Remember the Collyer brothers? The well-educated but reclusive pair saved everything. In their New York City apartment they packed tons of books, magazines, newspapers, and a few typewriters. Tragically, in 1947 they met their demise there. Investigators could scarcely crab their way through the narrow aisles that separated rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. One of the brothers was found beneath a pile of books from shelves that had evidently collapsed, and the other nearby.

We shall never know, but I like to imagine that the Collyers were not afflicted with discardophobia (the morbid fear of throwing anything away) — a syndrome that many of us are believed to suffer from today — but had actually used and enjoyed their huge archive. “Langley, bring me that copy of The New York Times — the one on the dedication of LaGuardia Airport,” I can hear his brother, Homer, asking. And Langley goes right to it, using whatever system he had devised to recall its location. A bit like researching something on the Internet, don’t you think? Yet the Collyers may have been able to find something even more quickly. Their database was smaller, and they had put everything in its place themselves — custom programmed it, I would say.

Of course, the Internet is much more useful and at the same time more problematic. It is huge, adding, some guess, five to 10 million pages a day. (The actual number is as elusive as the national debt.)

Rod Alferness, a specialist in high-bandwidth optical fiber technology at Lucent, suggests that while enormous bandwidth can bring us loads of information stored in the Web’s data banks, individuals may become so swamped they can’t process it. “Do you have half a lifetime to look at everything?” he asks. And what about its quality? Some users suspect that half of what is on the Web is not worth looking at — but they don’t know which half. Alan Kaye, co-inventor of the graphical user interface (GUI), is sympathetic. He sees 99 percent of the content on the Internet as “distractive and of no consequence.” Yet he believes the small percentage of worthwhile material can be uplifting and culture changing. The problem will be to make it as easy for people to find out about the good content as it is to find out about the distracting stuff, he says.

Information Addiction

Perhaps Langley Collyer was diverted on his way to finding the article his brother wanted. I can picture him, cross-legged on the floor between shelves, reading something in The Times that had caught his eye, then perhaps another item, and another, while Homer waited patiently. This kind of digression often happens to me when I’m online.

Researching online can become addictive. Caught in the Web may be a good way to express it. A fellow engineer of my acquaintance admits that he is often up until 2 a.m. following some work-related trail too intriguing to abandon. A few years ago a TV commercial promoting some computer product or another featured a young woman at a terminal boasting “It’s already 10 a.m. and I haven’t yet dressed or taken my shower!” The commercial’s creators must have realized its negative implications, for it soon disappeared. Vincent Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, recently noted that its always-on nature “poses a pretty tough problem for people who feel they have to keep up with everything — we may all end up suffering from ‘global sleep deprivation.’”

What to Do?

I am afraid that if we cannot somehow slash the amount of material we must search through to find meaningful results with a reasonable expenditure of time, the nature of our workstations and home offices will be transformed. Imagine each day mounting an exercycle to which we have permanently attached a keyboard. TV dinners will give way to computer dinners, warmed in a microwave oven and served on a tray, both affixed to the exercycle. As we multiprocess our way through the day, eyes glued to the computer screen, our hands will dart from mouse and keyboard to knife and fork. We will have to pedal faster and faster to keep in shape, and figuratively, to satisfy our lust for information.

Help Needed

Today’s search engines and specialized Web sites notwithstanding, the means of precision researching online will continue as an ongoing challenge. Who will meet it? Are library scientists a vanishing breed? Will Web site and search engine designers (search engineers?) come to the rescue? Are the former morphing into the latter? A major task will be to design, categorize, classify, and index Web sites and to certify the degree of quality and legitimacy of what can be found online.
Even Bill Gates agreed recently that “search just isn’t what it should be.” We need better technology for navigation, and, he said, “answers, not lists of Web sites” as we search. Gates hinted that the much anticipated Longhorn might help.

Let’s hope so. We want to make it as easy to find trustworthy information as it was for the Collyers, but minus the claustrophobic and threatening environment.

For more on the Internet:

Foulke, J. (Ed.), Engineering Tomorrow, IEEE Press, 2000; p. 110, comments by R. Alferness; p. 4, comments by V. G. Cerf; p. 88, comments by A. Kaye.

Navigation aids:

• The Librarians’ Index to the Internet, www.lii.org

• Internet Public Library, www.ipl.org

• Reference Desk, www.refdesk.com

• Hotbot Quick Search Deskbar, www.hotbot.com

• Metacrawler, www.metacrawler.com

• Altavista, www.altavista.com

 

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