Form and Content: When the Internet Is Not the Internet
Ann Grafstein
Hofstra University
United States
Paper: 1/2 hour
Convergence & Continuity
Librarians are all too familiar with the seemingly intractable confusion students display between the information that is freely available on the Internet and that which is only available through the research databases to which libraries subscribe. Librarians' attempts to explain the differences between the 'free' Internet and subscription databases often meet with minimal understanding.
Librarians and educators tend to ascribe students' tendency to begin any information search with the Internet to a variety of reasons, including failure to understand the research process, and even intellectual laziness. This presentation will argue that while these–and other factors–may play a role, there is a cognitive basis underlying the confusion between subscription research databases and Internet sites that are retrieved through Google, Yahoo!, AskJeeves, etc. The presentation will claim that the confusion results in part from a general tendency to conflate the technological medium through which content is delivered with the content itself.
Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan broadly popularized the view that the content of a message cannot be separated from the medium in which it is encoded. Other scholars have argued more recently, within the context of an electronic environment, that technology (for example, searching software interfaces, or the way knowledge is structured within a search system) directly affects how users seek information. John Curry, Sherie Haderlie, Ta-Wei Ku, et. al. examine the role of hypertext in learning, and argue that readers interact differently with a text containing hypertext than with a traditional sequentially arranged text.
The position to be adopted in this presentation is that the hypertext medium–that characterizes both the hits retrieved from an Internet search engine and those retrieved from a subscription database–predisposes students to conflate the different nature of the content that each provides. Performing a search on an Internet search engine yields a set of hyperlinked titles, as does performing a search on a subscription database. In each case, clicking on a hyperlink opens another document. The unifying property for the student, then, is hypertext. The hypertext structure shared by both the free web site and research databases becomes the salient feature that overshadows the qualitative differences in content. It will be argued that the key to educating students about the differences between the Internet and subscription databases lies in teaching them to separate the technological vehicle through which content is delivered from the content itself.
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