10 Things (I Think) I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

Untested Hypothesis #4: A search engine isn’t an engine.

Factoid: I’m a graduate student in Library and Information [Studies], and I would absolutely, positively much prefer to “Google it” than to utilize LIS-orthodox search tools (academic databases, etc.).

In fact, almost no such orthodoxy was utilized in this little think-piece. All search engines (so-called), all the time. This could, of course, render it unserious, unscholarly, uninformed, and therefore unread. Ironically, of course, most scholarship is also unread. So I might as well have a little fun and be my intellectual self (if, that is, we still believe in such things — and I’ve already said that probably I don’t).

Don’t get me wrong: in my LIS studies, I have been exposed to a brave new world in academic databases, (special) library catalogs, and the like. It’s exceedingly cool. But it’s cumbersome. To wit: I am procrastinating from completing the final project in my User-Centered Information Services class — compiling a Resources Notebook of reference databases etc. — because it’s hard work, I’m unfamiliar with the navigational processes, and the yield often doesn’t match the effort.

That’s not to say search engines don’t require effort. But the navigational process is hard-wired into my brain — such that it’s increasingly indistinguishable from what feels like my “thinking.” And this is by (intelligent?) design.

To elucidate my point, allow me to regurgitate a message board post I offered in Week 14 of my LS 500 (Information Science) class, in response to an article by Justin Zobel²² in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval Forum (or ACM SIGIR Forum, for short):

“But what I found most profoundly instructive about this week’s readings was how all of them made it accessible for me to understand how important metacognition is in the Information Age (so called). And a fundamental block for most people when it comes to that metacognitive awareness is the relationship between humans and the information technologies they use. They (we) don’t tend to think of that as thinking. In fact, it’s interesting to consider this in the context of our parallel consideration of usability [see here²³ and here,²⁴ courtesy Dr. Bonnici’s syllabus]. Search engines, apps, folksonomies²⁵ — these are all tools some smart person (smarter than us) designed and got rich off of, and now we use them (usability) to make or [sic] lives easier and more efficient. And, on some level, that is what they are. But then we get freaked out when AI can write better than us (and do any number of things better than we can, some of which don’t freak us out at all). And we think nothing of how search engines actually work. Which is to say: it’s social epistemology.²⁶ We’re enamored of our individuality, of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but we’ve always existed within (indeed, as) frameworks. Frameworks embedded in other frameworks. 

“As Zobel states:

Knowledge, for both good and ill, is becoming less about facts, and more about frameworks.

“That’s possibly because Search-Engine epistemology so powerfully reflects a deep, abiding, and intuitive interconnectedness in our experience of consciousness, writ large, that humans have never really been able to get our heads around.

“Other pull quotes from Zobel that really moved me:

A definition of cognition is “‘The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses’ … Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.” (Wikipedia, accessed 22 September 2017.) Retrieval can play an obvious role in cognition, as a mechanical provider of knowledge. From the perspective of a user, what is arguably a very natural way to describe a retrieval system is that it is a kind of external knowledge bank, supplementing ordinary human memory. Without hyperbole or exaggeration, it is reasonable to describe search engines as knowledge tools for enhancing or supporting human cognition [Belkin, 1990]. The core of the approach, as Belkin explains, ‘is that it explicitly considers the states of knowledge, beliefs and so on of human beings’ and that with respect to IR systems the ‘goal is the eventual appropriate modification of [the] state of knowledge of the user’. (Zobel, 2017, p. 23)

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This is not a new perspective, but it has implications that can be tested. A key implication is that a user who has access to an external knowledge bank might be expected to exhibit changed cognitive processes, and indeed that is the case: this phenomenon has been observed by psychological researchers in a range of studies. Small et al. [2008] found experience with Internet searching may affect how people undertake decision making and complex reasoning. Brown [2000] notes a range of respects in which Web access and search is changing behaviour, such as preparedness to use found material to learn tasks on-the-fly; he argues that web users are participating in a form of ‘distributed intelligence’. Most dramatically, Sparrow et al. [2011] found that people’s memories are adapting to accommodate the fact that some information is found online and are more likely to forget information if they know how to recover it– summarising, they found that the Web ‘has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves’. Ward [2013] has similarly found that Web use is having significant impact on memory.

Some of these changes are profound. A skilled programmer, for example, may have only limited knowledge of the pertinent tools when the task is commenced. Experienced search users may place a relatively low value on experts and expertise, and indeed the nature of expertise itself is changing: an expert may be someone who has the ability to accurately integrate found knowledge, rather than someone who possesses that knowledge. In short, the existence of search systems, coupled with the extraordinary scope of Web resources, is altering how we think. (Zobel, 2017, p. 24)

“A lot of folks I know are freaked out by that last sentence. They can feel that it’s true, and there’s lots of anecdotal (even, Zobel suggests, empirical) confirmation of it — also it seems there’s a general consensus in the body politic that it’s negatively altering how we think. I now suspect the main thing it’s doing is undermining expertise, authority, and what TS Eliot called “the individual talent.” That is, the notion of genius, of talent/insight that is sourced solely in an individual brain shaped by a unique life. That’s a relatively new idea, though — “the individual talent,” I mean. And, if you believe Eliot, it was always BS anyway.” 

NEXT: Untested Hypothesis #5: What Used to be called
the “Graphical User Interface”²⁷ is now called “AI.”