Wandering in a Strange Land

A couple of weeks ago I took on a part-time job for Google– actually it’s for a company that contracts work for Google. Unfortunately, I don’t get the corporate benefits that they apparently do at places like their Google Mountain View California headquarters, where staff enjoy a workout room with weights and rowing machine, locker rooms, washers and dryers, massage room, assorted video games, Foosball, baby grand piano, pool table, ping pong, roller hockey twice a week in the parking lot, and a cafeteria described as having “healthy lunches and dinners for all staff, with outdoor seating for sunshine daydreaming”. And, if that is just normal, consider the rumored Google policy that no ones workstation will be more than fifty feet from a snack cart or room, where you can access “bins packed with various cereals, gummi bears, M&Ms, toffee, licorice, cashew nuts, yogurt, carrots, fresh fruit and other snacks, plus dozens of different drinks including fresh juice, soda and make-your-own cappuccino.”

Certainly you can’t imagine a more pleasant workplace, except the thoughts wander easily to visualizing 300 pound people walking about the halls, unless the roller hockey and workout room copes with that issue.

I digress, as usual. What I’m doing for the Google people is rating websites as to their relevancy to search terms that are typed in Google. It can be a bit tedious, but the time seems to go quickly as I hop to and from various sites. Occasionally I run into a malicious site that downloads a virus on me, but so far my defense system has handled the problems. Not for the timid.

What does come out of the work is a sense of the strange and varied world of the Internet out there. Not that I hadn’t appreciated it before. I have been involved with computers from the beginnings, serving my internship on things like the TI-99 and the famous Commodore 64. I can recall demonstrating the fledgling Internet to students in my computer studies class. We would have a machine online over the normal phone line, connecting with an 800 number to a terminal at an American university. When connected as a guest, we would be offered fuzzy text pages where we would wander through lists of options, pick one of them to get to another list. I don’t know if we ever made it through the maze of option lists to where we actually read anything, certainly nothing of use if we did, but the students were almost as excited as I just by the fact that we were actually connected to a computer in Phoenix or somewhere similar. The fact that we probably could have phoned Phoenix and actually talked to someone took away from the mystery of the primitive technology that we were using!

The “World Wide Web”, an almost forgotten term now that is remembered more for the “www” of Internet addresses, wasn’t developed until into the 1990’s, and really opened the door to the online world that we see today. Our young people seldom realize that it hasn’t been around that long.

It’s a jungle out there. The Internet is an organic thing, growing at phenomenal rates, controlled technologically as best it can be, but largely out of control as far as what is published.

A cartoon in last week’s paper depicted a student presenting quite correct and proper information to her class on Benjamin Franklin. The teacher commended her on the project, and the student indicated she had “got it from the Internet”. A second student also presented on old Ben, with completely ridiculous false information. The teacher demanded to know where she had gotten that foolish stuff, and the response was the same: “I got it on the Internet”.

Unfortunately, quite correct. It takes only a little capability to create a web site (and template sites will do much of that for you), and a few dollars to cover the cost of “domain names” and space rental if you don’t want to be presented amid all kinds of advertisements, and you can be “broadcasting to the world”. This blog is an example of just that. I have about eight or ten domains (web site names) registered to me for various purposes, and have probably ten or twelve sites running at the moment for personal interest or some commercial purposes. On these sites I could post the most ridiculous drivel known to man, make the most outlandish claims, attribute everything to conspiracy theories, tout food or vitamin products as lifesavers, or post almost anything else I wanted, even things that would be tremendously offensive to most people. Curious students could peruse my site and come away with the most useless and even harmful notions.

This is the way it is… a vast wasteland of useful, fascinating information and images, more at our fingertips than at any other time in history, coupled with the most useless, trivial, debasing, foolish, and just plain incorrect stuff you could imagine. It’s all out there—let the traveler beware.

