the greycat blog

You’re here reading this blog, but who are you? Quantcast knows, and although their information is ’sparse’ they declare that my site ‘reaches fewer than 2000 U.S. monthly people’. That’s monthly people, you understand. More meaningless nonsense here.

The theme of the January 2008 issue of All The Rage is ‘forbidden knowledge’. Highlights include an interview with Greg Stekelman, better known as themanwhofellasleep, some borrowed opinions from Oliver Holtaway, and typically classy ramblings from Sylvia Bellini. And there’s something from me:

Modern technology, the googleization of the world, has made more knowledge available more easily than ever before, and has led to the concept of ‘forbidden knowledge’ itself becoming devalued. Every conspiracy theorist now has a website, repositories of convoluted nonsense that feed off each other and off the internet itself. Whether it’s 9/11, UFOs, the New World Order or the satanic nature of bar codes, the Truth is but a click away - ‘google it, people!’

‘Forbidden knowledge in the internet age’ can be found on pages 3-4 of the new issue (PDF file) of All The Rage.

Picture: Detail of photograph depicting Eve in the Garden of Eden by Jean Agélou (1878-1921). [Source]

There’s an interesting article by Guy Kewney at The Register today: ‘Who’s archiving IT’s history?’. Kewney points out the difficulty of finding accurate archiving on the web. Many sites hardly archive at all, or only started recently; even where content is archived, context and presentation has often changed completely. Add to this the difficulties of documents disappearing, links going bad and images vanishing and you have a very unreliable, partial and perhaps even misleading record.

This isn’t some failing of the web, but a result of its inherent nature. It is a slippery, unstable, unreliable thing. Yet the received wisdom is that once something is out there on the web, it’s out there for ever. And the converse is also widely held to be true, i.e. that if you can’t find it on the web, it doesn’t exist. A remarkable instance of this is discussed in an article by academic Mark LeVine in the Orange County Weekly for 19 March 2003 (and safely archived on the OC Weekly site). LeVine was being interviewed by talk-show host Dennis Prager; LeVine said, in answer to a question, that a particular thing had happened in 1996. Prager, however, accused LeVine of lying. The reason? He’d looked on Google and found no trace of the event LeVine had cited. ‘I was stunned by Prager’s remark’, says LeVine, ’more specifically by the idea that a minute-long Internet search would provide sufficient evidence to pass judgment on a historical claim’. Yet is it surprising that such a delusional view of the web persists when the gods of Google themselves have proclaimed their mission as ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’? Short of sending their robots to crawl the contents of all human souls it is very difficult to see how Google can make the world’s information ‘universally accessible’ (even if that were desirable), and as for compelling it to be ‘useful’, I simply don’t understand what they mean. But such megalomaniacal nonsense helps sustain the misconception that the web is itself ‘the information’, rather than (like all other media) a means of accessing a limited amount of information, in certain limited ways.

The problem isn’t that the web’s record of things, like every other archive, is incomplete and misleading. The problem is that it is believed not to be.