The information desert.
People without a scientific background might be surprised by how little scientific information is actually available online.
I have a background in three sciences: archaeology (anthropology), paleontology, and geology, in that order. I have a bachelors in archaeology, an avid avocational interest in paleontology, and a handful of undergrad classes in geology, plus some fieldwork in all three. Whenever I try to Google for a fact or a theoretical refresher in these fields, I'm inevitably disappointed by the paucity of relevant and accurate information available to the general public. It's certainly a far cry from all the hype surrounding the internet as an educational tool. The problem is, many casual internet users still believe the hype.
Primary sources (with a few exceptions, such as PLoS One) are locked away behind expensive for-profit gatekeepers like JSTOR and EBSCO. Unless you can shell out $30 for every single paper you wish to access, you can only do serious research from an institutional campus. Secondary sources, such as disciplinary surveys and reference works, are expensive and seldom available at bookstores. Tertiary sources (popular books and magazines) are widely available but unreliable, sometimes outright misleading. The public internet is a quaternary source at best. But the casual internet user is often oblivious to the problem. More than once I've encountered the attitude that "If Wikipedia doesn't back you up, you're lying."
Archaeology, paleontology, and geology are poorly represented on Wikipedia. I barely scratched the surface of cultural ecology as an undergrad, despite taking an entire course on the topic and specializing in zooarchaeology, which is partly grounded in cultural ecology as a theoretical perspective. This is the entirety of Wikipedia's information on cultural ecology in anthropology:
Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the Haida tradition of the potlatch on the Canadian west-coast).
I exaggerate, but only a little. The rest of the article goes on to say "here are some books that were written about it." The article also mentions the critique against environmental determinism, which brings the topic up to date with 1970 or so. It's a classic example of what we were told in every single course: Wikipedia is useful as a starting point, nothing more. The real information is still in books and scientific journals and other primary sources.
The article on zooarchaeology is even worse. By far the longest section of the article is "Naming the discipline." My entire field of study, in which I wouldn't even begin to approach proficiency until I obtained my PhD after twelve years of undergraduate and graduate study, is reduced to about five sentences. If, god forbid, I ever wanted to educate someone about my discipline, my only real online resource would be a three page PDF maintained by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. And even that only addresses positive information: "You can use this discipline to address these general questions." None of the critiques, problems, rival perspectives, controversies, and debates -- all of the things that make science what it is -- are evident in those three pages.
That, I think, is one of the unavoidable problems of posting educational materials online. The internet is a medium that emphasizes flash and brevity over substance. With a book, if you're a competent and conscientious author, you have room to lay out the various aspects of a controversy; even if you subscribe to a specific position, you can provide your readers with enough information to come to their own opinions. With the internet, the best you can do is say that there is a controversy, and maybe post a list of references that your readers will never bother to read.
And this feeds into what I postulate is an informational correlate of the Dunning-Kruger effect: The less information that a person has, the more unshakable their opinions, and the less receptive they are to new information. "Well, show me a link" becomes (in the minds of some internet uses) the ultimate refutation. If the information is simply not available online -- or, worse, if a snippet of a rival perspective is posted somewhere without context -- your argument is pretty much finished. Even though you may know far more about the subject at hand.
Anyway, this got out of hand. I intended to write a simple introduction to another topic I wished to discuss, but this is long enough as it is. Maybe I'll write something about my original topic later on.
I have a background in three sciences: archaeology (anthropology), paleontology, and geology, in that order. I have a bachelors in archaeology, an avid avocational interest in paleontology, and a handful of undergrad classes in geology, plus some fieldwork in all three. Whenever I try to Google for a fact or a theoretical refresher in these fields, I'm inevitably disappointed by the paucity of relevant and accurate information available to the general public. It's certainly a far cry from all the hype surrounding the internet as an educational tool. The problem is, many casual internet users still believe the hype.
Primary sources (with a few exceptions, such as PLoS One) are locked away behind expensive for-profit gatekeepers like JSTOR and EBSCO. Unless you can shell out $30 for every single paper you wish to access, you can only do serious research from an institutional campus. Secondary sources, such as disciplinary surveys and reference works, are expensive and seldom available at bookstores. Tertiary sources (popular books and magazines) are widely available but unreliable, sometimes outright misleading. The public internet is a quaternary source at best. But the casual internet user is often oblivious to the problem. More than once I've encountered the attitude that "If Wikipedia doesn't back you up, you're lying."
Archaeology, paleontology, and geology are poorly represented on Wikipedia. I barely scratched the surface of cultural ecology as an undergrad, despite taking an entire course on the topic and specializing in zooarchaeology, which is partly grounded in cultural ecology as a theoretical perspective. This is the entirety of Wikipedia's information on cultural ecology in anthropology:
Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the Haida tradition of the potlatch on the Canadian west-coast).
I exaggerate, but only a little. The rest of the article goes on to say "here are some books that were written about it." The article also mentions the critique against environmental determinism, which brings the topic up to date with 1970 or so. It's a classic example of what we were told in every single course: Wikipedia is useful as a starting point, nothing more. The real information is still in books and scientific journals and other primary sources.
The article on zooarchaeology is even worse. By far the longest section of the article is "Naming the discipline." My entire field of study, in which I wouldn't even begin to approach proficiency until I obtained my PhD after twelve years of undergraduate and graduate study, is reduced to about five sentences. If, god forbid, I ever wanted to educate someone about my discipline, my only real online resource would be a three page PDF maintained by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. And even that only addresses positive information: "You can use this discipline to address these general questions." None of the critiques, problems, rival perspectives, controversies, and debates -- all of the things that make science what it is -- are evident in those three pages.
That, I think, is one of the unavoidable problems of posting educational materials online. The internet is a medium that emphasizes flash and brevity over substance. With a book, if you're a competent and conscientious author, you have room to lay out the various aspects of a controversy; even if you subscribe to a specific position, you can provide your readers with enough information to come to their own opinions. With the internet, the best you can do is say that there is a controversy, and maybe post a list of references that your readers will never bother to read.
And this feeds into what I postulate is an informational correlate of the Dunning-Kruger effect: The less information that a person has, the more unshakable their opinions, and the less receptive they are to new information. "Well, show me a link" becomes (in the minds of some internet uses) the ultimate refutation. If the information is simply not available online -- or, worse, if a snippet of a rival perspective is posted somewhere without context -- your argument is pretty much finished. Even though you may know far more about the subject at hand.
Anyway, this got out of hand. I intended to write a simple introduction to another topic I wished to discuss, but this is long enough as it is. Maybe I'll write something about my original topic later on.