Free Write: Search
Dr. Alex Halavais recently released a book, Search Engine Society, and is teaching a course on the same topic this year. He's also broadcasting half-hour talks that accompany his course: this is one of them.
The rest of the series so far.
Most of the content is strictly audio, so that makes for a good radio-like stream of information. I want to make a tangent from his talk. In this video, he's speaking pretty broadly about how search is fundamental to the human experience, and what aptitudes search engines on the Internet have. One theme that pops up a few times is that we're shifting our way of dealing with information. Information transfer, increasingly, comes from sources that have no or very different social connections than in the past. Before the Internet, mass media, and card catalogues, it's very very hard to separate information seeking and social contact. Sure, you can write information down and record it, but getting ahold of the information always used to involve other people, whether they were gatekeepers to the information or whether they were the information. This had good and bad parts which I'm not going to talk about: I'm just going to note that it meant we got to use our extensive and long-held monkey toolkits for evaluating other people. Increasingly, though, information is available through channels where that toolkit doesn't work as well, and we're having to develop new tools.
This relates to aprivatefox and mufi, who've gotten me thinking about community-building. Halavais briefly touches on the topic of a perfect search engine. The junction of these two things is a tool that people have been stumbling towards gradually: a search engine for reliability and trustworthiness. When information exchange is social exchange, that evaluation of trustworthiness - in both directions - is embedded in the transfer. Most of the time it's pretty trivial. However, a lot of the information transfer that we're dealing with now imposes a higher burden for finding out about the trustworthiness of the source of the information. Hence things like SourceWatch, hence endless Wikipedia flamewars, hence iteration after iteration of Slashdot's moderation system. So that's an interesting direction to think of when we think of search, because that's an acute need: we didn't have that same need (although we had a similar one) when information transfer was an inherently social act.
The other thing that this brings to mind is related to circuit-four and efficiency. Halavais has a quick paragraph or two about laziness and finding answers that are good enough. A recent discussion about life advice spun off into talking about the trustworthiness of the source, trolling, and how much time it's appropriate to spend on trolls. This in turn branches into two directions: this is an interesting question because it's one that has multiple correct answers, depending on who's asking, and it's an interesting question because, again, this is an important question for community-building. When you're trying to evaluate other people, how much evaluation do you do before you declare your answer "good enough"?
Both of these, of course, get to be even more pain-in-the-ass questions when you consider that since we're talking about mutable qualities of human psyches, the correct answers are liable to walk out from under you. It's important to think about the questions anyhow, though. I think that the consistent factor here is that, quite apart from how much time you want to spend on searching, you will get better results if you are aware of how you're searching, and what the alternatives are.
The rest of the series so far.
Most of the content is strictly audio, so that makes for a good radio-like stream of information. I want to make a tangent from his talk. In this video, he's speaking pretty broadly about how search is fundamental to the human experience, and what aptitudes search engines on the Internet have. One theme that pops up a few times is that we're shifting our way of dealing with information. Information transfer, increasingly, comes from sources that have no or very different social connections than in the past. Before the Internet, mass media, and card catalogues, it's very very hard to separate information seeking and social contact. Sure, you can write information down and record it, but getting ahold of the information always used to involve other people, whether they were gatekeepers to the information or whether they were the information. This had good and bad parts which I'm not going to talk about: I'm just going to note that it meant we got to use our extensive and long-held monkey toolkits for evaluating other people. Increasingly, though, information is available through channels where that toolkit doesn't work as well, and we're having to develop new tools.
This relates to aprivatefox and mufi, who've gotten me thinking about community-building. Halavais briefly touches on the topic of a perfect search engine. The junction of these two things is a tool that people have been stumbling towards gradually: a search engine for reliability and trustworthiness. When information exchange is social exchange, that evaluation of trustworthiness - in both directions - is embedded in the transfer. Most of the time it's pretty trivial. However, a lot of the information transfer that we're dealing with now imposes a higher burden for finding out about the trustworthiness of the source of the information. Hence things like SourceWatch, hence endless Wikipedia flamewars, hence iteration after iteration of Slashdot's moderation system. So that's an interesting direction to think of when we think of search, because that's an acute need: we didn't have that same need (although we had a similar one) when information transfer was an inherently social act.
The other thing that this brings to mind is related to circuit-four and efficiency. Halavais has a quick paragraph or two about laziness and finding answers that are good enough. A recent discussion about life advice spun off into talking about the trustworthiness of the source, trolling, and how much time it's appropriate to spend on trolls. This in turn branches into two directions: this is an interesting question because it's one that has multiple correct answers, depending on who's asking, and it's an interesting question because, again, this is an important question for community-building. When you're trying to evaluate other people, how much evaluation do you do before you declare your answer "good enough"?
Both of these, of course, get to be even more pain-in-the-ass questions when you consider that since we're talking about mutable qualities of human psyches, the correct answers are liable to walk out from under you. It's important to think about the questions anyhow, though. I think that the consistent factor here is that, quite apart from how much time you want to spend on searching, you will get better results if you are aware of how you're searching, and what the alternatives are.