The internet can be a wonderful thing. There is so much information out there that at times it can be overwhelming. The sheer amount of information can often trick us into believing that it's more complete than it really is. Many of us use the internet as our main source. Our search to an answer may begin and end with a few keystrokes into our favorite search engine. There will be several times when what you find is the answer to your question, but is it the whole story? The world is moving so fast and information has become just another commodity so we take what we can get while we can get it and move on towards the next thing. We tend to forget that the internet isn't the alpha and omega as far as information is concerned. It's just another piece of it.
For all the millions of webpages out there that hold the minute details on seemingly any subject, there are millions more that just don't exist. Your favorite show as a child may have a dozen fan sites. That little-known painter has several blogs being written about their work. It seems that no matter how obscure something is, there is a webpage dedicated to it where someone believes it to be the most underrated thing in existence. The thing is though that no matter how detailed a website may be, there will always be pieces missing. No single location has all the information, regardless of the claims that websites like to make. The reason for this is simple. There are just sometimes that haven't been translated to the digital age.
I was at a used bookstore recently and there was a note on one of the shelves that stated ninety percent of all the books that have been written are no longer in print. In 2008 there were around 550,000 books published. Now ten percent of those still being in print is a large number, but it's obviously a small fraction of what was once available. The internet is able to keep information on those books that have long since been out of print, however, it's clear that not every book ever published in getting its own webpage. As the years go by it becomes more difficult to gather that information in the first place because the source is harder to find. Eventually the book written in 1984 that had a small publishing run will become all but forgotten except by those who had a part in it. For the rest of us it's as though it never existed. That small gap in knowledge may seem insignificant at first glance, but what if that book had the information you were looking for? What if it clarified an answer you had already found somewhere else? That's just a single book written in a single year that was overlooked. Think about what other holes are out there that the internet hasn't gotten around to filling because people simply don't know about them.
When I was young the internet was still a new idea so when I was in school and we had to research a topic it meant going to the library. You would look up every book or article on whatever you happened to be researching and used it as the basis for your project. Today you may be lucky enough to type something in and have a dedicated Wikipedia article written about it, complete with sources that most of us don't bother to check. In you look really hard you may even find the subject of your paper already written out in a way that requires very little work on your part. Strangely enough the differences between going to your local library and using the internet are small. There is a basic assumption that the information you're getting is both correct and complete. Using the internet as the sole source is the same as using your local library as singular place to get your information. While they both may be full of useful knowledge, it's hard to know what you're missing. The library may just be too small to hold all the books you'd need. Or the internet article you found may have been written by someone who only had access to their local library. Or the writer used the internet as their sole source and distilled down already watered down information even further. Using just the internet as the primary source is no different than going to the local library and figuring every book needed is within its walls.
True research is probably hard and time consuming. Reading every book. Viewing every internet page. Digging up dissertations and unpublished papers. Finding the book that has been out of print for decades. Talking to someone who has first or second hand knowledge of whatever you're looking for. All of these help to fill in the gaps, but there may always be that little bit of lingering doubt that something is missing. How can you ever know that you have the whole story unless you were there?
