Doublethink
As more and more reference material becomes digital, a greater percentage will have never been on paper and it will be too expensive to make a hard copy. Unlike ten years ago, much new digital material created these days lives its entire existence on the computer. It's inevitable, really. The economics are such that it's too expensive to make physical printouts, plus the hard copy has greater utility with backing up, searching, publishing on the web, etc.
Like is Wikipedia even printed out anywhere? It changes so often I can't believe that you could even get a definitive hard copy.
What worries me about this is that disinformation, bad facts or just plain lying might be difficult to check up on. What happens if the government or someone else just changes historical facts to suit the expediency and current need? Several people, including senators and congressmen have been involved in a quiet war to favorably edit their Wikipedia biographies--even to the point of making things up or leaving out key facts.
This concept is part of a concept called Doublethink, and is, of course, an integral part of Orwell's 1984.
I worry about the changing quality and essential verifiability of online reference material and its potential for 3rd party manipulation. As hoary and antiquated as paper is, it's hard to change and once everyone has, say, a dictionary in their house, it's very difficult to change the meaning of a word to suit the political moment. If there was only one dictionary and it was online, it would be child's play.
Posted on August 07, 2006
