I was sitting in one of those plastoid booths in a restaurant, absentmindedly eating and reading a print copy of an article from C|Net News called "Web users have case of short-term memory." The place was very busy, and I was aware of several people cruising and looking for a place to sit. One in particular stopped at my table. I guess he stopped because the table had an open seat, and then he saw the article I was reading was familiar and he couldn't resist striking up a conversation.

"That article is interesting. It's very crowded here. Mind if I join you?" From the dreadlocks, craggy black face, and silver streaked beard, down roughly 6-foot-6 to his shoes, the man was imposing. He looked at me and smiled.

"Sure," I said.

He slid into the side opposite and placed his tray. "The name is John." We shook as he grabbed his fries with his left hand.

"I read that article a week ago," he said. "It was about, in part, kids learning from the Internet. Learning a very shallow slice of knowledge…no knowledge of history. The Internet mostly covers things that happened since 1996 or 1997. Do you know why that's important?"

I replied, "What you don't know you're missing can hurt you."

"My own kids haven't been to the library in two years," said John. "Except Shauna, she knows enough to go hunting for things in books. But the other kids, they think the world is encompassed by the Web. I tell them, 'Beware, you often don't get anything but fragments from the Web. Lots of information but little understanding.' But you know kids and parents--words, words, just words. Until some teacher hauls 'em up short with a bad grade for lousy research, the warning isn't real."

"Web bites," I said. "The Web equivalent of sound bites. I've been told by editors, 'Keep it short! People reading these pages have a real short attention span.' I think there are more fundamental problems than the lack of history on the Net. Eventually, in a few decades, most of the historical documents will be on the Web; but the big portals, search engines, and Web sites are what kids are going to see, and the factoids will still dominate those places. The news in headlines, analysis in four hundred words, and heaven help the editor if the reader must scroll down a page!"

John said, "Sounds like you're a writer. Then you know exactly what I mean." I nodded in agreement and slurped more cola. He said, "Don't get me wrong; I think the Internet is becoming the greatest repository of information in history. Much of it is readily available. But it's a new world, vast, largely uncharted, and full of traps for the intellectually unwary."

"You know," I said, "it reminds me of the spreadsheet program phenomenon. When VisiCalc and then Lotus first made it big, there was a tendency among many people to assume that if you did calculations or financial planning on an electronic spreadsheet, it had to be right. Bad assumption, of course. There's a similar feeling at work about information on the Internet. If you write a paper based on Internet research, it has to be OK."

John laid a small notebook on the table. Not a computer notebook, but one with pages of paper and a writing appliance consisting of a piece of wood with an embedded carbon substance. "See this recording device?" said John. "It's largely sequential. I write down ideas as they come to me. But the content isn't ordered. It's random. How do I find something? If it's recent, I can usually remember which page it's on. Otherwise, I thumb through the pages. Very inefficient compared to a computer search algorithm. On the other hand, these are my thoughts. Some of them are even stuck in my memory. When I thumb through the notes looking for something, I often find other things. Once in a while, I read through the notebook--most of the notes, just to jog my memory or loosen a new thought. I never keep notebooks very long…maybe a few months each. Do you know why I don't put these notes into a computer?"

"You don't care much for computers?" I said.

He smiled. "Heh. I built my first computer when I was 10. I think I've had one of all the major personal computers of the past 20 years, and I routinely work on two or three at a time. No, I'm no Luddite." John picked up the notebook and softly thumbed a few pages. "No, I keep the notebook like this because these are my thoughts--most of them half-baked, of course. I don't plan on sharing them on any network. I may never write them into a document. The notebook just represents a slightly more permanent storage place for my thinking, a personally crafted cache."

We both stared at the notebook for a moment. In the context of our conversation, it had a kind of iconic attraction. "A very intimate relationship between the ideas in your head and what's on paper." I said.

"Yes," said John, "and it's bits and pieces. If taken out of context, they're something like the factoids on the Internet--but almost every bit and piece is woven into my thinking, my feelings. Can I do this on a computer?"

"I suppose so, sure," I replied.

"But the mechanics are different," said John. "Sometimes--no, often-the mechanics of the program, especially document management and searching, get in the way of treating what I write as a sloppy, unfinished record of my thinking. I always want to polish and finish a thought. I'll even start fiddling with fonts. Working on ideas from the Internet is even more bound up in the mechanics of navigation, complex search engines, and page capture. I do it, but it almost never produces serendipitous thinking."

"Maybe that's just you," I said.

He frowned. "No doubt. To some extent, I'm sure there are people who put thoughts that are intimately enmeshed with their mind into a computer, but I think far more people get caught up in the ability to capture bits and pieces and spend relatively little time thinking about what they mean-let alone developing a framework for comprehension."

"So what?" I asked.

"What you don't know you're missing can hurt you," John said and smiled.

"It's what I call the cost of chaotic thought. If your thinking consists largely of undigested factoids, if you have little idea how things relate to one another--either causally or by content--then you're going to have a terrible time making good choices. You'll make a lot of bad--not necessarily bad, but inaccurate--interpretations. On such things are based a life full of mistakes. An unhappy life."

"And you think the Internet magnifies this problem?" I asked.

"As a place to go for information, I wouldn't let a novice go near it. The Internet is for seasoned researchers. Only people who are skilled at organizing information and have enough experience to cull out the B.S. can wander around in the quagmire of search-engine results without completely losing a sense of what's real, what's useful, and what's not."

John was obviously worked up. He hadn't taken a bite in minutes. In fact, his hands were independently busy with twisting and knotting his paper napkin. "I hope you're indulging in hyperbole," I said. "Your point of view won't be very popular with the teachers who every day tell their students to go forth into the cornucopia of the Internet and produce a research paper."

John looked disgusted. He was disgusted. "I consider that the pedagogical equivalent of parents who let their kids watch eight hours of TV a day to keep them quiet." And with that he slid out of the seat, picked up the tray, nodded, and left.

Editor at Large Nelson King is ComputerUser's leading industry analyst.