The information super-highway

One of the most persistent claims for the Internet is that it will give people easy access to vast amount of information. There is also a widely held view that economic success in the future is going to depend on so-called ‘information workers’ (people whose jobs are primarily concerned with manipulating information) and that access to communication infrastructures is critical for such people. Such beliefs have led to a considerable drive in many countries to develop the internet and to ensure that schools, universities, and businesses are connected.

There are problems with this view if the Internet and its importance, which are often not considered. One major problem is that there is no guarantee of the quality of the information available. There is no editor to ensure that the contents of web pages are correct or clearly expressed, for example. Nothing prevents someone setting up web pages which are completely inaccurate or misleading. Of course, the case of propagating information on the Internet has also been used for more sinister motives, such as distributing child pornography and even information on how to make bombs.

Moreover, the case with which online information can be accessed and copied means that many people are reluctant to publish on the Internet. Doing so is likely to result in loss of royalty if the material they have developed is copied. It is true that many papers and magazines have web pages, but these are usually samples of their publications rather than complete copies. Indeed the current situation is probably somewhat misleading – if internet access becomes very common, and they are not able to find a way of charging for access, many of these sites reduce the information they make available.

Online information gives rise to a more insidious problem: the ease of accessing it leads people to ignore other sources of data. It is, of course, far more work to go and look for information in libraries, but these nevertheless represent more reliable sources. What is available on the Internet is rather arbitrary and certainly issues of copyright and the vast difficulty of digitizing older documents or data means that it presents a distorted picture in many areas.