Increase Content? First Let's Clean Up the Garbage

By Jonathan Friendly

Special to the Gazette

It has become commonplace to see alongside highways signs announcing that this or that organization -- the Kiwanis, the Girls Scouts, Something Manufacturing -- has adopted a couple of miles of road and is keeping it clean. Occasionally you can see orange-vested representatives of the organization wielding spiked poles to collect the trash along the shoulder.

We need that kind of volunteer group to start working on the information highway. The Internet has a litter problem that makes the Interstate system look as spic and span as Zurich or Singapore.

Anyone who has spent any time surfing the Net knows that four minutes out of every five go to wading through the garbage. Even if piety and wit were not notably absent in the Information Age, they are surely ineffective in calling back any of what the Moving Finger seems to be writing so incessantly.

It's all well and good for learned persons to discuss Increasing the Content of the Internet, but the real problem is getting rid of what we've got in such noxious overabundance.

It's not just the dead-ends -- "This server has no DNS entry" or "The server is not responding."

More often it is the frustration of finding that the first 22 groups Yahoo located for your search have no bearing on your interest and no real likelihood of being interesting to anyone except the egomaniacs whose pages compete to offer the most current ratings of the 1,235 pages that mention tuna fish.

With equal frequency your search returns a news group with 4,421 entries. After burning up your last free quarter-hour on America Online downloading the headers, you find that 3,105 consist of "Yes please" responses to an exchange that began "Would you like to learn how to make money fast?" One thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine articles are flames directed at "all you jerks who waste bandwidth saying 'Yes please.' "

Seventy-four entries propose alternative schemes for harming AOL. And the three entries that would have had content are "no longer available on this server."

What we have, in short, is a major digital pollution problem, and somebody better do something about it.

It would be nice to pretend this is not a problem. After all, we say, it's just electronic zeros and ones and it will all dissipate harmlessly in the ether.

That's what we've always said about our out-of-sight, out-of-mind wastes, the stuff that shows up 30 years later as Love Canal or greenhouse gases.

How do we know that this stuff is not just piling up somewhere in cyberspace, waiting to poison our grandchildren with an epidemic of carpal tunnel syndrome? What do you think happens to all those backup tapes that the mainframes so dutifully make in the wee hours when only the Asian subscribers are accessing their ISPs?

The best answer, of course, is citizen action. Each of us should pledge to reduce our e-mail output by 35 percent over the next five years and to recycle 200 megabytes a day. We could have days of the week designated for pickups on our strands of the Web, and burly guys could appear on our screen-savers at 6 a.m. clanging electronic garbage pail lids and shouting "M'on back, m'on back."

More likely, we will need government action. A bit tax could be levied on Compuserve, Delphi, Prodigy, AOL, and the like, with the promise of a Packet Mountain where this stuff will be safely entombed for 10,000 years. Of course, 10 years later inquiring reporters will find that the I-way Superfund has been spent in a planning process that enriched the lawyers and academic research engineers but left insurmountable bandwidth blockage at the Net's most crucial intersections.

As long as the Net is going commercial anyway, this is an opportunity for the Browning-Ferris Electronic or Waste Management/CyberWorks. Let them cable it off to toxic incinerators and bill the Internet community at a million bucks a gigabit -- less if we drop the government overregulation and those nasty insurance premiums.

But perhaps we should not be too hasty. It's trash, but it's our trash. A cleanup effort could succeed too well, wiping out the cyberglyphs that might be the electronic Rosetta Stone for deciphering the birth of the Internet.

Before we rush to drag all those useless digital outputs to the electronic shredder, we should pause for posterity. Otherwise in some distant future the archaeologist probing the electronic midden heaps of the 20th century may be appalled to find the only revelation is that universal tiding of disaster --"C:\> No files found."

Jonathan Friendly, the editor of The Internet and Society Conference News, teaches journalism at the University of Michigan.