I am starting to find it quite hard to get a hold of quality information worth reading, recently through the internet. As I sift through a variety of social bookmarking sites, either I keep finding more and more garbage (which might be entertaining for the first little while but largely a waste of time) or news information which I highly doubt to be anything close to reliable.
If you want really unreliable information, go read the commentaries at yahoo finance, where by is it clearly impossible to have any idea about where the economy might really be going by reading most of the garbage put out by the pundits. Some people were going on for the past 3 months that the US economy is in perfect shape (minus the "little financial troubles" it was facing with the sub-prime loans and the faltering industrial base).
Reading the news is also another sore spot for me. There used to be a time where the news was about reporting important events or things that were genuinely relevant to the general public. Gone are those days to be replaced by 24 hour news channels that love to make a big deal about insignificant events. I could not give any less of a damn about Britney Spears checking into rehab or pundits on politically biased TV "News" shows having an axe to grind about some political or idealogical agenda, or etc. None of the information being broadcasted is nourishing information that provides to the well being of the general human being and therefore I find it largely useless.
So instead of the mainstream media, I look elsewhere where perhaps real or thoughtful information might be had. I look for essays or thought provoking ideas backed up with significant data or well constructed articles. Unfortunately, as of late, I am having trouble finding anything worth reading and I've broken down to buying a book to read... for the first time in a long time, which just arrived today.
There is something nice about reading a book. The ideas are far more complete compared to reading a 1-2 page article online. Short articles hardly provide for any depth of understanding. How am I supposed to understand anything about international relations in a 1 page article summarized by say "Saudi's promise to raise oil output to reduce oil prices." Surely the issues at hand are far more complicated then that and yet the general population is supposed to judge the actions of a nation based on a simple sliver of information. We have TV pundits and online pundits putting bits and pieces of these tid-bits of garbage to make one grand picture of garbage. As the saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out." But I digress...
The book I am reading is "Out of our minds: How to be Creative" by Sir Ken Robinson. Admittedly, the title does sound a little cheesy ("How to be Creative!?"), but Ken Robinson (I highly recommend watching his TED talk which is quite fascinating) writes about the current shortage of "creative" workers to further propel us into the future. He has a very good understanding of the problems in the current education system and it is worth a read. I have so far gone through 50 pages of the book and have been quite satisfied with most of the ideas and the background information he presents. Nothing of the sort that you'd find easily on the internet.
I think that is the new problem that the internet will face in the future. With access to countless billions (trillions??) of webpages, it will become harder and harder to find information worth reading now that anyone and their dog can post to the cloud that is the internet. Social bookmarking, which I thought were the wave of the future for democratically aggregating pieces of information worthy of reading, had now been replaced by the frivolity of the masses with continual up voting of trivial matters. I once used to love these sites as the density of well educated people that used to frequent them led to a higher density of good quality articles being posted. Perhaps it is time for me to look for smaller and better communities to find reading material from.
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