GETTING USED TO INFORMATION OVERLOAD ON THE WEB
by Inderpal Bhandari, executive editor at large
"Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that". Thus, wrote Herman Melville in his classic, Moby Dick. And, that was well before the advent of the Internet.
The Internet adds to the turmoil of our poor hearts and poor brains. If you have ever tried to find something on the Net, I am sure you have felt that turmoil. And, perhaps, reacted to it. There is a famous video entitled A Bad Day at Work that is making the rounds of the Internet, in which a hapless user vents his frustration by smashing his computer. I think the chances are good that he was searching for something on the Internet.
I have had two recent experiences that led me to understand why things are the way they are on the Internet and perhaps, more importantly, why the status quo will be maintained for quite some time to come.
The Wall Street Journal recently published a section on health and medicine, featuring among other things a full-page article on "doing your homework" on the Web "to learn about your doctor - before you pick one". Thanks to the Internet, there are now several Web sites that provide information about doctors. In theory, you can review the credentials and training of your doctor; you can do a background check on him or her to see if he has been formally disciplined by a state medical board; you can get information on malpractice settlement on the Web; you can compare his or her performance versus other doctors who specialize in the same area.
Therein also lies the problem. I cannot picture the average web user hopping from site to site painstakingly piecing together all this information. In fact, this is as good a business case as any for the portals or bundlers of the Web, namely, the Yahoos, the AOL's and so forth. Their value-add is that they do the research for their users. Some day it will be possible to challenge the dominant position that these players enjoy by using intelligent programs that will search the Web to create a useful bundle of information to answer a user's query. But this is beyond the state of the technology today.
Recently, someone pointed me to the Web site, http://www.fedstats.gov Data from over 70 government agencies can be found here. It clearly has the potential of becoming a tremendous resource. A related service called Data Ferret allows users to download data over the Internet from different governmental sources for their own use. I explored both services, trying to assess how useful they were likely to be for Web users.
My conclusion is that these services will soon become a dream world for researchers, analysts and SAS jockeys. But I am not sure that they will attract the average Web user as currently presented. To some extent, this is an opportunity lost. After all, surveys and other such data are known to be quite popular with the general public, as is evident from the fact that they are used regularly by popular newspapers to engage their readers. I think a different presentation of the content on the two government data Web sites could have proved attractive and useful to the average Web user.
In summary, the Web is often best viewed as a domain for research. There is a fundamental reason for this - different entities investigate different aspects of a topic and are best positioned to report those aspects. For example, the American Medical Association is positioned very well to obtain and dispense information about the credentials of a doctor, while a state medical board is better positioned to dispense information regarding disciplinary action. When decisions are to be made that need two such pieces of information, research has to be part of the process. Also, since the Web is often viewed as a tool for research by many people who create Web sites, their main objective is often to simply make data available. It is up to the researchers who use that data to put the right pieces together. These observations suggest that the average user who is trying to find information on the Web will have his hands full for quite some time to come, much as Captain Ahab did while trying to find Moby Dick.
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Inderpal Bhandari can be reached via http://www.virtualgold.com