But you're an information professional, aren't you?
At seven or eight years ago a friend who also works with information technologies
reported to me that people who turned to him for help in finding information on
various topics were always surprised when he told them it was hard for him to
help them. "But you're a professional at searching for information on the
internet!" they'd exclaim. He would tell them that he was well versed in
the few fields that he had studied, and could probably find materials on those
subjects quite readily and successfully, but that because he didn't know much
about the other topics that he was being asked to help find information about,
he didn't even know where to start looking for such information. His attempts
at explaining that each field had its own organizing principles, it's own particular
keywords, and more, just didn't seem to help. People simply assumed that searching
for information was little more than typing a term into a search field and clicking
on <ENTER>.
But of course that's pretty much precisely what it's become. And it's probably
on the way toward becoming even simpler. Today in schools we try to teach pupils
to use search engines, pretty much to the exclusion of any other search tools
or methods. Yet chances are good that by the time they've become truly
adept at this the technology will have advanced to a stage at which instead
of typing a query, all they'll have to do is vocalize their request into a microphone
in order to get passable results. We're sort of caught in a bind, a sort of time
warp. On the one hand, search has became the dominant metaphor in our information-dominated
lives. On the other, chances are good that better and simpler methods of accessing
information are already sneaking up on us as we train pupils in present-day search
techniques.
Go to: The tyranny of search.