2/17/98... OYOYing the WWW.

I shambled out of the shop the other evening, pluming a sour reek of ash sawdust, to find Peggy fuming over the PowerBase 240. She was trying to do a web search for a biography of Sepulveda, the Renaissance philosopher, and her brain was beginning to boil.

I was hungry (I'd come out to propose we go for a quick supper), and a little impatient, I fear. When my initial sympathy ran into her anger I began to snap a bit, too, and we were soon shouting over the computer.

"It's just GARBAGE," Peggy declared. "How dare they put up sites so badly written, so pointless, so self-indulgent?"

"Naw," I said, "it's wonderful that anyone can self-publish. It's like having access to all the raw material of history."

That didn't help. It was another case of the 3Ws. Wigged out on the WWW. Peggy, and every teacher in America, is up against it. This new communication tool is changing the way we deal with information.. the way we think.. and suddenly the old ways are being superseded. Everyone is back at square one.

When teachers give a research assignment now, some students will go to the library and do a text search, but an ever increasing proportion go to the web as their resource of choice. What they hand in, often, is a jumble of downloaded infotainment. Looks great, but has no order or structured relevance. And there's the class thing, of course.. the trailer kids don't have PCs at home, so the affluent have another leg-up on the future, or seem to, which only compounds a teacher's dismay.

Why dismay? Just imagine having to teach how to use a tool you don't know how to use yourself. That nobody really knows how to use yet. Imagine trying to teach literacy when the medium of choice is badly written, and unedited. Imagine trying to teach structures for understanding history when the research environment is totally unstructured. Imagine trying to teach how to organize your thoughts, in your words, on paper when it's so easy to cut and paste received data. Imagine trying to teach how to extract valid information, when every site on the web has equal authority. Peggy is trying to learn the ropes, and keeps falling off the boom.

We spent another hour chasing links. Actually did find some biographical info on Sepulveda, in French and Spanish, but it didn't answer the question Peggy had started with. The philosopher had engaged in a famous theological debate about the nature of the Native Americans, and Peggy wanted to know if he'd actually visited the New World. Finally, our hunger prevailed and we hopped in the Owl.. gobbled down some veggie burritos in Brunswick.

Then we went into the college library, and Peggy found the answer in five minutes. No, he never did come to America. I picked up two books I'd found referenced on the web during a previous surf. A little mix and match. The old book piles aren't obsolete quite yet, but we're feeling more so.

Obviously all of us are going to have to come to grips with the new medium, but Peggy's dismay isn't unwarranted. Knowledge and understanding as integrated abstractions ARE evaporating, along with the Queen's English. Word processing encourages lazy thinking, and hypertext is dissolving linear discourse. The tradeoff is instantaneous information and planetary connectivity.. the democratization of utterance. An American dream come true.

Well, I've always had a fondness for anarchy, and we now have that at the information level. Gee.. it's neat, if you want to go out for a stroll.. but it's a real pain when you want a specific answer to a question. In fact I'm learning not to ask specific questions, and isn't that interesting? Have we been the victims of a literate delusion? Have we fooled ourselves into thinking the world can be explained in coherent sequential text by academic authorities? That there are ANSWERS?

Books are not only rigorous, they're a consensual product. Authors, editors, publishers, peers.. all have a hand in shaping the final product. By the time a text gets into print it has generally been vetted by some hierarchical authority, however implicit. And the traditional nature of published text is a structured discourse. But you can put up a web site without any of that. It's more like oral converse on the street than academic publishing. And to think it was the scientific community that started the web. What a hoot.

Meanwhile, what's a teacher to do? She can bookmark a few encyclopedic web sites. So far these tend to be so dilute as to be transparant. Full of multimedia noise, but bare of content. It's the specialist info that gets posted first. The grunt work of scanning in all those old generalist books isn't very glamorous, so unless you luck into someone's hobbyhorse you'll be lucky to find Sepulveda. She can buy Britannica, which still suffers from digestion, but at least is literate and attempts a sort of comprehensiveness. She can locate some good hub sites, maybe, and begin to compile a list of useful end sites for specific subjects. But that begs the question. If the wonder of this beast is its diversity and specificity and contemporaneity, confining school research to digested authorities and pre-identified sites doesn't teach how to use the tool. You don't tell high school students to go look it up in Colliers in the library, so you shouldn't spoonfeed them the web, either.

As yet there's no middleground between elementary web info and post doc speciality. Secondary webology will come, of course.. assuming we need it. But if the infosplosion continues to mushroom without integration we may breed a generation which doesn't know they need it. Who thinks we fogies are hopelessly antiquated to suggest you can structure knowledge and have some sort of comprehensive understanding. Let alone write coherently. ZAP. POW. gif and jpeg.

Peggy is still taking it in small doses. She admits there ARE some wonderful specific resources in cyberland, but wonders if the rare gems are worth the immense frustration of finding them. Maybe when the teachers figure out how to use this thing they can show the rest of us. She still sputters and fumes. I'm keeping my nose in the sawdust, and my mouth shut.