I love the internet: I hate the internet.
I love it for the tremendous ability it has to let me track down vast amounts of information, everything from research I need to do my job to YouTube videos that show me how to remove and replace a broken Ford Focus mirror.
I hate the way it has given broad reach to racism and other evils, by allowing people to widely broadcast fake information that others don’t even bother to check when it reinforces the positions they already believe.
But I also wonder if it’s going to reach a point where its usefulness is completely overshadowed by its commercial side.
Look at this example, which, I admit, is a particular one.
I was looking online for information on Schreiner’s Restaurant in Fond du Lac, Wis. — information I found eventually. (Never mind why — that’s another story entirely.)
But in the process, Google directed me to Sirved.com, Yelp.com, TripAdvisor.com (actually, individually, to Tripadvisor.com, .ca, .nl, .nz, .ie, .uk, .hk, .fr, and .rs), Zomato.com, Mapquest.com, Foursquare.com, Untapped.com, Menupix.com, Findmeglutenfree.com, Restuarntji.com, Menuism.com, Winnie.com, Zippia.com, Groupon.com, Verview.com, Manta.com, Yellowpages.com — and the list goes on.
Many offered reviews of the food or shots of the menu — they also carried their own advertising, and, as optimized and promoted sites, clogged up my efforts to find the restaurant’s site itself.
I wonder, though, if there will eventually be more corporate leeches than the actual number of working, producing bodies can carry.\
There’s a similar problem with hotels: try to find a website for a particular hotel, and you can find yourself crashing into hotel booking sites that don’t even represent the hotel you’re looking for, but name it while they suggest every other possible hotel where they do have an agreement for discount rooms. (In an internet variety of “you can’t get there from here,” the travel website will suggest “Contact accommodation for availability. There are similar hotels available.” At the same time, it doesn’t give you a link to contact the hotel you’re looking for. So, just a form of web blocking.)
It makes me wonder about how many piggybacking sites the internet can actually hold, and function as a useful tool for suggesting or providing services: want food delivered? Grubhub, SkipTheDishes, UberEats, DoorDash, ChowNow — the market’s filling up, and those are just some of the major North American players.
I just wonder whether a point will come where overlapping and competing services plugging up the near-endless space of the web will eventually make it harder to find things, rather than easier.
It’s especially a problem because many of the web services are ride-alongs.
They’re selling (or adding on to) someone else’s product, and, in no small part, making that product visible and available to customers — for a cut of the action, either through a fee or through site-based advertising or any of a number of ways.
I wonder, though, if there will eventually be more corporate leeches than the actual number of working, producing bodies can carry.
Every bit of new complexity, infrastructure and technology adds costs that have to be recover somewhere and somehow — if not from the customer, than from cutting into the returns from the supplier. (All of which, as I’ve pointed out before, means money flowing out of local economies to far-off, and sometimes essentially cloud-based, multinationals.)
It’s bad enough that the information landscape is getting hugely cluttered by artificial sites that pretend to be news, without any investment in news at all, peddling whatever “information” will generate the largest number of clicks.
It’s like being at the invention of the printing press, and then seeing it being used to compact trash.
Oh, and on a happier note, happy New Year, everyone. Let’s all make this next one better.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky
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