Is the Internet “making us stupid?” That question, asked of Google and the entirety of the web, was the focus of a recent Atlantic Monthly article that has stirred a lot of buzz.
I don’t think “stupid” is the right word, but I do think the Net is having a huge impact on the way writers and editors work today. And we should take a step back to look at how that change affects our written product.
I began my writing and editing career when the Net was really taking off as a source of information, not just a means of marketing or a techie meeting ground. More and more publications were going online. Amateur websites about obscure topics were being created on a daily basis, then overhauled by experts who added accuracy and legitimacy to their information.
Today’s writers can glean much of what they need from the web without ever setting foot in a library.
It’s fun detective work, trolling the web for that oddball quote in a trade publication, or uncovering a debate you didn’t know existed, or finding out your profile subject is a champion Frisbee-thrower.
But my academic experience doing research in the field of European history—reading primary sources in the bowels of an old library, visiting foreign book collections and archives, scrolling through reams of microfilm and fiche, straining to read handwritten notations, wearing special gloves to handle 200-year-old cartoons—taught me how to dig beneath the surface of things.
Scrolling through the Net doesn’t always yield a full picture. Not everything is there, especially if it’s more than a few years old, or requires more than a few paragraphs of explanation. You have to ask yourself what you’re not seeing online, and you have to go to the source—whether that’s a research paper, a book that references older books, and those books too, or the people at the heart of an idea or project.
Net-only researchers are missing out. There are decades’ worth—dare I say centuries’ worth—of relevant information crammed away in libraries’ troves of books, magazines, microfilms, special collections, and more. Some of this is starting to crop up online through sources like Google News Archive, but many, many gaps remain.
Writing that exclusively relies on the Internet without any other sources of information reminds me of those book reviews some students wrote in high school after watching the movie version of the book—or just reading the Cliff’s notes.
So if a research topic piques your interest, go to the page, not just the screen. And then go to the person, too—that’s still the most important source. (One reason I did not become an academic historian was that my interest in learning from other people, rather than just paper sources, was so strong.)
One more thought: Another side effect of the Net is that it may someday impede research into our own era. The Internet may have replaced much of our culture’s paper ephemera—the broadsides and fliers of old, and increasingly, the muckraking and the opinion-shaping, will now live on computers. And that will certain be a barrier if our servers and hard drives crash without leaving backups behind. And what’s more, that will be a problem for future historians unable to track down hard copies of just about anything.
MeredithInk 