So i was reading half interested CNN article on information overload in our society and wondered whether i was really dreaming when i read that a 22 year old thought that:
“”The library is daunting because I have to go there and everything is organized by academic area,” Quaranta said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
Were books as easily searchable as Web pages, she’d reconsider.
Otherwise, they might as well not exist.”
This in my view is an interesting conflict between the real and the virtual world. Its a visualisation problem as well, by this i mean that it reminds me of the tree/forest paradigm. When you look at the forest it might be impressive and make you think: boy ill never find the tree that i want! But inversely when you’re only looking at a tree, then another, its easy to ignore the forest or even not know how big the forest is.
So i think that books in a library give you a good understanding that knowledge is not encapsulated in that one element but that there may be others you might bump into along the way which might inspire you or allow you to make connections which would never have been possible.
Web pages are bad for that, the web is a very limited way to search or see the forest, its query based, so its only based and will only look for what you know or think you know, but seldom gives you accidental access to things you didnt know or didnt know you didnt know, as the famous mapping goes…