The World Wide Web: taking the plunge - includes related glossary, addresses and information on four religious sites

Christian Century, Oct 11, 1995 by John Ottenhoff

Such examples clearly illustrate one successful function of the Internet: it has brought like-minded people together. While some critics have rightly warned about superficiality in our electronic culture, the Internet has also spawned a culture of hyperspecificity and concentration. This unprecedented means of gathering data has produced unparalleled data bases and special-interest communities. Whether the subject is industrial music, home education, antigovernmental sentiments, pornography or the writing of William Shakespeare, chances are you can find a community of well-armed experts somewhere on the Web. In this respect, Marshall McLuhan's prophecy of a "global village" seems to be taking shape. Real "virtual" communities exist in great numbers on the Web.

THE FASTEST-growing segment of web sites involves commercial interests. Businesses now sell products of every sort and await only the perfecting of payment methods before the Internet be comes a major shopping source. Yet in my brief sampling I was sent to only one commercial site--Internet Workshops & Consulting, which trains business people to use the network and offers workshops to help them become thoroughly interactive. The vast amount of raw information available over the net makes guides to finding and managing that data increasingly important. Like this commercial site, libraries more and more will find themselves in the business of guiding patrons through electronic mazes; power will lie not so much in knowing things as in being able to navigate and control the world's online information.

While the commercial use of the Internet may seem troubling, it nonetheless puts a vast selection of products right at hand. Life in a small town is less limiting when great book and CD stores are available on computer. One might worry, however, that this commercial advance represents only a further affliction in an American consumer culture already out of control.

Since academic institutions form much of the backbone of the Internet, it is not surprising that URouLette directed me to many academic sites. Increasingly, colleges are finding the Web a great way to reach prospective students in addition to transacting scholarly business. One of the more interesting academic sites I found was the Stephen Birch Aquarium-Museum, part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego. At this site information ranges from local weather and surf conditions to satellite images, electronic periodicals and other resources for the study of oceanography. Like popular Internet sites for NASA, the Birch Aquarium page allows the institution to both educate and advertise. The Washington University Libraries Department of Special Collections home page demonstrates nicely that the technology also serves the humanities. One other site, the OAK Repository, stores software, both educational and entertainment.

HOW USEFUL is this information? Most of it could be--and probably is--just as effectively presented in print. Much of it is inconsequential, as in the case of Washington University's photographs of recent university speakers, lists of fight song lyrics, and representations of campus gargoyles. Yet by offering items such as an illustrated campus tour and an overview of the school's special collections, the Web page makes the university a more accessible, even democratic, place, friendlier to scholars and the general public. The current institutional uses of the Web are harbingers of the day wnen virtually entire libraries will be online.