Don’t Google It

“Oh just Google it.” is the all too familiar response when somebody is asked a question of moderate difficulty.

Well no, we shouldn’t just Google it’. A number of studies have shown that the internet’s way of putting quick, simple answers at our fingertips is changing human intelligence. As somebody better known than I but whose name escapes me for the moment said, “First we traded wisdom for knowledge, now we are trading knowledge for information. The problem is that information supplied in quick snippets does not enrich is because it doesn’t stick. The information overload the internet burdens us with means we are bombarded with a constant stream of data in such a way that little of it has time to stick and be added to the pool of knowledge on which we drawn when critical analysis or deductive logic is called for to solve a problem.

 
Sadly however the propaganda put out by government, academics and corporate businesses is gradually embedding the idea that the internet is a repository of all human knowledge. Even if this were true, the internet is not that simple. Important information has value. Once information is put in the public domain it loses any value it may have. Consequently though Google and Wikipedia claim to be important sources for reference the best information, that a scholar or student ought to be looking at, resides behind pay walls or security walls. It is not in the public domain. There is also the question of reliability; how sound is what you find on the internet?

Unfortunately, in spite of the geeks and nerds efforts to delude themselves that computers are capable of intelligent reasoning, they’re not. While most people who read this will have a good, if perhaps a tad subjective idea of what context implies, a search engine will recognise a contextual link if the same word occurs a few times in two entirely different web pages. Some years ago I wrote an article entitles “My Problem With God.” It was for posting on a site where a powerful clique of evangelical Christians were bullying people of a more liberal persuasion. The article which referred frequently to the nine months I spent in hospital and rehab recovering from a brain haemorrhage and commented on the many degenerative diseases that afflict humans was intended to challenge the view of God as a master puppeteer controlling all our thoughts and actions. Though usually describes as an atheist ( I prefer non theist) there are concepts of the divine I can accept. My belief system is not the point here however, what intrigued me when this article was posted was the advertisements served with it by Google. Because “God” appeared in the title and was mentioned many times, all the ads were for God merchandise, recruitment for Churches and sects and so on. Context?

Search engines are heavily influenced by what their developers and owners like to call “The wisdom of crowds.” By this they mean of course the stupidity of the mob, the herd instinct of sheeple. One of the factors used in weighting results for searches is the popularity of a page. Thus if a page has been looked at more than another and all remaining factors (links in vs links out, keyword density, frequency of updates and link relevancy are equal, the most popular popular page well be deemed the most relevant. This usually means someone searching for “stainless steel anchor pins” will see many results linking to pages selling stainless steel anchor pins when they might have wanted to lean about what these fictional products are used for, how they are made or if they are fit for purpose. The web is not a reliable source then. 

Sadly because of this internet addiction  sales of reference books are sinking fast as we turn to our web enabled devices for the answers to life’s great and trivial questions. But our lives and our  civilization would be diminished if The Oxford English Dictionary or Webster’s Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, the various dictionaries of myth and folklore, Culpepper’s Herbal, the numerous guides to gardening, fishing, stamp collecting and every topic imaginable are lost.

A good set of reference books ought to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist can do without. The detail they give as opposed to the brief factoids gleaned from a search help us express ideas or understand obscure words or references in someone’s work.

Traditional dictionaries and reference books are being overtaken by a shoddy online sites, their pages optimised to attract traffic and generate advertising revenue.  Search using a keyword and definition key and most likely you will get a brief line giving the two or three most popular meanings or inflections. Most hard copy dictionaries, even the compact ones some of us used to have in our briefcases will provide some semantics, the linguistic root of a word and some idea of its derivation or associations. Ask for a definition of “declare” online and you’ll get seven definitions of “declare” – but no helpful peripheral nods to “declaration”, “declarative” or “declaredly”. When online, you are never encouraged to browse or stray from the conventional, to explore the paradigm* and understand the full scope of definition you looked up. You are only encouraged to click on the ads.

As a source of information web pages are considered by many serious researchers to be shallow, superficial, crude and academically worthless. Anyone who disagrees with this view should read the Appendix to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where The Party (Big Brother) deems that language has become too sprawling and unwieldy, and  a new language, Newspeak, to strip out anything that is spurious and redundant including all words that give language colour, light and shade, are expressive of mood or emotion or encourage visual imagery. Instead of having 40 or 50 terms for “wicked” or “wrong”, say Big Brother’s lexicographers, let us agree to say “ungood” to mean all of them – and, if emphasis is needed, “doubleplusungood”.

It is not difficult to discern the nerds who run the great internet corporations and who would have us believe humans are worthless if they do not aspire to be as unfeelingly efficient at performing tasks as computers would be leading us much more quickly in this direction if only enough of us were willing to follow.

This item, posted on a site which shares its ad revenue with me, may seem like a case of the author biting the hand that feeds him. Not so, I think computers are a fine tool but that is all they are, a tool. I think the internet should be a great asset to us as a means of communicating, finding and distributing information, but we should not for one second imagine the internet can think or make decisions for us. Thus I am writing to try to encourage people to the view that computers and the internet should be servants to us rather than that we become slaves to technology.

*Paradigm: usually used in business speak to refer to a model or pattern, paradigm from two Greek words, para, through; and digm, to run; is used here to denote the full range of a word’s meanings and inflections. The most literal meaning is a theme, as a theme runs through a poem, narrative, philosophical speculation or piece of music.

RELATED POSTS:
Google algorithm tweaking
Is the internet making us stupid
The internet threat to civilisation
Marking Computer Says No
Internet Censorship? Google boss Schmidt has other ideas
Google Boss Tells US Senate: We’re Not Microsoft
The Panopticon