The Time Problem of the Internet

July 12th, 2008 | By Patrick

For a long time now, something about the internet has bothered me. The internet on the whole doesn’t bother me, but there’s an aspect of the internet that bothers me. Quite simply, where does one start with the internet? The internet has a time problem.

The internet’s biggest time problem is that there’s no starting point. It’s the most flexible version of recorded history, but it doesn’t have all of recorded history on it. You can find information on almost any topic in the world, but there’s no beginning and no end. For example, just imagine being a completely new user of the internet. Where would you start?

(I did a funny search on Google as part of my research for this post. I Google’d “how to use the internet,” and there are actually a few results for this. Of course there would be results, but isn’t it funny that someone would have had to know how to use the internet and a search engine in order to find these sites in the first place? I digress…)

The point is, we often talk about how the internet has put the world’s information at our fingertips. We can search to our heart’s desire and find detailed information on a seemingly infinite number of topics. That’s just the point though, isn’t it? We’re always searching.

Before the internet, if I wanted to learn something, I picked up a book and read from page 1 and read it to the end. Compared to a similar process on the internet, I’d start at page 25, then read pages 1-10, a bit of 76, n-1, and then I’d assume I’d read enough.

Our information is fragmented. It’s disjointed in time and sequence. I’ve been working to improve my web development skills and have felt this first hand. There’s no one place for me to start and finish. I find myself reading blog posts about advanced topics before I know the basics. I find information that’s outdated but must rely on intuition and error checking to be sure. Random topics rise to the top of the search pile based on a popular blogger. Who’s to know where this information should fit in time? Where’s page 1?

When you visit a blog, you’re presented with the most recent blog post. I’m not sure a new visitor always wants to read the most recent content. Whenever I find a blog I really like, I try to read a sampling of the earliest posts as well as popular posts. I want to know where the blog started, where it’s gone and how long it’s taken to get there. The archives help a bit, but for my purposes, they’re often ordered backwards each month (including Enter Venture’s archive).

No one’s really figured out how to organize the web this way, but I have the feeling plenty of people would appreciate it if someone started putting a bit of chronology to the web’s information. There’s an enormous opportunity to organize the world’s educational matter this way, but it doesn’t stop there. A chronologically organized archive of the world’s newspapers and history would be pretty swell too.

One of the biggest drivers of the internet’s time problem is the emphasis on NOW. Sites have to deliver fresh content. As users, we’re inundated with up-to-the-second information and are fickle with our attention.

You see this problem manifest itself everywhere. It’s not entirely unique to the web, but news stories last barely a week before there’s a new NOW to focus on. There’s no time to reflect on what happened last week. If you use an RSS reader, you find yourself overwhelmed with articles that have to be read now, else suffer the dreaded Google Reader’s 1,000+ unread items. You have that Twitter account with all of your friends and followers that have your attention. Your Facebook chat window. Friendfeed. Yoono. Gchat. Email. Now. Now. NOW.

That brings up my final issues with the time problem of the internet. It doesn’t represent all of time! Remember those nearly 6 centuries of recorded history prior to the internet? You know, the ones that aren’t on anyone’s Facebook feed? Between then and the internet era, there are a few important things you should know about. Some of this information is worth at least as much of your attention as “Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter.”

I love what Google is doing with its Books Search Library Project, but it’s just a start. Just imagine what it’d really be like if we had access to all of the world’s information, and if we organized it in a way that suited the way we both made sense of time and navigate the internet. Before the internet, it took a lot of effort to record history. Ideas were condensed and forced to be organized in scrolls, books, and libraries. Only the best ideas rose to the top. It’s not just a time problem, it’s a bit of a sequence problem, a focus problem, and a hubris problem.

What’s that they say about those who forget history? They’re doomed to forg… — sorry, hold on, someone just commented on my wall.

Posted in Ideas Comments

  • OK. I finally have a chance to respond appropriately to this. You're right to point out that I'm a bit inconsistent with this post. My ideas evolved as I began writing, but my essential point can be boiled down to the fact that I can't replicate a book's learning experience with online tools just yet.

