Proposition: The internet, in its current form today, is a bad medium for transferring information and even worse for transmitting ideas
Hypothesizes about why digital is bad for transferring knowledge
It’s a saturated medium
There’s too much stuff and much of it’s interesting so it’s hard to stay focused on anything.
Everything is one click away
Pages tend to be designed to get you to take some “next action”
Buy
Click
Favorite
Comment
Share
Humans have a limited capacity for attention and the environment is deeply deeply overstimulating
Pop ups
Ads everywhere
Movement that draws the eye and focus away from the ideas
The signal to noise ratio is bad
Expertise isn’t clear and every interaction has to prove its bone fides
Most content is written by amateurs but how do we verify if it’s true or meaningful? Are all opinions equally valid?
Learning on the internet is like trying to learn from gossip
“On the the internet no one knows you’re a dog”
Most pieces of content are written with a profit motive
The individual piece of content aims to make money (7 cute dogs you won’t believe are real vs. A book about dogs from DK)
The medium has been designed to be addictive so we’re never satisfied after finding one answer
Search doesn’t return meaningful results so we’ve learned to accept adjacent answers as substitutes to our genuine query
We’re easily satisfied when something sort of answers a question
The monetization strategy for well written and researched content hasn’t materialized so the best things never make it to the medium
There’s limited capacity for marking up content or adding notes which forces us into a passive mode which makes asking questions difficult
We frequently look at the medium when we have just a second- like in line or on the train
It’snotpossibleto “capture” an idea. When you find something interesting on the internet the best you can do is bookmark the location and hope the interesting idea will still be hanging around when you return
The internet is more technology sophisticated than previous medium. Specially comparing with books the internet should come out clearly on top because it has inherent advantages
The mediums advantages
Interlinked text allows ideas to be connected
Encouragesbigthinkingbyshowinghowinterconnected information and ideas are
Infinite space allows sharing as much content as the author would like to add instead of being limited by the page
Interactivity let’s you explore an idea in depth and simulate different conditions. Books have to present a limited number of variations
Videos let you see
URLs allow returning to very precise location to return to ideas
Pages can be updated when new findings become available. We even have tools for notifying about changes like RSS