Web 2.0

Web 2.0; in an era where bandwidth is cheap, and storage space even cheaper, there has been a proliferation of blogs, news websites, and public forums where once there were none. Electronic development has given the many a voice that can be heard around the world; but at what price? When information is cheap, the emphasis is no longer on the information itself, but on those who present it. This is the problem with Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 has been, and will continue being, an amazing step forward in humanity's capacity to communicate. The fact that I can look up one of over 3 million articles on the Wikipedia and have the luxury of demanding that each point that I read be clearly cited with a respectable source is an advantage that I will not deny of Web 2.0. Or the fact that I can catch up on my friends with the click of a single button; no more rummaging through lost and broken contacts, scouring social networks for someone who might still be in contact.

Back in the "ye olde days" of the late 1990s, Yahoo had a single news portal, and that was all that was deemed necessary. Today, Google has a separate search algorithm for news stories, designed specifically to sort through the hundreds, if not thousands of mainstream blogs catering to news ranging from the intimately local to the expansively global. But, when attempting to do research for a political piece I was writing, it struck me how useless this search algorithm was.

On the sidebar of common options, Google News allows you to choose between three different categories: "All News", "Images", and "Blogs". Notice that a "News" category is missing? In an era when information is cheap, the emphasis is no longer on the information. Although I lack hard numbers to cite here, a Google News search will bring up around 9 editorials or other opinion pieces out of every 10 stories returned. When did editorials become so popular? My local newspaper runs around 2 or 3 pages of editorials out of a 20 page newspaper (not counting sports, lifestyle, advertisements, etc...). On the Internet, information is cheap; and if writers want to make a living peddling something cheap, they have to either dress it up as something more expensive, like an "opinion article", as if that added any intellectual value, or deliver it en masse; sometimes both.

Looking up information on the proposed Cordoba House to write an unbiased summary of its political effects on American politics, I came across the fact that the Anti-Defamation League had asked the Cordoba House to reconsider its location. This seemed out of the ordinary, so I searched this story up; lo and behold, scores of articles proclaiming the ADL's incredible hypocrisy, or how the ADL was ardently against the Cordoba House, or the reactions of the Jewish community on the ADL's decision. About two or three of these articles were polite enough to actually quote more than a line or two from the ADL's own words. About zero of them were polite enough to actually link to the ADL's press release, which I had to find myself.

Some pundits of the Internet claim the problem is that "we're drowning in information". To the contrary, I'd propose that we're drowning the information.