Search has evolved into a lucrative business. Everything that humankind produces – be it intellectual or material, no matter how great – is worth little if it is not easily available to the consumer. Marketing campaigns and SEO initiatives have brought the marketplace into our homes. Libraries and schools and all kinds of intellectual properties are now available from most any computer. Our world has been “google-ized,” and relevance-ranking has shaped multiple perspectives on “findability.” But the computing power of statistical text analysis, pattern-matching, and stopwords has distracted many from focusing on (should I say remembering?) what actually makes the world tick. There are benefits and dangers in a world where the information that is served to the masses is reduced to simple character strings, pattern matches, co-location, word frequency, popularity based on interlinking, etc. The information chatter that is retrieved is often nothing more than the clutter of hitlists that must be sifted through for the occasional gem, the possible answer to one’s inquiry. The world does not need more popularity-based spamming, uniformity in experience, and mediocre thinking. I shudder at the thought of a globalized world where all of us hear, see, think, and do the same thing. And then the endlessly sifting and searching … This linking experiment has been good enough for some, but not even close to good for others. It has been sold to us as ...
Anytime
Search has evolved into a lucrative business. Everything that humankind produces – be it intellectual or material, no matter how great – is worth little if it is not easily available to the consumer. Marketing campaigns and SEO initiatives have brought the marketplace into our homes. Libraries and schools and all kinds of intellectual properties are now available from most any computer. Our world has been “google-ized,” and relevance-ranking has shaped multiple perspectives on “findability.” But the computing power of statistical text analysis, pattern-matching, and stopwords has distracted many from focusing on (should I say remembering?) what actually makes the world tick. There are benefits and dangers in a world where the information that is served to the masses is reduced to simple character strings, pattern matches, co-location, word frequency, popularity based on interlinking, etc. The information chatter that is retrieved is often nothing more than the clutter of hitlists that must be sifted through for the occasional gem, the possible answer to one’s inquiry. The world does not need more popularity-based spamming, uniformity in experience, and mediocre thinking. I shudder at the thought of a globalized world where all of us hear, see, think, and do the same thing. And then the endlessly sifting and searching … This linking experiment has been good enough for some, but not even close to good for others. It has been sold to us as ...