Assignment 5: Evaluate five websites on a topic of your choice using criteria you locate on the web

by Andrea Rubin

Well my topic was anxiety and I ended up at www.shybladder.com from the www.worrywart.com website of a Dr. Stickler who claims to have a Ph.D., although the last dated accomplishment listed in his bio was serving on an anxiety board in 1989—do you think he was removed from the anxiety board because he had this big ego where he wanted to sell his books on a website about anxiety instead of altruistically serving the anxious population of our planet and he had some weird vision where you must clip your toenails only a little at a time each day instead of waiting until they get really long and clipping the whole thing off. He begged us to follow his advice because it was free and he had wanted to help people since he was 19 years old. This made me wonder if he had killed any puppies when he was 18 years old and I was also curious about his blinking red and yellow book cover in the upper righthand corner of the screen for only $29.95. Of course these are my own criteria and not those of the web that is to say dot-com and shy bladder seem incongruous to me and so does worrywart dot-com. I was much less anxious while perusing the dot-org websites and even the dot-gov websites which were mostly statistics and you could download them pdf (pretty darn fast) so I knew the government might be inaccurate but not manipulative or maybe it was trying to manipulate a different set of people than those who might be anxiously seduced by the Paxil website, where I ended up a little later. Still the government statistics also had an agenda and though they could offer you the statistical comfort of knowing how many individuals feel the way you do they could not offer you any possibility of feeling the way you personally feel the way a good therapist might welcome you that way and you would know that money was contributing to the help of the world. I learned the confusion of the government a number of years ago when I had to call it during the time I worked in the law firm library which partly got me into the School of Library and Information Science. I had to call the government to ask for a listing of treaties in force and the government said in a sleepy voice “I’m sorry ma’am we don’t have a listing of trees and forests.” The government was always sleepy when I called it and sounded as if it had been sitting at the same big desk for years and I could not reconcile this sleepy vision of the government with its active violent activities as in planning wars etc. This element of the government which it would like to deny was expressed when the department of labor sent me a fax saying “the information you requested is attached,” only you could see the woman had written “attacked” instead of “attached” at first and then crossed it out. Looking at the dot-gov websites during this project it seemed to me that the government had never been anxious or was perhaps projecting its anxiety onto its employees who answer the phone in vast windowless rooms that exude an institutional smell.

Andrea Rubin lives in San Francisco.