different places. But it’s still the same information.
Is this affecting our overall knowledge and insight? It’s possible.
