Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

2.5 The Internet as a source of information
Unit 2 Using information sources
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

The Internet offers files about authors, recordings of authors speaking, files that contain whole novels or poems that you can copy, pictures of original printings of texts, critical essays and other scholarly information, and of course files that just give any kind of relevant general knowledge. Library catalogues and the sites of bookshops and publishers can help fill out information about a particular book. Contents of journals, abstracts of articles, and lists of articles cited can be found at particular sites. The cost of this richness of information is that you have to know how to find the files you need. One approach to this is to consult a source (printed or on the Internet) that lists the addresses of files that are relevant to your interests; your library might have some suggestions of places to start. The second approach is to embrace the randomness of the Internet by using a search engine such as Google. You might, for example, ask the search engine to find files with the phrase ’Call me Ishmael’ in them (the first sentence in Moby Dick). For the second edition of this book, such a search showed up 451 files containing this phrase; now for the third edition six years later, when I conduct such a search I find 26,500 files: this is an indication of how the Internet has grown, a fact both exciting and problematic, making more information available but also hiding the relevant information under a pile of junk.

One of the mantras or mottos of the Internet is that ’information wants to be free’. This has several meanings. First, it applies the pathetic fallacy to information itself; like the Romantics who attributed human desires and feelings to the landscape, contemporary ’Internet Romantics’ treat information as though it is a living entity; like many kinds of non-literal thinking (or metaphor), this can be a useful way of thinking about information. Second, it suggests that information should be free of charge or payment, and thus is part of a struggle over who controls what information and how they will make it available; in practice, publishers and other controllers of information can charge such high fees for access that many libraries, and hence users, are unable to afford them. Hence it is worth knowing about projects that, often government- or university-funded, make useful information freely available, such as MIT’s open courseware project (which aims to make all teaching materials used at MIT freely available), or the University of Toronto’s ’representative poetry on-line’. Third, and most profoundly, it suggests that information wants to be free of restraints and control, both in being able to ’go’ anywhere (or more specifically be accessed from anywhere), and in being free from editors or censors. The ’Wikipedia’ project, which is an encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is an example of this notion in action. The notion that information wants to be free raises questions about intellectual property rights (the ownership of what a person invents), and about the truthfulness or accuracy of information; particularly on the Internet, there is often no guarantee that information is provided lawfully or accurately. In contrast, one of the guarantees that is (implicitly) given when information is bought is that this information will be correct.