What you guys think?:D

what kind of legacy?

gigo?

I think it is.
Maybe you should log off.

I think it is.
Maybe you should log off.

guess you did not see the poll.

No, the internet is getting smarter. And maybe once the internet reached a certain level of network complexity it will gain consciousness.

I would be willing to bet 70% of the data is tabloid caliber. You can probably toss half the servers and who would even care? Not this one, we need this one.

And this is a serious thread.

Holy moly, someone voted YES....allright.

No just the users.

Look at who was on the internet 20 years ago and their average IQ. College Professors, DARPA guys, geeks.

Now look at who is on. EVERYONE.

So yes, the average intelligence of the internet is lower than it was.

The same argument can be made for college education over the last 100 years. As more people have the opportunity to join, the lowest denominator drops as well. It's not a bad thing, and the overall society benefits greatly from the increased participation ("a rising tide raises all ships"), but the once isolated education/internet culture changes greatly due to the changed demographic.

There is a significantly larger VOLUME of knowledge available on the internet today, however. So maybe I'm looking at the question the wrong way.

People tend to neglect the fact that computers were once only used by Military's, College Professor's and other highly placed intellectuals. Having such intellectuals develop the network of course means all the wonderful complexities that only intellectuals can dream up. As the internet moved towards the masses and Commercialised prospects for Mass advertisement came into being, those networks has been pushed to be easier to used, to have easier programs and operating systems so that the most illiterate computer operator can still see the occasional glimpse of an advert.

In short, it's been dumbed down so people can sell stuff, stuff you don't necessarily need but want all the same.

As for information being available on the internet, well that's kind of funny. For the most part the most informative pieces are usually written into books and books are usually copyrighted with the reasoning that for the author to do a particular amount of research they require funding. The information on the internet is not on par with that of books, yes some people might put some books through OCR's to scan as many pages as they can, however they aren't whole books just excerpts. The limitation herein is pretty much the books are hardcopy and the internet is a cycled presence of data.

This causes a deficit in the sense that the higher calibre books (written by scholars and authors) appear less on the internet in comparison to pieces written by students and untrained hacks. So be careful when quoting anything from the internet as it might not of come from someone academically accredited.

I believe it is getting smarter and there's an AI that is up and running called " spuriousmonkey " . We must beware for it exceeds all the programers expectations and is blazing a tail all of its own. ;)

Personally, I think the biggest problem with the Internet, and the information on it, is that you can't trust anything to be factual or truthful or even remotely honest. I mean, what good is information, regardless of the volume, if you can't trust it?

Baron Max

As the Internet is not sentient how can it be smart or dumb !?

R us person on the internets make it be dummer?

Is our children learning?

can I has cheezburger?

>.<

The internet isn't getting dumber, its evolving.

Do you guys think Sciforums is above or below the average "internet intelligence" level?

The internet is only as dumb as the people who use it.....

http://images.boxofficemojo.com/images/gilbertgrape_story2.jpg

The Internet is Holy, blasphemer!

Only as dumb as the people that put unverified shit on it.

IS I STOOPID? IS I MAKING TEH INTERWEBZ STOOPID? Seriously, the internet cannot get dumber, it's the users using the internet. Now, I consider SciForums to be my retreat from the retardism of AIM and MySpace. I suppose that the collective intelligence of people using the internet has dropped.

;1548753']IS I STOOPID? IS I MAKING TEH INTERWEBZ STOOPID? Seriously, the internet cannot get dumber, it's the users using the internet. Now, I consider SciForums to be my retreat from the retardism of AIM and MySpace. I suppose that the collective intelligence of people using the internet has dropped.


just look at you tube

Do you guys think Sciforums is above or below the average "internet intelligence" level?

First you have to define 'average'. From my experiences on any other half serious forum, I've found that posters are in most cases intelligent and helpful relevant to their subject matter. SF posters in the main are a bunch of freaks ranging from dumb to super intelligent with the dominating factor being, ego.

Stryder, river-wind and Max make the case best. I am not talking about forums or user contributed content like youtube (except for the hacked up mockumentaries) or myspace.

Max: Personally, I think the biggest problem with the Internet, and the information on it, is that you can't trust anything to be factual or truthful or even remotely honest. I mean, what good is information, regardless of the volume, if you can't trust it?

Stryder: This causes a deficit in the sense that the higher calibre books (written by scholars and authors) appear less on the internet in comparison to pieces written by students and untrained hacks. So be careful when quoting anything from the internet as it might not of come from someone academically accredited.

Dumber because it's god-awfully mismanaged, imo. What good is all this "more-now-than-then" data if you must dig and dig and dig to get at anything? The gTLDs, such as dot-com, dot-info, dot-nz, etc, is a fanatastic system that isn't being utilized to its full potential/capacity. And all of that bloody Flash is mind boggling. Humans have a way to cheapen brilliant implementations—and commerce is very much one of its cheapest vices.

The internet isn't getting dumber, its evolving.

I've heard the same thing said about the English language.

I think the internet is getting more commercialised, and is used by a wider range of people, where as at first it was used by nerds :thankyou: who tend to be more intelligent in certain ways.

Define "dumber"

More and more scientific data is added to the internet every day; not only is new data created and added, also old journals are scanned and put on the internet. The generation of knowledge on the internet is going both forwards and backwards in time.

Wonderful.

However, this data is mostly limited to subscribers; universities, research institutes, certain libraries etc.

Most people have no access at all except for the open access journals which are still rare.

This leaves us with an explosion of conspiracy sites, creationist sites, blogs, news sites, and forums like this one.

They have an expanding body on knowledge, but one that always remains shallow, is completely false, completely biased, or just plainly retarded.

And this knowledge pool is used as the no.1 information source for most people.

The only highlight I can think of are projects such as wikipedia. Although wikipedia has always been under criticism, it has indeed created a readily accessible encyclopedia on a wide variety of topics that is reasonable accurate, although not very deep.

The percentage of bullshit is rising.

This makes the percentage that is not bullshit harder to find.

psik

Rubbish.

The internet isn't really getting dumber. It just wants us to believe it is.