3 ms·

Books are still where the good stuff's at. Even some periodicals. Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not living up to the early hype, and does

Books are still where the good stuff's at. Even some periodicals. Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not living up to the early hype, and doesn't really even seem to be heading the right direction.

winphone1974 4y ago
I'm confused by what you think the internet is, and this hype you feel it's failing?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that it has achieved that—in some fields, kinda, in many others you can barely scratch the surface before you have to hit a library (probably a university library, and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you're very lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does not have the info you want, and even if it does have it, it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at least as well as some print version you could get instead.
  - melagonster 4y ago
    at least most of new research article is online, although we still have problems with publish company, but everything is towards to better way. e.g., Germany government and now maybe White House are standing at side support open every article.
dublin 4y ago
But real books on real topics have been getting purged from libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a decade now. In many school districts, older books containing actual truths, are destroyed rather than marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers. To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years". The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.) Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...) More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently. We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...

winphone1974 4y ago

I'm confused by what you think the internet is, and this hype you feel it's failing?

yamtaddle 4y ago
Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that it has achieved that—in some fields, kinda, in many others you can barely scratch the surface before you have to hit a library (probably a university library, and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you're very lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does not have the info you want, and even if it does have it, it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at least as well as some print version you could get instead.
- melagonster 4y ago
  at least most of new research article is online, although we still have problems with publish company, but everything is towards to better way. e.g., Germany government and now maybe White House are standing at side support open every article.

dublin 4y ago

But real books on real topics have been getting purged from libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a decade now. In many school districts, older books containing actual truths, are destroyed rather than marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers. To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years". The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.) Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...) More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently. We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...