INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

BBC News’s Aleks Krotoski has a thought-provoking op-ed piece about how technophilically skewed the bulk of the internet really is. Her observation is based on spending some time with people who simply don’t use the web. She points out that they are not luddites but people who have simply found that the web doesn’t speak their language, doesn’t share their ways of structuring information. She mentions issues with search facilities like Google, but she also points out that even approaches meant to be more democratic (e.g., the semantic web, or facilities based on the intelligence of the masses) fall short for people who are not technologically oriented because the creators of web sites and the presumed intelligent masses are dominated by technophiles. For us 202ers, of course, the differences in how people organize information are nothing new, but it’s good to remind ourselves now and then that, as aware of the differences as we are, we are ourselves members of a particular community of thought. We at the iSchool are, I think, too focused on serving the needs of society to be considered residents of the traditional ivory tower; we live instead in a silicon one.