Do you Houyhnhnm?

As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, I was present for the birth of what we now think of as the World Wide Web. A user of an early beta version of NCSA Mosaic, I was just outside the delivery room, and what a beautiful baby it was. Suddenly, information seemed so easy to find! Surely, this would be the beginning of a new golden era!

A new era, yes. But golden?

I began to have my doubts when I saw my first virus hoax e-mail. The admin in my office had forwarded it to my whole group. Why had she done this, I asked her, when it was so easy to find out it was a hoax? It would have taken her a minute to do the necessary research on the internet. Her answer was that it took so little effort to forward the e-mail, and if it were true, she had done a good thing. Twain's observation -- that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on -- had now become literally true, even if truth doesn't literally wear boots.

I was dismayed to find that it didn't matter that it was so easy to check facts on the internet, because few people were inclined to do so. So all sorts of plausible falsehoods, urban legends, and opinions based on ignorance were more likely to propagate on the web than vexing truths.

Now when I hear the word "yahoo," I associate it with both the internet and a certain book by Jonathan Swift. And I worry that there's too much yahoo on the internet.