Falling Off The Surfboard While Surfing The Internet

Taking the age-old terminology of “Surfing the internet” I think today I can easily state that we’re not surfing the internet, we’re drowning in it. Have you ever tried to step back and figure out how you got to the page that you’re looking at? Sometimes it can be amazing. Just try it with Wikipedia. You really can get lost.

For instance, I started off looking for articles that have been permanently removed from Wikipedia forever, found Wikitruth.org and starting reading about controversy surrounding the founding of Wikipedia, progressed into a controversy about an administrator at Wikipedia who faked his credentials and used them to beat people over the head with in arguments, used Wikipedia to search more about what Wikitruth was all about, then continued immersing myself in the “culture” surrounding Wikipedia. I ended up searching Technorati in the wee-hours of the morning and ended up on an angry blog entry about the existence of God.

It’s absolutely nuts, you can get lost on the internet today. What has struck me about Wikipedia as I traveled along this journey is the fact that even in the most irrelevant and obscure of places, human nature and politics run rampant. Though, in this case Wikipedia is an absolutely huge internet presence and it appears that only at Wikitruth can you peel away some of the layers and peek beneath the surface at some of the things that Wikipedia is not too proud about.

It’s not about information anymore, it’s information about information. Where the information is coming from, why it’s being brought up, who is bringing it up, and what role does it have to play.

It’s a brave new world, and we’re drowning in it.