The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be. The educational and practical resources are there, and are not that hard to find assuming you have gained minimal technological literacy and a certain understanding of internet culture and critical thinking relating to the content available.
There is a ocean of addictive distractions to wade through, but at the same time we know the following things:
- We have to be constantly mindful of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect
- News sources and journalism have always had significant quality problems when they venture beyond just reporting basic news, even in the case of business-oriented publications that as Chomsky has pointed out have a vested interest in delivering quality reporting
- Understand topics requires delving into the academic literature in many cases. In this scenario, the internet becomes the line towards that literature or those long-form articles but most of the users' time has to be spent reading and thinking instead of just browsing
- Identifying skinner boxes and addiction traps is easy. You usually know when you are in one. We have to just be honest about what our goals in life are and how much progress we are making towards them
What this does not solve is the problem of focusing on the wrong things in life or embarking in a career or interests that are ultimately deleterious to your life. But the internet at least makes it far easier to pivot and refocus as long as you let it do so and use it towards a conscious goal. This mindfulness is easier said than done but it's far from an impossibility.
Good point, I agree. I did not think of that. However, it's a bit hard to find certain things now. To take one example, sometimes I like to read reviews of camera equipment. I like to read reviews written by individuals who just use it rather than the SEO junk by most major websites. However, even if those small-time reviews are usually much more informative, they are VERY hard to find in search engines. The SEO junk just overwhelms page after page of search.
That's why I think the internet would be better off without a lot of the intense duplication that is out there today.
> The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be.
Sort of. Many of the useful (not ad-driven) sites of the 90s are still around. Mine are. So in that sense, yes.
But they are drowned by the flood of ad and SEO-driven junk. Finding the good parts, if you don't already know, is becoming harder. Search engines no longer return most of the useful sites on any given topic.
It depends on what you define as useful. 90's style personal websites/Usenet/BBS forums can be useful. People certainly gathered there to make significant things happen and to create useful resources. That said they're still pretty infotainmenty, the signal to noise ratio is still pretty low compared to a focus on an actual topic of interest that comes through deeply engaging with the literature and/or delving into making or building things with it. We have to keep to the logic that the internet is a conduit towards real life actions and the internet of the 90's already cut into that. In a sense, being bothered by the SEO means you are still in an infotainment mindset anyway or at least surfing the shallower waves.
Today's internet has astoundingly accessible resources on all sorts of things. A motivated person can still sidestep all of the crap with relative ease. Or to put it another way, if they get lost in the shrubs, they weren't gonna make it in any case. Motivated people now have many more tools and platforms at their disposal to gather alongside one another and make things happen. The pre-September internet was more private, yes, but that was actually a massive flaw in an absolute sense. Now you can have a bright middle class Mongolian kid become an electronics expert on his own and the greybeards aren't barred from finding their watering hole either.
There is a ocean of addictive distractions to wade through, but at the same time we know the following things:
- We have to be constantly mindful of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect
- News sources and journalism have always had significant quality problems when they venture beyond just reporting basic news, even in the case of business-oriented publications that as Chomsky has pointed out have a vested interest in delivering quality reporting
- Understand topics requires delving into the academic literature in many cases. In this scenario, the internet becomes the line towards that literature or those long-form articles but most of the users' time has to be spent reading and thinking instead of just browsing
- Identifying skinner boxes and addiction traps is easy. You usually know when you are in one. We have to just be honest about what our goals in life are and how much progress we are making towards them
What this does not solve is the problem of focusing on the wrong things in life or embarking in a career or interests that are ultimately deleterious to your life. But the internet at least makes it far easier to pivot and refocus as long as you let it do so and use it towards a conscious goal. This mindfulness is easier said than done but it's far from an impossibility.