On the Internet

After reading the first chapter of Dreyfus, I am relieved that it is much easier to comprehend than Borgmann. I agree with a lot of the points Dreyfus makes about the internet and about search engines. He says that when we search for uselful things on the internet, it is like searching for a particular needle in a stack of needles; I agree with this. I could not even begin to count the number of times I use google or other search engines and am left with merely one or two credible sources. Also, I think the CYC thing he talks about, from the little bit I read about it, sounds pretty interesting. I think it's odd that after all the progress we've made with technology, we can't seem to make it answer what seems to us to be a logical, simple question such as chewing gum and walking at the same time, as Dreyfus uses for an example. Yet while I agree that as the net grows we will be forced to pick through piles of trash to find a few things of relevance, I see no way around it. The web is growing and people are becoming more and more dependent on it everyday. As we talked about it class, almost all of us go straight to the internet when given a research topic. In a way, this is what Borgmann was talking about, becoming more and more dependent on the devices and not on the focal things and practices. Maybe all we need is a long walk down the fiction section in the library, but when a computer is only three steps from my door, why would I want to drive ten minutes to the library to get relatively the same results?