The Web Makes Me Smart

Remember the novelty of the web? You pressed a word underlined in blue, and it would take you to some other place. How novel! And you'd search in Alta Vista, which used to be the top search engine of the day (yes, before Google!).

But who could really estimate the true impact of the web. Many factors made this possible. The Internet itself, of course, is one big reason. We needed someway of networking, and this was the clear choice. Then, there was the browser, the killer app of the web that let us see things in pictures, not just text, a la Archie and the old Internet apps (yes, before the Web!). And then we got sound, and animations, and more!

However, other things also had to happen. People needed computers in the home. Thus, when you could buy a computer for under $1000, and now, even under $500, people were less reluctant to shell out the money. When people saw that email (the original Internet killer app) could be managed by others (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail), this gave incentive to have a computer so you could check your email every few minutes.

Less important, but still useful, was cheap high speed Internet. True, $40 a month or so is a bit pricey, but wow, so much better than dial-up. Still, dial-up is good enough to get on the Internet.

HTML was another innovation. Sure, it sucks now, but it wasn't hard to learn, and more importantly, browsers didn't hide the HTML source from those who wanted to see plenty of examples.

Once people saw the convenience of the web, they could start getting information. And perhaps the most commonly sought information (at least among males) is sports. People who can't watch sports (lack of cable, or at work) can, at the very least, keep up with scores, and unlike newspapers, you can keep up in real-time.

That's the missing piece of the equation: content. Someone has to provide content. And that someone can be anyone, you, me, a major newspaper, whoever. Of course, you need the ability to find the content, which is what search engines are for

With all this wealth of information available at your fingertips, you have the ability to read up on all sorts of information that you wouldn't have thought possible. My folks are still the old-fashioned types. They read newspapers. They watch television. Surfing hours on the Internet is still something they don't quite grasp.

So how many of us feel the guilt to have to keep up. I'm reminded of a tale told by a graduate student, some 15 years ago. He said, back in the day (which would have been 10 years earlier), professors rarely wrote their own papers. Which is to say, they rarely typed their own papers. The computer was not in wide use, and even those that were available were too primitive to write papers.

Then, Donald Knuth decided that typesetting was a skill that was disappearing. An aesthete, Knuth wanted his books to look professional. He decided one way to do this was to write a program to do typesetting. This took him on a detour from the books he was writing about the fundamentals of computer science that lasted ten years. I suspect he thought he was saving the field of typography, and that this was worth a detour.

He invented TeX (which he pronounced "Tech", because the "X" was really the Greek letter "chi" pronounced "ki" as in what you would say if you were to say "kite" but not reach the letter "t"). TeX was effectively a programming language. It was a pain to edit correctly, though some managed its arcane structure. Leslie Lamport wrote wrappers on top of it, and named it (partly) after himself, and called it LaTeX, which he didn't advocate a pronunciation. Thus, he would accept "Lah-tech", "Lay-tech" and even "Lay-tex".

Problem is that most people aren't programmers, and so the people most capable of using LaTeX were computer scientists. All of a sudden, this elevated the quality of papers, from a typographical point of view, to great heights. If you can find papers written in the 1970's, you'll see they look like total crap. They use typewriters that are specially used for writing math. It looks awful. But everyone had their technical secretary type their papers.

All of a sudden, those secretaries wouldn't be able to figure out how to use LaTeX and grad students, then professors, began writing their papers in LaTeX and fighting with it, now they can typeset. The time they used to spend doing, you know, research, was now being spent typing papers. Or formatting them.

Point is, now that people could typeset papers, they were doing them, and spending their time making their papers look professional.

Do people feel the same guilt with the web. Now the web brings information to me, I need to go look at it. Back when you had to visit the library and locate papers from across the world, well, you wouldn't do it. A housemate of mine just said he avoids reading papers that aren't available online.

Now think of that. People used to have to locate papers in the library. Look stuff up in one book, see if the library had the right journals, drag the book to the copier, and make copies. Heck, if ain't in Cite-Seer, no one's going to read it.

What does it mean to be smarter anyway? One measure is the amount of information you can cram in your heads. Another is learning how to reason about difficult issues. This could be proving a theorem, writing a program, and analyzing works of literature. I suppose the Web can make you smart there, but more than likely, it's helping you find recipes, note which statistics are important to success in football. You can read more opinions on the web and that can be enlightening.

I enjoy reading film reviews, and some of the best are on the Internet. Has that made me smarter? I don't know.

How much pressure are you feeling to keep up, now that you can?