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.
