I’ve found a moment to read Nick Carr’s new piece, Is Google Making us Stupid? I admit to being baited by the title; the article really has little to do with Google (or any search engine). In the article, Carr describes potential cognitive shifts caused by pattern changes in information consumption. As we move from book chapters to blog posts, Carr argues, there seems to be a change in our ability to process longer-form material.
For a guy as technically self-aware as Carr, the “internet is changing stuff” argument is a letdown. I don’t think anyone doubts that our information patterns are changing; we naturally forage to the most-appropriate media to answer information needs. That we’ll always hold up previous forms of media as more essential or original is also a truth – wasn’t the net better when it was full of long-form academic websites, as compared to Perez or Gawker today? Flash forward five years and we’ll be writing the same article about the now-ubiquitous mobile net, bemoaning that it is hard to read journal articles on the iPhone 5.0.
That media is constantly changing is fact, and that our patterns of media shape our conception of media is also fact. There’s a constant evolution of device and form, and it is only sensible that we’ll evolve our production, fueling shifts in the types of information we consume and the audiences we imagine. These shifts are modern, and centerpiece to the network economy. Long-form literacies should not be taken for granted; if we choose to value “decaying” forms, they need to be taught and emphasized. If we approach this passively, our literacies are always going to be volume-dependent. Perhaps the irony of digital natives is that the long-form will be a skill we’re required to teach; rather than focusing on neo-literacies, we’ll compel students to slog through War and Peace.
The question I wished that Nick addressed was mediation; with a title like Is Google Making us Stupid?, I was hoping he’d explore how the mediation of search is affecting “knowledge.” I see this as a critical question. For all its technical sophistication, Google and Digg are essentially the same thing – crowdsourced knowledge. While Digg uses human voters, Google relies on hyperlinks. Hyperlinks act as votes, meaning that the most-relevant results are also the most popular results. For fact-based search (“Yankees homepage”) this works just fine, but when things get more subjective or complex, the process breaks down. If you get diagnosed with a disease and search it, the About.com page that pops up is likely to be much less informative than the PubMed article buried on page 4 of results.
You might argue that it is the searcher’s responsibility to sift – go through each page and evaluate the results. In the context of a recent diagnosis, this probably works. But for topics we’re less invested in, “truth” becomes the top 3 or 5 or 10 results we’re willing to skim through. And because these top results are most heavily trafficked, they’ll also get the most inbound links – the rich become richer, the classic Matthew effect. This mediation is forcing a refiguring of our notions of authority; the network is the authority, the mean perception is truth.
I must note that my critique of knowledge and authority is susceptible to the same flaws as Carr’s critique of modernity-via-reading-habits. Our notions of authority have long been determined via scarcity – be it the limits of the printing press, the capacity of editors, or the choices of collection-development experts at libraries. One might argue that these systems of knowledge are as arbitrary as the crowdsourced present. The critical difference is expertise – we’ve long required expertise of those who make our knowledge choices; expertise manifests itself quite differently in the crowd.
At a high level, both Carr and I are tilting at windmills. The web has so vastly changed the access function of information, there will inevitably huge changes as the information audience exponentially expands. Perhaps the takeaway is that we must remember that alternative types of literacies must be preserved and taught, if we wish for them to survive.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
“Perhaps the takeaway is that we must remember that alternative types of literacies must be preserved and taught, if we wish for them to survive.”
I’m kind of an intellectual Darwinist, here – sure we can preserve methods of literacy through instruction (they do still teach how to recite epic poems in Greek and Middle English), but what’ll survive is what’ll be useful in the world. Us old folks might whinge that the kids are a bunch of ignorant heathens – just as they did when people started reading novels and not just the classics, or newspapers, or listening to radio, or watching TV… I feel like it’s almost a cliche to point this out and yet somehow people keep forgetting the “all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again” nature of these changes.
Agreed that truth has always been scarcity of info or attention, doesn’t much matter, the effect is the same.
I do think the control of that mediation is both exciting and scary.
I think one company being able to control scarcity (and define truth) is historically dangerous.
Crowdsourcing is amazing unless it’s just a new dictatorship. Who controls the filter on the crowd?
I read Carr’s peace both as an surprised fascination for the plasticity of the human mind and a critic of the easy temptations the web has to offer. Google is so important to him, because (I presume, like me) he feels the need to search a few details when reading (or checking the news — although I doubt he fancies Google News.)
Because I read this rebuttal, I really though you (Fred) and him were aligned, and I suggested ‘Freedom’ in the comments of his blog — hope that was OK with you. Let’s see if he likes it, or if his detractors will.
I first said I couldn’t understand how your software could have any relevance — obviously I changed my mind since, although I much prefer to close my computer and go in the garden.
“Our notions of authority have long been determined via scarcity – be it the limits of the printing press, the capacity of editors, or the choices of collection-development experts at libraries.”
So I wonder what authority really is and why is it valuable? I think we use the scarcity of authority and tokens of authority as a proxy for the complex task of discerning truth. The future of intellectual thought will force us to do more of our own thinking about what the truth of a matter really is.
That means we should shift education toward the goal of teaching how to critically evaluate sources and how to validate claims.
> So I wonder what authority really is and why is it valuable?
(At least in economics) authority is the ability to make a decision: if you are a monopoly or a monopsony, you decide on the price and the conditions. In retrieving information, because it is expensive to do so and useless to copy it, this monopoly is the optimal case, and there is only only one leading expert.
> more of our own thinking
Actually, scarcity was introduced as a scientific criterion in the Fourteenth century by Ockham. With digital formalisation of information, machined-learned models relaxed the constraint to let humans understand and accept every explanations — not always for the best, if you consider the Law of Greater Numbers, e.g. the recent financial crisis has been driven by people smoothing models, to the latest figures, adding noise instead of trying to grasp a comprehensive, limited view (including back-firing crashes).
Not always — but possibly so. Google has dozens of rules that apply to its algorithms, still hand-picked elements from Machine-Learnt suggestions; some internally advocate for less human control.
I don’t think we need “more” understanding or to be more astute in validating claims (we might already be overwhelmed with that) as much as understanding how to organize algorithmic treatment of information — but that probably was what you meant.