Today is the Internet day in Spain (but I’m not sure if it’s also in other countries). The Government has organized some events in Madrid (yes, in the Real World™), showing no idea of what Internet is. A Spanish newspaper was asking “Can you live without internet (in Spanish)?”… interesting question.
Internet for me is an incredible collection of knowledge. This is mostly good… for example, I discovered my first hobby (the game of Go) thanks to it. And I’ve met with a lot of new people (mostly clever people).
But sometimes it can be bad. I constantly see so in my professional world (web developing) where I met a lot of people who “blindy follows internet recipes”. Let’s explain this. I’m lucky of having an University background in Computer Science. But some people don’t have a background, and use Internet as a “consulting thing” to find information about the problem that they are working on. They usually arrive at a page with a recipe to sort out the problem, like “drop down menus made easy” or “install a CVS server in 30 seconds”. Next they blindy follow the recipe. And maybe it’s not a correct method to use… they see the tree, but don’t see/understand the woods. The worst part is that they have the unreal perception of being good professionals!!
I mean… it’s good having all this incredible amount of knowledge. But sometimes you need a background (real studies, books, and such things) to completely understand the recipes. For example, I play piano and flute, and have some ideas about reading a music score; I even compose sometimes, short songs. But I clearly know that I’m not a good musician.
“The cobbler should stick to his last”
(I’m sorry, I used internet to find this phrase, and I’m not a phrasist professional)
It\’s not good to follow recipes blindy, not even the ones you find in books. This is the case particularly in mathematics, and I\’d say that this makes the difference between good and bad mathematicians: a good mathematician must be always sure he\’s working in the right path, and not just take the first recipe he sees!
Anyways, the internet is becoming the quickest way to get information and it can\’t be simply ignored, one must do the same as with books and other references: one has to check the truth in what he is reading. That reminds me about Buddha: \”do not follow blindly my teachings just because of my authority: you must examine and analyze each and every single word I say\”.
Well, the best thing is you can get your recipe, and then understand what it does. I wanted some tooltips to appear in words at my blog and had to look at the ‘recipe’, I don’t know enough CSS to get to it alone. My first idea was ok, but I wanted it quickly and searched for it. Easy to understand, understood, done, so… recipe+understanding=:D