Back in my undergraduate days (long ago, when issues very different from cyberspace concerned me) one of the burning environmental topics was the Population Bomb. It's a bit hard to remember, but about 35 years ago the claim went that the world was headed toward famine and death on a massive scale because the earth's resources couldn't maintain what appeared to be a continued and spiraling growth in population. As Paul Ehrlich, the major prophet of doom, put it:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
As should be rather obvious (and was so considerably
earlier than only thirty five years later) this didn't happen. The fallout from
such an overly zealous prediction, and the easy willingness to accept it, however,
is (or should be) a scepticism toward environmental predictions of doom. Predictions
of environmental disasters, after all, are frequent and intense, and it seems
that the only thing that we can truly be sure of is that if the
sky is falling, it's doing so extremely slowly. Ehrlich undoubtedly still
has his followers, but more than a generation later, he seems to have succeeded
in fading into oblivion.
My interest in the deleterious effects of ever booming
population growth waned long ago, but if we're looking for possible environmental
disasters, the web is a great place to look. Promises of impending doom abound
there. But should we believe these promises, or instead those who tell us that
today's doomsayers aren't any different from the Paul Ehrlichs of a generation
ago? Toward the end of December, 2004, the conservative columnist George Will
wrote an
Op-Ed article in the Washington Post (and on its online edition) praising
Michael Crichton's anti-global-warming-scare novel State
of Fear, and arguing that the fear of global warming is greatly over-exagerrated.
This article wasn't the first time that I'd encountered claims that global warming
isn't the danger it's often made out to be. That being the case, although in
the past I'd never found many reasons to agree with George Will, I was amenable
to being convinced that on this score he was right. And of course I
tried to find information on the web that would tell me whether or not he
was.
Readers of these columns, however, can correctly assume
that I'm not going to try to resolve the global warming controversy here. The
issue may interest me, but it's not the sort of thing I deal with in these columns.
And that being the case, at this stage in this column it seems fair to ask -
all this is well and good, but what does all this have to do with the internet?
One doesn't have to turn to the internet to find conflicting opinions. These
can readily be found in newspapers and on television. So why a column that seems
concerned with such a trivial issue? Am I going to claim that something different
is taking place on the web than in more traditional media? That wouldn't be
an easy claim to prove. Perhaps we might be able to point to certain limited
distinctions, and perhaps these can be significant. In a print environment,
for instance, because its readership would have been predefined as readers of
a particular newspaper, Will's article would probably have had a
more limited impact. In addition, it would have faded from public view more
quickly, and three months after its publication relatively few people would
encounter it. On the web there's a greater chance
of longevity and of receiving a wider audience.
But two other differences between traditional media and
the web, differences that aren't necessarily obvious, should definitely be considered
significant. These are the page ranking systems that various search engines
use, and the rather unsophisticated searching habits of today's web users. Taken
together (and it's hard to separate them) they create a sort of vicious circle
of limited curiousity that creates a situation in which even in cases where
an issue is controversial and hotly debated, it doesn't necessarily generate
interest outside of a small
circle of friends.
Back in 2001, Jakob Nielsen, of usability research
fame, told us that:
Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results.A Consumer Reports WebWatch study from 2003 found similar results:
The majority of participants never clicked beyond the first page of search results as they had blind trust in search engines to present only the best or most accurate unbiased results on the first page. As a result, two-in-five links (or 41%) selected by our participants during the assigned search sessions were paid results.This suggests that even in cases where different and varied information, information from different points of view, information that evaluates source material in conflicting manners, is available, a large percentage of internet users aren't going to find it. Instead, they're going to be satisfied with the first information that they encounter on a subject, and they'll neither investigate additional results that are available to them, nor revise their searches in order to find different information. In other words, after a couple of clicks at the most, they'll be shut off from additional and/or different viewpoints or opinions on a subject. And this means that page ranking is all - if you can't get your site to the top of the results, you're not going to be found at all. And if only a limited number of people find you, your ranking isn't going to be high, and you'll continue to fade into oblivion.
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