Remember the Information Superhighway?
That was the phrase someone came up with back in the ’90s to describe the wealth of information that would be available at a user’s fingertips on the Internet.
The truth is: However useful the Internet can be for finding some information, it is not a superhighway. As far as the technology is concerned, this “highway,” a word suggesting a route characterized by high-speed and efficiency, is more like a dirt road.
We all love Google, right? Well, how many times have you used Google to actually find the answer to a question, only to have this great Engine of Search cough up hundreds, if not thousands, of irrelevant hits based on your keyword or phrase?
For example, I recently went in search of some information about television that would seem to be basic.
Wishing to learn about the growth of reality TV over the last few years, I googled the phrase “How many reality TV shows?” and came up with 272 hits.
I learned nothing. A site called Yahoo Answers demonstrated everything that is wrong with the Internet. On a page titled “How many reality TV shows are there currently in America?” the answers were provided by people who had wandered onto the site. “Too many,” answered one of them. “A buttload!” declared another. Thanks a lot, you’ve been a great help.
Then I asked Google, “How many hours of TV?” in the hopes that the phrase would help me learn how many hours of TV the average person watches.
Something called WikiAnswers came up with this answer: “Almost 20-26 hours per week.” That was it. No context, no source, nothing.
It was also wrong. I found a more credible answer on a proprietary site the Nielsen company provides for journalists. The answer I found there: The average person watches 4 hours and 47 minutes of TV daily, about 32 hours a week. I also learned that the average daily-viewing time has grown every season since 1996-97.
With an average of 107 million people watching prime-time TV everyday (a factoid also found on the Nielsen site), the TV business is still going strong, no matter how many people choose to surf fruitlessly on the Internet’s highway to nowhere.