I feel when people hear the term “the Internet” in general conversation, they should be able to assume “the Internet” describes sites that are available to any American adult.
Is it just me?
Sometimes at a party or whatever, when people are debating - or just wondering about - an issue, certain friends of mine will say things like “It’s easy to find out, I’ll just look it up on the Internet,” when what they mean is that they’ll use their access to a subscription-only service, archive, or database to find information. This bugs me. If you are going to use a special resource, you should name it.
I should also point out that these very same friends who are quick to toss around the term “the Internet” when discussing sites accessible only with expensive subscriptions, are also very likely to make people feel stupid for being unable to find a particular paper or article on “the Internet.”
Well, technically, “the internet” is the network and its connectivity protocols, so one (IMHO reasonable) interpretation of “the internet” is the sum of all resources that can be accessed via open-standard protocols over that network. So your walled-off intranet LAN is not “the internet” even when it utilizes TCP/IP, and AOL is not “the internet” because it depends on proprietary protocols that only their content browser software can access, but paid-access sites would still be “the internet”.
The New Jersey Turnpike is still a highway, while the Staten Island Ferry route and the Indianapolis speedway are not.
Surely Lexis, Dialog, Eurolex and so on were around before the internet - or ( forgive me - not enough coffee yet to be sure) before the World Wide Web at least?
I use Lexis-Nexis every day at work, and a few other services (Dialog especially) very often. I wouldn’t consider L-N to be “the internet” per se, partly because, as Celyn notes, It was around well before the Internet was in common use. But more to the point, L-N and Dialog are compendiums of print media. They are to print media what Google and Copernic are to the internet.
I look at L-N more as a catalog of print media that happens to be on the internet, rather than part of the internet itself. If the internet didn’t exist, we could still have L-N (though in a vastly inferior format, IMHO). The NYT archives, by the same token, fall under the same category. I remember using microfilmed archives of the NYT before they were available on the 'net. Again, there’s no need for the internet to exist to permit the existance of the NYT archives. The internet is a handier way to search for it.
Well, technically, you don’t look up anything on the Internet, since the Internet just connects networks together. You would use the internet to connect to some resource to do a search, be it Lexis, Google, or the SDMB search function.
Saying “I looked it up on the Internet” is like saying “I looked them up on the phone”. It doesn’t make sense unless you qualify it somehow: “I looked it up by calling information.” Similarly, “I looked it up on Google.”
But that’s being pedantic. Usually when people say “the Internet,” frankly, they mean a search engine. I agree that using Lexis and not saying so is a bit odd, since not many average people have subscriptions.
Personally, I think any OP that contains some variant on the phrase “this bugs me” should be sprinkled with liberal doses of profanity and started in the Pit, because inviting people to Great Debate your pet peeve is a bit, shall we say, peevish? At least in the Pit, you can be humourously vulgar in your ranting.
So what if your friends use the catch-all term “internet”? Are you going to start demanding bibliographies every time somebody dredges up a factoid over pizza and beer? Geez, chill out.
Now what bugs me are people who start threads using terms like “Lexis” and “NYT” and then not defining them (or even using them) in the OP. From the context, I guess NYT was New York Times, but as far as I know, a Lexis is a slightly-damaged luxury car.
Please note my OP refers to “the term ‘the Internet’ in general conversation.” General. Important qualifier.
Thanks, Ed, that’s how I feel.
Bryan, it’s not really a pit issue - I genuinely wonder if the average person takes a conversational mention of “the Internet” to mean that which is available to most of us.
If someone “dredged up a factoid” that anyone else could find, then no, Bryan, I wouldn’t demand anything. But, if someone “dredged up a factoid” because they happened to have an uncle who had been in the operating room during John Travolta’s sex-change surgery, and then got snotty with people hadn’t heard the same factoid, then yeah, I’d demand the lucky guy with the uncle explain he how is not, in fact, better researchers than other pizza-eaters but merely has access to better sources.
