The Internet: Not For Public Consumption

I’ve come to the conclusion that the internet is not delivering on all its promises. It isn’t doing my laundry, walking my dog, cooking me dinner or snuggling with me at night. In the internet, we don’t have anything that would matter to people living in most of human history, anything that touches us on a deep emotional, physical, or spiritual level. We don’t have anything that matters to most people on a mental level, either.

What we do have is a huge resource of text and images created by computer geeks for their own usage. As a computer geek myself, I find this immensely useful. I spend much of my day on a computer, searching for computer information and viewing computer media. When I visit Google, I search for snippets of code, thumbnail images for icons, and essays written by computer-literate people and the other writers they enjoy.

But talking to “[normals](http://www.planet-familyguy.com/locations/index.php?id=15)”, I realized that most people don’t care about finding computer information on the internet; they are more interested in making their everyday lives easier. So we get email instead of letters because it’s easier than licking stamps; chat instead of phone calls because it’s easier than dialing and easier to talk to multiple people at once; digital pictures instead of film because they’re easier to share with others. For most people, the internet is only about connecting, because the web as an information resource is still in its infancy.

For this to change, the web must expand to contain knowledge other than the types geeks are interested in. Since the content of the internet was created by web geeks for web geeks, it is valuable only to web geeks.When I searched for “select box option” at Google yesterday, I was fairly confident that I would get the HTML computer code that I was thinking about. But to a normal person, that same phase would more likely conjure up images of U-Haul, cardboard shipping boxes, gift wrapping, or boxing video games, and they would be incredibly confused at [the results Google returned](http://www.google.com/search?q=select+box+option).

The best way to make the web’s information valuable to non-geeks is to allow them to create it. Google became the leader in this area with its purchases of Blogger and Picasa. These services, especially [in combination](https://secure.hello.com/how_bloggerbot_works.php), make it easy to create content online. Over time, the web will grow to contain the thoughts and experiences of a more diverse and accurately representative group of people. Information about cardboard boxes, U-Haul, and video games will be available to normal people’s searches, to the possible detriment of computer coders (but we’ll leave that problem up to the search engine crew, who are, of course, all computer geeks themselves).

The other way to make the web useful to the rest of the world is to access more types of content. While Google has again done an admirable job of adding Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, Macromedia Flash, and digital image content to its archive, we are so far limited to searching what was created digitally or has become digital, using a computer. We can’t search harcover books or other printed material very well, despite attempts by Google and Amazon to scan and text-recognize [some](http://print.google.com/print/faq.html) [books](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/507108/103-5769931-8983047) and [mail-order catalogs](http://catalogs.google.com/). We can’t search our own past conversations very well, except through time- and CPU-intensive transcription of audio recordings. And we can’t search our memories, except to the extent we [transcribe our brains](http://ryskamp.org/brain/).

When that richness of content is available online, either through more advanced searching tools or easier and more accurate automated transcriptions, the internet will be a resource useful to a greater audience than its original geek creators, and an information tool as valuable and trustworthy as a set of encylopedias, a meeting of elders, or a family album. Then we can say the internet truly matters, on a level important to all people.