Page 205 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

172 Part 3 Putting Theory Into Practice

The Internet

Lest you think otherwise, we use the Internet daily. Besides e-mail, we use it to
post lecture notes and slides on our course homepages, visit chat rooms external
to the physical class, and research topics about which we are interested. How-
ever, we differ from many of our students in how we go about using Internet
technology to fi nd information that will help us with our research and writing.
Simply put, our research skills were honed while wandering through brick
and mortar libraries that featured drawers of card catalogs arranged by the
Dewey Decimal System, stacks of bound books, printed journals, and even mi-
croforms we viewed with the aid of projection machines. Thus our “search” for
information relevant to a paper we were writing or to a study we planned was
largely limited to what could be housed physically within the confi nes of the
library building.
One benefi t of this fact was selectivity. Because space was limited, librarians
and other scholars served as gatekeepers who determined what information
should be let in and what information should be kept out. Although this system
was far from democratic, its purpose was to make sure that the information we
found was current, relevant, authoritative, accurate, and explicit in its purpose.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, chinks in the brick and mortar of this sys-
tem of warehousing and distributing information were becoming increasingly
apparent. The sheer amount of scholarly information was increasing exponen-
tially, and it could neither be evaluated as quickly as needed nor constrained by
the physical space that had been built to contain it.
Needless to say, this is no longer a problem. Breakthroughs in information
storage and retrieval have largely solved the physical limitations of the tradi-
tional library. And personal computers in combination with the World Wide Web
have made virtual libraries a reality for most college students and professors.
If that were all there was to the story, our task in this chapter would be much
simpler.
But as we know, there’s more. The same breakthroughs that made virtual
libraries possible also have made possible the Open Internet. Yet the Open In-
ternet hasn’t simply made the development and dissemination of information
more democratic; it has also eliminated many of the fi ltering processes that let
valid information in and kept erroneous information out of every conceivable
channel of communication, including speeches. In addition, the huge increase
in the volume of resources has buried the researcher with information that needs
to be evaluated.
surface web The Internet is actually made up of several sections. The Surface Web,
(Open Internet) Web sites sometimes called the Open Internet, is searchable by Web search engines such
freely accessible to all as Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo. This part of the Internet often allows you
users over the Internet. free access to information. The other part of the Internet is the Deep Web,
which is sometimes referred to as the Proprietary Internet. The Deep Web
deep web
contains information in private databases that are accessible over the Internet
(Proprietary Internet) Web
but are not intended to be located (crawled) by search engines. For example,
sites accessible over the
some universities, government agencies, and other organizations maintain data-
Internet only to autho-
bases of information that were not created for general public access and do not
rized users and often at
a cost. allow search engines to index them. Other material on the Deep Web is from
commercial publishers who require that you access it through a paid subscrip-