Textual instability on the Web

I just had an interesting experience that certainly proves what Warnick states about the instability of text on the Web and also supports the concept that it is a much less useful educational tool than some claim.

I am taking Dr. Newman's seminar on the literature of exile, and we are reading Ulysses. The first night of class, which was Jan. 22, Dr. Newman directed us to a site named The James Joyce Portal, which featured numerous links to various sites discussing topics related to the novel.

That site apparently no longer exists, or at least attempts to reach it for the past two days have been fruitless. I attempted to reach it through my bookmark and through links provided through search engines, and the site is simply not there or inaccessible.

Just how useful is an educational tool if the material can be here one day and gone the next? Actually, that statement is not worded properly. The tool itself offers great potential, but any tool is only as good as the hands it is in. If we use the Web as an educational tool by referring students to links that we ourselves do not control, we are trusting complete strangers with no responsibility to maintain the site to help us educate our students. Personally, I find the Web very useful for posting my own material and distributing it to students via services such as WebBoard and Blackboard, and I rely on databases supplied by my institution's library to offer them research tools. I also, of course, use email to stay in touch with my students. But I never use other Web sites in my courses because they are too unreliable. I've always suspected that something like this incident with the Joyce site could occur. As a graduate student, I find it frustrating. If I were a typical freshman comp student, I would find it a good excuse to not do assigned work.

The Web offers some useful services. Email is wonderful. Online banking is very convenient. Library database links are very valuable, providing that you are a student at a university. The ability to read at least shortened versions of various newspapers is informative. But on the whole, it is largely yet another form of entertainment, another electronic distraction that interferes with students devoting time to more reliable, edited print material. It is largely as much a wasteland as TV, which also once offered great educational potential.

I also found the discussion the other night of the possibility of adding sticky notes to Web pages distressing. How much more useless can we make Web sites? Sure, stickies could be used to direct students and other users to useful sites, but they could also be used to attach distracting, worthless advertisements to those sites, advertisements that may in no way be connected to content and may actually be contrary to anything the page author would endorse. Corporate America would LOVE this ability to advertise for no cost at all. Just look at the amount of junk mail and junk email you receive every day if you think that corporations would hesitate for a minute to just visit every random site they can and put on stickies proclaiming the virtues of their products. People would soon learn to avoid stickies in the same way that they don't open junk mail. (I go to my physical mailbox only once every couple of weeks because all I do is transfer garbage from one recepticle to another, and I do that only so the post office has room to put more garbage in my mailbox so I can throw it away unopened.) Again, what could be a useful tool for information and education would become a tool for garbage transfer, and the useful information supplied by stickies would be missed by most readers because they would learn to not even look at them to avoid being assaulted by "Drink Coke" messages.

If there's one thing we should have learned from the second half of the twentieth century it is this: Never underestimate the ability of human beings to take technology that offers great potential and turn it into crap. That doesn't mean that technological advances should be avoided, but we shouldn't get too enthusiastic about the potential it offers. The seven cardinal virtues have been, are, and always will be more than offset by the seven deadly sins. Technology improves; man, sadly, does not.