I suppose what it is, is a reflection of people themselves. Some thinker once said that common sense is “far from common”. While there are a great many people out there with a lot of good ideas, sensible morals, and the best of intentions, sometimes it appears that they are not the ones on the Internet. Perhaps it is a reflection of society that the largest segment of the Internet for usage and commercial value is apparently pornography. There are millions and millions of sites devoted to that. Last week an email from Google mentioned to me that pornography was an aspect of the Internet, and would I be interested in rating queries for that? It seemed a whispered invitation, since they indicated if my answer was “no”, I was to just not reply to the email. If I was willing to, I could just click “reply” and say nothing. I ignored it and declined.

I know enough from school and being involved in computer work there that it’s provided a very different world for our young people than we ever experienced. As it does to the rest of us, it presents a world of tremendous opportunity and tremendous danger. It foists supervision responsibilities on parents that most are incapable of handling, and provides hidden lives for children that we know little about.

We’ve opened Pandora’s Box with the Internet. While some might imagine that someone, somewhere, some government, could regulate it— shut down the bad sites, clean up the thing– those with any familiarity with how the thing works realize that it would be beyond doing at this point. They are lucky to regulate it as little as they do, which is mainly putting out fires in combating viruses and hacking, and scratching the surface of child pornography.

Over the years there have been thousands of sites that displayed the joke of being “The End of the Internet”… I posted one myself years ago. The usually adage was that you’ve traveled it all (which you can never, and don’t want to ever do), so now shut the thing down and go outside and enjoy the rest of your life.

Most of us realize the wisdom in that, and I suspect at some future time we will look back on it as advice we should have taken more seriously. As a people we’re largely unarmed and naïve wanderers in a strange land. As a society we will try to pick the flowers and avoid the land mines. I don’t know if we’ll make it safely across or not.

But they’re paying me… what’s your excuse?

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5 thoughts on “Wandering in a Strange Land

  1. Well, one part of your blog really caught my eye! (No, not the part about rating porn sites!) I’m talking about your comments on how easy it is for any old hacker to set up a website and purport to put forth the truth on everything under the sun. I ran across such a site just the other day, claiming to have the best news coverage anywhere. One of their items claimed that in November of this year, the U.S. of A. is going to elect either a black man, a white woman or a geriatric senior a full decade older than YOU as president!! Can you imagine?? How gullible do they think we are??

  2. Re: Google. My experience with many internet users is that they are no more able to conduct a meaningful search on Google than they would be using the card file of their local library (if card files still exist.) The problem that I see over and over again with people who come to my website and ask questions is that they don’t really know how to select the right “keywords” for their research and thus come up with results that are either too broad (too many irrelevant links) or no links at all. While Google is a wonderful “library” for research purposes, like any tool, its proper use must be understood.

    And don’t get me on the subject of people “web browsing” from cellphones or whatever and then trying to place orders without being able to see what they are doing. The WORST are middle aged executives with their boss’s American Express card and their Blackberry!

  3. True about the search capabilities, Phil. I see that everyday in my Google work– searches for unbelievably broad topics, ambiguous, etc. Part of my focus has to be to interpret their query, which at times is rather difficult! A number of them in the work list the last day or so concerned a search(hopefully by a Grade 4 student) for “Louis Pasture”… strangely enough it comes up with a number of ebay listings where the seller couldn’t spell “Pasteur” either!

    Francis

  4. As far as spelling mistakes go, I’m rather certain that Google takes those into account, and suggests corrected versions (not just by means of the “did you mean . . . ” and will also expand what it thinks is acronyms and search using the full meaning of the acronym (at least what it thinks the meaning might be). I find that if you know how to phrase it, it’s certainly a great deal more accurate than a dusty old card catalogue 😉 Hehe. The only weakness is all those websites with entirely inaccurate search tags (which I’m sure you’re even now working on fixing!).

  5. Google doesn’t seem to do much in the way of spelling correction, as the “Louis Pasture” situation above indicates, other than the “did you mean” for common phrases (I don’t think that applies to less common ones). I even get search queries diverted to other sites for things like “something,com” rather than .com— it doesn’t even correct the use of the comma in an obvious situation (and the user frequently goes to a spam site, suggesting that someone takes advantage of the keyboard slip). The most frequent problem area, and easiest to avoid, is the lack of using “” when searching for a multi-word term that you anticipate (and want) to be connected in the result.

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