>What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.
Except he's correct. The web has become a disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theory bonanza. Finding good information still takes legwork, 22 years after this article was written.
Also to be fair to Cliff, this article was written well before sites like wikipedia had prominence. So yes, back then putting something in a search engine was asking for trouble. The results were very poor because the content was very poor.
>What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact.
Thus the rise of social media.
I think this essay was unusually prophetic and insightful in many ways.
> The web has become a disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theory bonanza.
By analogy to "net-negative producers" at what point do the conspiracy theories incubated by the internet detract from it's good points enough that it is overall negative, or perhaps only as positive as say, the fax machine?
Except he's correct. The web has become a disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theory bonanza. Finding good information still takes legwork, 22 years after this article was written.
Also to be fair to Cliff, this article was written well before sites like wikipedia had prominence. So yes, back then putting something in a search engine was asking for trouble. The results were very poor because the content was very poor.
>What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact.
Thus the rise of social media.
I think this essay was unusually prophetic and insightful in many ways.