Wednesday May 18, 2005 Does the Internet make us lazy - or is information still too hard to find?
The main league in which I referee American Football, the British American Football League, has a discussion forum. One of the sections in the forum is a section entitled Football Rules, the purpose of which is to ask rules questions.On the whole, this is a good thing. It allows players and coaches to seek clarifications on situations they may not be sure of and have this view seen by the wider community to everyone gets a chance to share in the information.
However, while there are questions of the "this happened, and this was the result, but I thought the result should have been X because of Y", there are also a lot of questions posted of the "what is the rule on X" nature. This is despite the fact that a complete copy of the rule book is actually available online here.
Anyone who has access to the discussion forum presumably also has access to the online rule book (they're both web-based after all), but choose to post a request for help rather than checking out the definitive source of information.
The question that always bugs me about this is "Why?". Why get second hand information when you could get first hand information? Isn't first hand always better?
Do people post such requests because it's easier to get someone else to do the hard work of filtering and processing (even when the response is nothing more than a cut and paste job from another information source), or is there simply too much information out there and the filtering and searching task is too much at the moment?
Do the searching and indexing engines still have some way to go before we truly get what we need from Internet searching? It would seem so, and while it remains this way, I'm sure that asking for second hand information will still be the preferred solution for many.
( May 18 2005, 11:51:37 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]
Posted by Brant Gurganus on May 18, 2005 at 12:52 PM BST #