As an analogy, someone with a subscription to “The Privacy Journal” who read a single, unique article about X and then tried to put down someone by saying “You never heard about X? It’s been in the news!” would not be playing fair because the average person has no reason to think of a small-circulation subscription-only journal as part of “the news.”
So you think it was slightly unfair of me to start a thread with the term Lexis? Was that because you inferred that I believe you should already know all about it? Why shouldn’t you know all about it? That stuff’s on the Internet.
Unfair? No, but it was a disservice to your own thread to use unusual terminology in a thread title and then not define it in the OP. In any event, it certainly didn’t come close to making me “feel stupid” (which is in the OP). Surely what makes you feel stupid is an entirely subjective matter, better suited to IMHO (if you don’t feel like cursing about it) or the Pit (if you do). Had you started a GD asking for opinions why your sister was such a meanie to you when you were growing up, you’d have a similar problem, i.e. asking for opinions on something only of personal significance.
Had you left out all the personal stuff and simply asked “Should pay sites count as ‘the internet’ for general research purposes?” … well, aside from the question seeming kinda pointless, I’d say “Sure, why not?”
j.c., I think your standards are a little too high. In my experience, many people still have trouble differentiating between e-mail and the internet, or between their computer monitor and their CPU. When they say they found it on the internet, they mean they used their computer to find it, and it was “out there” somewhere as opposed to being stored on their computer’s hard drive (not that everyone can tell the difference). I don’t see anything wrong with saying that you used the internet to find something if you had to go through the connectivity protocols to get there.
We’re still in the embryonic stages of internet use at this point. I’m sure that as time goes on, we’ll develop new, more specific terms to define various types of online resources. If Bryan Ekers saw an internet-related post from five years in the future, he’d probably be even more confused by the terminology, as would the rest of us.
I think the major problem is the preposition: “I looked them up over the phone” makes sense to me. Yes, you could be more specific, but it makes sense without doing so. Similarly, perhaps one should say “I looked it up over the Internet”.
The service name “Lexis” is being mis-used here. The service
really being refered to is named “Nexis”. Think of Lexis as a law library, think of Nexis as the database of news and information derived from newswires, newpapers, magazines, TV show transcripts, etc. Some of this content is online exclusively through the Nexis service…some of that information is available elsewhere, including the “freely” accessible internet.
I doubt that many people are standing around at parties quoting Lexis sources…and if they are, that’s a pretty dry party.
To be perfectly fair, the two services have become so closely integrated that even legal practitioners don’t make a distinction between the two. I would say “I looked it up on Lexis” regardless of whether I was looking up a particular judicial opinion or a news article about a client in Business Week.
Huh. All the folks at APRA (Association of Prospect Researchers of America) call it “Lexis” for short. Of course, since the law library is often invaluble to us–it’s good to know if one of your prospect has just had the pants sued off of him–we do use both parts frequently.
Bars, parties, the dog park…maybe I just hand around with a dry crowd. Typical scenario is that someone will mention a newsworthy event of the day. (e.g., health news according to Oprah and dateline.)Some snoot who has inside dope from an exclusive source will counter the general attitude with information from “the Internet,” and belittle the rest of the crowd for not knowing this particular aspect of the story.
Some of us know these snoots, and if we’re around, we tend to call them on their sources. I’m not always around. Some of my friends don’t know so much about the Snoot sources, and after being made to feel small and stupid for not having read something, they’ll email asking if can find such and such on “the Internet.” I can usually find it. And then, by searching with a set of unique terms from the original doc, determine that Google isn’t going to pull it up.
In a way, it’s a strange flip-flop on the smarmy lawyer tactic of trying to impress with the “real story” about whatever case is currently a media circus.
LexisNexis is like Taco Bell KFC. Sometimes you get both in one package, sometimes not. Some people use one exclusively and don’t’ know jack about other. Some enjoy both. Either way, all the money goes into the same kitty.
