roundtable: Re: New way to label information on the Internet

roundtable: Re: New way to label information on the Internet

Re: New way to label information on the Internet

Joseph Ransdell (Joseph_Ransdell@ttacs.ttu.edu)
Fri, 22 Dec 1995 20:23:47 +0000 

Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 20:23:47 +0000
From: "Joseph Ransdell" <Joseph_Ransdell@ttacs.ttu.edu>
Subject: Re: New way to label information on the Internet
To: roundtable@cni.org
Message-Id: <01HZ4D1CTYDEHSJHRF@ttacs.ttu.edu>


Brent Wall says:
> 
> I sell the Web to my folks here in Leon County as a
> productivity tool.  To wit:  if you need info on x, do this or that
> web search. I do this all of the time, and, frankly, the results are
> less than spectacular.  

I should think so.  But I am wondering why you sell the Web in that 
way?  Are the people in Leon County not interested in the 
communicational potentialities of the web, for example, and perceive 
the internet as nothing but a place where you go to acquire 
information?  I wouldn't expect much sales from a sales pitch 
designed to appeal only to information acquirers.  Limited human
appeal in that.   


> I try to sell the web to my folks as a productivity tool.  As a
> part-time academic I tend to look to a variety of professional
> journals, but most are not available on the net.  Thus, a serious
> literature search is still a very iffy enterprise.

Why not sell it to them as a communicational tool?  There are things 
to be done on the net and the web besides reading professional 
journals.  Serious students of literature can talk to each other 
about literature, for example.  That can be productive.  Point out to 
them also that the web has the remarkable characteristic that anybody 
in Leon County, for example, that can connect to it can establish 
themselves on it by constructing a web site, with all tools provided 
for doing so at no charge, and they can fill it with as much 
information or other attractive elements as they want to go to the 
trouble of writing URL addresses for, and with a little imagination 
they can have people by the thousands dropping by to see what is there.  
If they have special interests, academic or otherwise, that they want 
to communicate with similarly minded people about they can do that.  And 
so forth.  There must surely be some people in Leon County who see that 
there is some value in communication, and it wouldn't take long for 
any interested persons to perceive that the people who are driving 
web development are packing it with as many communicational tools as 
they can as quickly as they can.  That is rather exciting to people 
who are interested in communication.  People who are just interested 
in acquiring or dispensing information may not see the point, but
so what?  They must surely be a rather small percentage of the people 
who might be interested in the internet or the web.  

But perhaps I am missing the point, and there was some special reason 
why only information hounds were being targeted for the sales pitch.
(My mail has been more than usually unreliable the past couple of 
months for some reason and I may have missed the context.  If so, my 
apologies for the irrelevance.)

Joseph Ransdell
Dept of Philosophy
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409
ransdell@hub.ofthe.net
bnjmr@ttacs.ttu.edu

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