What’s on the Web — and What’s Not
Many students (and some scholars) seem to act as if the World Wide Web
contains all of human knowledge. One indication of this phenomenon is the
increasing reliance on Web sites by students for research purposes. One survey
reported 93 percent of a student sample said finding information online made
more sense than going to a library (Troll, 2001). The same report suggested that
students are “enamored of the Web. In many cases, if the information is not
available on the Web, it does not exist for them.”
It is not just students who think the Web may contain all knowledge, or
may be approaching that point. An article on the Web as a “super-brain” stated,
“We can safely assume that in the following years virtually the whole of human
knowledge will be made available electronically over the networks” (Heylighten,
1995).
In a similar vein, Web programming expert John Simpson has written,
“The whole body of human knowledge, experience, and understanding
can be expressed in terms of plain text; if something cannot be so
expressed, it might as well not exist” (Simpson, 2002).