While there might not be many people under the age of 92 that would describe the internet as "the information superhighway" anymore, I think the idea underpinning this metaphor remains pretty widespread.

It's the same logic that leads people to describe the internet as a repository of humanity's accumulated knowledge. And it's the same thinking that leads highbrow-sounding folks to occasionally describe the internet (you know, the place we keep the arguments and the vine compilations) as a modern-day Library of Alexandria.

But when we actually use the internet, the internet doesn't feel much like a wonder of the world. Why should this be?

Road warrior

I had a moment of disenchantment with the internet in 2015, when I was reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Around the time that I finished the book, I stumbled across this quotation online somewhere.

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

The thing that bothered me about this quote is that I immediately recognised that it did not appear in The Road. My suspicions were confirmed when I searched the ebook for the phrase. While there are lots of references to fire, and to carrying the fire, there is no version or variant of this quote in The Road.

Despite feeling absolutely certain that this quote was not in the novel - and then confirming it - I still felt on some level that the internet was probably right and I was probably wrong. I mean, it was right there on Goodreads as one of the most popular quotes from the book. Even today, it is the fourth most upvoted quote from the book, according to Goodreads users.

879 likes! That is too many likes, Goodreads users!

My confusion only deepened when I was browsing a Waterstones and opened one of those year planners that are marketed to booklovers, complete with old Penguin cover art and whatnot. I happened to open it at a page that had the fake McCarthy quote drawn out in a kind of wobbly caligraphy. It was long enough ago that I can't remember whether there was anybody with me that day, but I'm certain if there was that I would have ranted about the inaccuracy for hours afterwards.

I wasn't the first or the only person to notice this. More recently, Chad Dundas tracked the quote to its apparent source - a Guardian interview with psychoanalyst Hanna Segal in which she simply summarises the theme of the novel in her own words.

This quote, then, originated in a newspaper and ultimately found its way into some kind of physical book. But along the way, it was the internet that chewed it up. It was the internet that took a line of text and put it onto platforms with upvotes and sharing. It was the internet that put it onto lo-res images that got shared onto Facebook pages full of inspiring quotes.

Patch notes

My argument here isn't that the internet is bad, or that it's inferior to other forms of media.

My argument is that we should be alert to the ways in which - for all its radical bigness - the internet is a patchwork.

Some of the patches are beautiful silk; others are stinking cotton; a few are polyester that's dripping wet for some reason. And those patches are stitched together haphazardly - some tessellating perfectly on all sides while others are barely connected to the wider whole at all. Some patches have clearly been ripped from their original position. And good god, there are a lot of holes everywhere, spaces where patches really ought to be.

There are a few practical implications of this way of viewing the internet.

• We probably shouldn't look to the internet as the sole arbiter of truth. This was true even before the massive intensification of our worries regarding deliberate online disinformation

• We probably shouldn't look to the internet as the sole arbiter of whether something happened, or existed. Not being able to find something online doesn't actually mean very much!

• When everyone is getting their information on a subject online, it can be amazingly powerful to just read a book

You might counter that all this sounds a bit luddite-y. After all, journalists, authors, and TV producers have been getting facts and quotes wrong for a long time before the internet came along.

That is a fair point. One argument for the many gatekeepers that existed or exist in other forms of media is that they were there to ensure that only authoratative experts were given platforms from which to speak. They were keeping out the uninformed, along with the malicious. Clearly, those gatekeepers did not completely nail their assignment, and they were also often wildly prejudicial in barring access to some groups oh-so-much more than others.

The trade-off, however, is not only that the internet is home to certain bad actors. That much is obvious to us all.

What’s less obvious, I think, is that we’re collectively in awe of the internet’s vastness.The fact that no one person could hope to know every corner of the web convices us that it is therefore much bigger - and therefore more complete - than it actually is.

And when we forget that, it can trick us - not only into misquoting a bleak novel, or believing that we must have imagined an episode of a TV show because we can’t find it mentioned online. It can trick us into thinking it’s an information superhighway, sprawling marvellously and endlessly past the horizon.