Digital pollution: June 01, 1998 issue of New Thinking

June 01, 1998 New Thinking:
Digital pollution

Website content management

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June 01, 1998

Digital pollution

By Gerry McGovern

Pollution is rampant in cyberspace today.

As a species we have a tendency to be wasteful. Much of what we create puts convenience first, rather than our environment or a long-term view of sustainability. It is usually only when pollution begins to cause serious damage that we consider doing something about it.

The nuclear industry is perhaps the best example of how reckless a polluter we can be. Here, we have created waste that will last for thousands of years; waste that we hardly know how to store. The Irish Sea reeks of radiation as British Nuclear Fuels daily pumps radioactive waste into it.

Pakistan and India behave like spoilt children. ‘I’ve got nuclear capacity,’ India chides. ‘Now I have too,’ Pakistan retorts. Of course, Pakistan and India are joining the other spoilt children around the world who have long since been strutting their nuclear toys.

I remember my first job. It was in 1984, and the company had just bought a computer. It didn’t have a hard disk. You could buy a 5-megabyte hard disk for it but it was some crazy price. 5 megabytes seemed like so much space. However, we managed to run the company’s accounts and administration using 5.5-inch floppies.

How things have changed. Now we talk about gigabyte hard disks. And the funny thing is that many of us end up running out of space! No matter how much storage space we get, we seem to find ways to fill it.

Okay, we now have these huge software programs. But look at how wasteful we are. Back in 1984 when I was using a word processor, I didn’t create multiple versions of documents because I didn’t have the space. I was more conservative and I managed fine. I cleaned up my floppies regularly of files I no longer needed.

Today, my hard disk is a mess. There’s all sorts of stuff stored on it that I don’t need anymore. The thing is that because there’s so much space, I’m losing the skill and interest in figuring out what to keep and what to throw away. It’s easier to keep everything.

There are some 400 million pages on the Internet today. There will be 800 million by 2000. How many of them are any use? How many of them are complete and utter rubbish?

Think about your website for a moment. Are there corners of it where you haven’t been in a long while? Is there information on it that is no longer relevant to you or your customers?

Managing a quality website is as much about pruning the information you already have put online as creating new information.

Why? Because when most information gets old, it rots. It becomes waste in the system. Like car fumes pollute our lungs, information fumes pollute our minds. We can’t find things as all the dross clouds the quality.

If we don’t deal with digital pollution now, it will become a serious impediment to the long-term stability of cyberspace. We could start caring for our new environment by:

Only putting up on our websites information that is of genuine quality
Regularly reviewing our website content and dumping our information waste

Gerry McGovern

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Think about your website for a moment. Are there corners of it where you haven’t been in a long while?