| English Composition | Spring 2000 | Palomar College |
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Many people have a similar first experience with the Internet. After upgrading their hardware, finding a service provider, installing all the appropriate software and then spending hours or days fiddling with settings just to get their connection working, they finally get logged in, and ... nothing. Depending on their choice of browser, they're probably confronted with Microsoft's or Netscape's home page, both devoted primarily to computer industry gossip. If they're using one of the bigger, more user-friendly ISPs such as America On-Line or Compuserve, they may be presented with a menu of recommended sites to visit. If they're really unlucky, they may just be staring at a command prompt. In any case, all the fireworks they've heard about -- the up-to-the-minute news, the raging debates, the online texts, the giant databases, the omnipresent smut -- are nowhere to be seen, and there's no clear indication of how one is supposed to find them.
So the new Internet user sits there, pulse rate slowly falling to normal. They lamely click on a few links, and are rewarded with more of the same, or perhaps they get a message saying that they need to "install a plug-in" before they can go any further. Ultimately they give up, and resolve to have a savvy friend show them what to do.
The problem is, people expect the Net to be like TV, and it's not. TV is a centralized medium, with just a few main providers who select material designed to appeal to large segments of the population. In addition, since TV is so well-established and standardized, all the settings you need are already built into your TV, and you can go to the supermarket and buy a magazine with a complete listing of all the week's offerings. The advent of cable has shaken this picture up a bit, but the basic situation is still the same.
By contrast, the Net is like a million channels of cable, with no TV Guide, no ratings authority, and long cryptic names instead of channel numbers. It's also not as passive a medum as TV. Even when you find something you like, you can't just sit and watch; you're constantly presented with choices among hyperlinks, some of which promise to take you off to entirely different topics. It's as if, while you were watching TV, a little ad appeared in the corner, saying "Hey! There's something more interesting going on on Channel 8! We've got explosions! Come take a look!"
What all this means is that, to get any real use out of the Net, you have to bring more to your browsing experience than just a desire to be entertained and/or informed. Once you know your way around, it is possible to spend as many hours as you want just wandering from site to site, surfing the Net the same way people channel-surf with TV. Most of the time, though, you'll find that you get much better results if you start out with some idea of what you're looking for. Do you want information on cars, or music, or plastic surgery? Do you want to play online games, or make travel reservations, or buy hypoallergenic gourmet pet food? Or do you just want to find someplace with you can chat with people, and maybe start one of those online relationships that they've been showing in TV commercials recently? The more focused your search process is, the more likely it is that you'll find something that'll be worth returning to again and again.
In later sections of DI, you'll learn techniques that can help you search the Net (as well as more traditional resources, such as libraries) more efficiently. But before we get into that, you need to have a good sense of what's out there, so that you can figure out what you might want to search for! By now, most people are familiar with the idea of a Web site, but there are many different kinds of Web sites, and there are also a large number of other resources on the Net that can't be accessed via a Web browser. Each of the following links will introduce you to a different type of Net resource, as well as the special software (if any) that you'll need to use it, and the special techniques you'll need to find information of that type. As usual, you can choose how deeply you want to pursue each topic, based on your personal interests; but try to get at least a basic sense of all of them, because you'll want to have a full toolkit for the next section, which deals with more general research techniques.
[to be covered in the future:]
| Written by Ilya Farber | Copyright © 1998 Encylopaedia Britannica, Inc |
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This page was last edited: 08/17/04