After at least a few years during which it seemed that
nobody needed, or at least wanted, an introductory course to the internet, I
recently had the opportunity to return to teaching basic internet skills. In
the past I'd enjoyed teaching courses of this sort, and since over the years
I'd developed a rather extensive set of teaching materials, I figured that doing
so again wouldn't demand too much effort. What I hadn't realized, though of
course I should have, was the extent to which basic and simple Googling had
upstaged almost all other "skills" which I might intend to teach.
In my previous courses I'd spend at least one whole lesson
on bookmarking, and yet in this latest course I barely
described the basics, doing little more than suggesting that bookmarking
was most definitely a very important activity before moving on to other skills.
I explained to my students that creating logical folders in which to categorize
their bookmarks would make it easier for them to find something important in
the future. In order to convince them of this I'd repeat phrases like "an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". But of course with the quantity
of sites my students accumulated (or lack thereof), even an ounce wasn't really
worth the effort, and as I've noted previously
about myself, bookmarking has to a large extent been superceded by online
searching.
And if there wasn't much to explain in terms of bookmarking,
there was even less to explain in the theoretical realm of comparing indexes
to search engines. I was quite used to the fact that most people can't, or simply
don't, distinguish between the two, but until
I started reviewing my notes I hadn't realized that there's hardly an
index worth its salt anymore. It was then that I began to truly realize
that search had become our all-inclusive metaphor or access to information.
Was that unavoidable? Was seeking out information via a
search engine predestined to be the only way to find something? Other possibilities
certainly seem possible, if not probable. A couple of moments of brainstorming
brings up a number of other possibilities - serendipity is always on my shortlist,
and click by association isn't far behind. But what I found most strange, and
even distressing, was that, with the mounting evidence that very little serious
indexing seems to be taking place anymore, I found myself wishing that it was.
Surely the vastness of cyberspace makes cataloging a Sisyphean task, meaning
that if we really want to find something, we're going to have a much better
chance of doing so if a machine helps us than if a
person does. But I found myself missing that
human touch*.
Lest I sound overly sentimental, or critical of the coldness of technology,
I hasten to emphasize that this concern arose from the feeling that when we
find information via a search engine, we're also learning to conceptualize the
information terrain as one of separate, unrelated slivers of data. Dare I say
that it's something like strangers
in the night?
Much of the information that people are searching for
is being sought by many others. The Lycos 50 and Google Zeitgeist are (previously
examined) examples of this simple, and sometimes distressing, truth. From
that perspective, search creates, or at least gives expression to, a sense of
community. After all, at the very least it's comforting to know that the information
we seek is of interest to others as well. But it's in the very nature of a search
engine that the information we find is particularized, atomized, out of context.
Finding what I think I was looking for is certainly
a satisfying, even pleasing, experience, but when we find it via a search engine
we become enamored of the illusion that there's an easy, fast track to enlightenment,
we assume that knowledge is little more than a collection of facts. We learn
to view our world as a vast vending machine in front of which all we have to
do is drop in a few coins and click on a couple of buttons. It's a surprisingly
enticing illusion, and we're all too easily taken in by it.
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