Requiem for the Internet

[sdi]

I grew up on the Internet. Back in the 90's, it was a great place for hobbyists—you could search for all sorts of things and learn and learn and learn. Nowadays, it's so cluttered up as to be useless: the signal is drowned in noise.

This bit me hard this weekend. I was doing another pass over my summary of the myth of Isis and Osiris, relating the various pieces of the myth to its Greek equivalents, and trying to use alternative sources to fill in Plutarch's prudish gaps:

These are nearly all the important points of the legend, with the omission of the most infamous of the tales, such as that about the dismemberment of Horus​ and the decapitation of Isis.

Ultimately, I managed to accomplish my goal, but, tellingly, had to do so, painstakingly and by hand, using the books in my own library. (Gold stars go to the Loeb editions of Diodorus Siculus and Manetho, and to E. A. Wallis Budge's Legends of the Gods.) It is obvious in hindsight, but perhaps should have been obvious beforehand, that searching the internet for anything remotely related to "isis beheading" was inadvisable.

The days of the internet being a useful tool are coming to an end in general, but this weekend marks when it ceased to be a useful to me, personally. If you want to know something, endeavor to become a human encyclopedia on some topic, and try to cultivate friends who do similarly on others.

Comments

[ashverse]

This is one of the reasons I wish academic databases were more widely available! Of course it would not solve the issue, but it would be nice. As a college dropout (hopeful future graduate, too), I do miss being able to research semi-obscure Japanese theater history, random medical papers, or whatever else my heart desired between essays.

[sdi]

I'm not familiar with academic databases at all!

[ashverse]

Oh they're so useful for research. I think the one my school paid for was called EBSCOhost? There's a ton of them, and then smaller ones for more specific things like biology, medicine, art, etc. Thousands and thousands of digital articles, books, sometimes even digitized/scanned primary sources. But you can only access them if you're a student, and I think also a teacher. And what is accessible varies school to school. Otherwise it's all paywalled or not even accessible at all to the public. I think JSTOR may be somewhere in this category? Not sure. But yeah it was nice to be able to access stuff without paying an arm and a leg.

There's still plenty of ways to research stuff, libraries, finding the living encyclopedias you were referring to. But it would be nice if all these already sorted/tagged/etc archives were more accessible to the general public.

[sdi]

Interesting! I'm not sure I'd trust any of it for the kinds of research I do, alas: the last century of academic work at least has demonstrated itself "penny-wise, pound-foolish" in the extreme.

[ashverse]

That's fair! I wish the internet would stop getting worse and harder to use.

[sdi]

I fear that the internet is only reflecting the state of the people using it. Hesiod didn't have good things to say about the end of the Iron Age, and we're way past that!

[ashverse]

That's fair.

[duskpeterson]

Speaking as someone who was researching classical history online in 1995, I'd say that there's a lot of valuable stuff online now, but some of the best stuff is behind paywalls. I haven't figured out any way to access paywalled classical databases except by going back to college. (US public libraries often give generous access to history databases, but usually only on US history.)

That said, what is free online can be amazing. It's just a matter of managing to hunt it down, which is harder these days. I miss web directories.

[sdi]

The nineties were a great time to be on the Internet. The joy and education I received for free there did more for my career than the misery and fortune I spent on university ever did. It's part of why I insist on putting everything I make online in the public domain.

[duskpeterson]

Hurray for you!

[temporaryreality]

Do you ever initiate your searches via google scholar? It accesses many of the above mentioned academic databases.

[sdi]

Oh, are you all just talking about reading the academic literature? In that case, yes, I have access to it! (But alas, I haven't found it useful. I will say that "horus beheading isis" produced sane results, however!)

[temporaryreality]

Yeah :)

[sdi]

Thank you for the suggestion anyway! What I really want is a search engine just for the spiritual revelations of every mystic of which we have a textual corpus. I suppose that's asking for too much!

(Just ask my angel, I routinely ask for too much. ;) )

[temporaryreality]

I love the idea and wish that, at least, creative stringing of search terms could do that for you.