The Internet's Search Problem

    The internet is amazing. It's one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, and it allows us to search, connect, and access people and information that might not be found as easily in the analog era. However, the internet has grown so large that it presents a problem. There is so much information online that it's difficult to find everything you want, from my various interests in American history to preppy teen culture.

    It seems that many fictional books were written about the experience of perplexity, but none of the related experiences have dedicated websites. All we have about someone's day-to-day life are social media pages, which are harder to index. They say that the algorithm controls our lives... and I wish it were a lot better. For instance, YouTube does not recommend good podcasts to listen to, nor can I find them easily. Searching for good recommendations for these and for books also doesn't work. It's just so sad that we have this vast information superhighway, but it's so congested that it's hard to get from point A to point B.

    For example, when I am researching older cellphones for articles and just for fun, I will see all sorts of ads for cellphones that came out this year. I have to 'go back in time' to find information about them. Finding cool or new YouTubers is difficult as well, as is finding genuinely 'new' sites. It seems that everything has just become harder to find and less open, ironically because we opened the floodgates. In the old days of the Internet, you would have portals that linked to specific sites, like the MSN portal, the AOL portal, CompuServe, etc.

    While these sites built a walled garden, they curated information you may not have seen before and made surfing the web feel like an activity. Coupled with encyclopedia programs, you could probably find anything. This access to new information meant innovation and new ideas continued to flow. But now, walled gardens are broken. The news feed application Pocket is dead, turning into a newsletter. 

When I am searching for something in particular like 'preppy teen life circa 2007,' or 'how did computer hacking work in the 80s,' or 'what is it like having 6,000 followers on Instagram with 4 posts,' 'what's it like being an Instagram influencer with 6-20k followers as a 17 yr old girl?' or 'what were cellphones like circa 2004,' etc....I come up blank. Not because people like this don't exist—preppy is obviously a thing, I know people with 6-20k followers, and phones existed in 2004, etc....and yet there is scant information because these people do not write and the crazies are pontificating on reddit meaning the information is very inaccurate or biased.

    This leads to apathy and loss of innovation, and that's so sad. What new and interesting YA books have come out lately? What new podcasts are out there? God bless and Tech Talk To You Later!!!