Lucidity

An interesting thing happened to me on the way to some information recently.

I had stumbled across what I thought to be an obscure Yiddish interjection in a book I was reading, and typed it into the search field on my browser to see if it would cough up an instant translation. The first hit was not a translation, however; it was the very chapter of the book I was reading, in HTML.

Because I was reading a book, and in a literary frame of mind, I was ready to ascribe some sort of greater meaning to that event, though in reality it was just an odd coincidence. The phrase that I typed in was actually a proper name, and the chapter of the book in which it was contained had been excerpted for an online review. But even for a digital lifestyle proponent such as me, this kind of collision between analogue and digital, between what I imagine is happening in my head and what I imagine is happening somewhere out there, gives me pause. I know some computer in California wants to read my mind. And a computer in California already has control of my teeth.

These convergences have been stacking up in the back of my mind like cordwood for the past few years. I was once talking to a friend about the somewhat disturbing ritual of cooking and eating an Ortolan (I have done neither). Some time later he expressed amazement that when he went to look the bird up on Wikipedia, he discovered that I had quoted entire passages to him from the online encyclopedia. He seemed somewhat impressed. I was rather alarmed.

I rail against Wikipedia, foolishly, pointlessly, because it has succeeded in being the monolithic oracle of online information that it always wanted to be. I was reviewing the work of a colleague and wanted to substantiate an un-footnoted claim. The claim came from Wikipedia – but even in Wikipedia it wasn’t attributed. So I did a broader search on that phrase, and immediately realized the folly of my attempt. I found dozens of children of that Wikipedia entry before I gave up, many in quotes, and many without. I can only suspect that the progenitor was not among the search results. But even if it had been, how would I know?

The internet is big, my friends, mighty big. But in spite of the incomprehensible vastness of it all, there’s an unsettling sameness to it in a sense. We have, essentially, one encyclopedia. We have one search tool. I just typed some not really random words into Google as they popped into my head: car, computer, bread, file folder. Wikipedia was the first hit for three of them, and the second hit for “car” (first place honours in the car category went to carmagazine.co.uk). I don’t mean to understate the variety of experiences available on the internet, but merely to suggest that the path of least resistance often seems to be looking at it through a straw.

Some of you may have read the Atlantic Monthly article this past summer entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” – the author’s premise is that the internet is changing how we read, and conceivably affecting our ability to absorb long complex texts. The online version features links to some interesting information, including an academic study of the online search habits of researchers (and plenty of Wikipedia entries, of course). But as much as I’m interested in how stupid I may be getting, I’m also interested in how smart we are if we all know the same information, in the same words, from the same source. I’m reminded of episode of The Prisoner (and yes, we also have only one movie database) entitled The General, in which the titular character has invented a system called “Speed Learn”. In its ability to instill in the recipient the equivalent result of three years worth of study in a mere three minutes, “Speed Learn” is eerily indistinguishable from a futuristic brainwashing technique.

What does it all have to do with marketing, you may be asking. Our newest research team is tackling the subject of search, and it’s a pretty far-reaching topic. On one side are pure and simple iterative techniques, spreadsheets full of keywords, easily tabulated click-through rates. On the other side are people, though – unpredictable, whimsical, subject in varying degrees to influence not only from the information they absorb, but from the medium itself. As a writer by title and inclination, I am particularly interested in how people read, and how to predict the right answer to the questions they are about to ask. But I also just like good questions, sometimes more than answers. “How do you get to the top of the search result?” is a popular one. Another good question might be “Would anyone search the word ‘car’ for any other reason than to prove a point?”