    The index is just a starting point. We use an index to reach the information we really want, not to absorb it, and this is true both in traditional libraries as well as the internet. On the web, Google is our index, but once I get to the books (read: websites), it leaves something to be desired. This is the step I'm talking about. I can read about recorded time in the same way that I can with books. I need something like the Amazon Kindle for the web.

    The other time problem I'm talking about is the overwhelming focus on the present. I'm not sure that's a time problem so much as a focus problem. If we looked at a graph of the amount of information on the web related to history, we'd see a dot-com-like bubble around the creation of the internet and a slow trickle leading up to now. If we don't bring our past history onto our current medium, I think we'll have distorted history (and Wikipedia just doesn't cut it). Isn't it inevitable that this will somehow come back to haunt us?
  • Eric, great reply. I'll need a bit of time to give that the response it deserves, but in the meantime I fixed my typo. (I actually fixed two typos. Don't tell anyone.)
  • Eric Jacobsen
    Patrick my man, you are so right. However, in your last two sentences, you do two things - you commit the only typo in the entire post ("What’s that the say?") and you pointed out that the premise articulated in the introduction of your article is too narrow for the conclusion; that it is not just a time problem, as you and me (as a reader) both seem to realize as we read from paragraph 1 to paragraph 12 of your post. I can only assume that you wrote the introduction before you wrote each successive paragraph...or did you jump back and forth and edit along the way? Are the contents of this posting in chronological order or is it organized in some....other way?

    Humans make sense of information in a number of ways, in terms of logical sequencing and cross-referencing, and there is not necessarily one "best" way. For examples found in your post - either demonstrated in your style as an author or pointed out as part of your commentary:

    1. Standard narrative organization - An introduction with the premise and subject of the information sets expectations, subsequent chapters, pages, paragraphs, etc. provide supporting detail, grouped in clusters that resemble arguments which build upon one another sequentially--all building toward a comprehensive understanding by the reader of the broad subject laid out in an introduction. A conclusion and afterward often closes the loop, and tells the reader what, if anything, from the author's point of view, is left unresolved at the time of publication. Date of publication is something that you will find in just about any book, magazine or periodical published since the dewey decimal system was created, if not earlier, but I'm no library scientist.

    2. Chronologically. History jumps around by topic and many unrelated things are happening in parallel. Ancient Mayans new much more about time, astronomy and science than did Dark Age Europeans and probably most 21st Century American school children. At any given moment, a person could be writing a well-researched masterpiece that advances human knowledge of a subject or discipline and accounts for all prior knowledge through references, while some other person could be writing a blog posting about the same subject based solely on their personal observations (no offense). These events - and human knowledge in general, follows no set path. As you point out, knowledge is discovered, documented (or not) and lost (or preserved) and may or may not be shared, but you are absolutely right - we do need to get our collective act together (or create tools/standards to facilitate this) if we intend to make all of this information as usable and retrievable as possible given any number of filtering, indexing or sorting criteria. Again, I'm no library scientist, but I do seem to recall a few books I've read (some of them pre-dating your Facebook Wall), having things called Editions (each subsequent edition superceding those that came before them), Bibliographies (which also contain dates of publication).

    3. Indexing. Information in books, on the web, and even on good signs in public spaces, are often indexed by topic, chronology, keyword, location, language, zip code, familial/heirarchical orders (parent/child, etc.).....the possibilities are endless. I think this is where your realization that it is more that just a time problem points toward solutions - many of which exist but are simply underutilized today. Many search tools can search and sort by one or two of these criteria at a time. If search results could be searched, filtered, and sorted according to any combination of these criteria, it would be much easier for someone with a mind to research this problem of asynchronous information to determine how much of it is organization and how much of it is truly a "gap". Indexes have also existed for centuries, and a good index will save you from having to read a book from beginning to end as you suggested. Strangely, to do so you always have to start in the back. However, there's a mini-index in the front of most books also - the table of contents, which will usually tell you up front which page the index can be found on.


    So in short, I think your conclusion and points about the need to sort information chronologically on the web is valid, but that your conclusion that it’s not just a time problem, it’s a bit of a sequence problem, a focus problem, and a hubris problem - is the more important one, and should probably be the subject of a broader work. Since Library scientists have been hard at work on this problem for years and I think that in collaboration with IT people a solution can be found to your web conundra. They can most likely help with just about everything except for the hubris.
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