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… is the internet, of course.
OK, I’m going there. At the risk of being swallowed by the online universe and spit out the other end as a decrepit, hopelessly out of date, moldering relic of the newspaper past — all of which I am, by the way — I’m going to say it:
The digital world is creating more problems than it’s solving.
There. I feel better.
And I’m not even going to try to reconcile my argument with the likely truth that I’m wrong. Let somebody else make that case.
All I want to do is point out the astounding work being done by geniuses to create massive frameworks for digital information that, when they fail, the rest of us can’t fix.
Compare, say, Nevada’s online healthcare system or, more recently, its Common Core testing structure to Its state library and archive.
Libraries are organized by the Dewey Decimal System, which is understood by only trained librarians — a highly structured means of sorting millions of variables.
The rest of us need a simple guide, like a card catalogue, to actually find the book for which we’re searching. (We can also wander around exploring the library and discover all kinds of fascinating stuff, but that’s a different metaphor.)
What would happen if some prankster broke into the library at night and shuffled the card catalogue like a poker deck? Or took it out back and burned it in a trash bin?
Well, it would take a librarian or several to reconstruct the card catalogue. In the meantime, the library would remain open. The rest of us would be capable of finding the books we sought — not as efficiently, of course, and probably with some level of frustration. But the library itself would be useful to anyone who can read.
Now, let’s consider what happens when a system like the dearly departed Nevada Health Link or the currently defunct Common Core system crashes.
Ninety-nine percent of us would be left in the dark. The information isn’t retrievable, and we have no hope of fixing it. We would need experts in computer science just to look at it.