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Two Visions of the Future from the U.K.

Two different news items offered insights about the future of online. My focus is the limitations of key word search. I downloaded both articles, I must admit, eager to see if my research were disproved or augmented.

Whitebread

The first report appeared on January 14, 2008, in the (London) Times online in a news story “White Bread for Young Minds, Says University Professor.” In the intervening 72 hours, numerous comments appeared. The catch phrase is the coinage of Tara Brabazon, professor of Media Studies at the University of Brighton. She allegedly prohibits her students from using Google for research. The metaphor connotes in a memorable way a statement attributed to her in the Times’s article: “Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content.”

The argument strikes a chord with me because [a] I am a dinosaur, preferring warm thoughts about “the way it was” as the snow of time accretes on my shoulders; [b] schools are perceived to be in decline because it seems that some young people don’t read, ignore newspapers except for the sporty pictures that enliven gray pages of newsprint, and can’t do mathematics reliably at take-away shops; and [c] I respond to the charm of a “sky is falling” argument.

Ms. Brabazon’s argument is solid. Libraries seem to be morphing into Starbuck’s with more free media on offer. Google–the icon of “I’m feeling lucky” research–allows almost anyone to locate information on a topic regardless of its obscurity or commonness. I find myself flipping my dinosaurian tail out of the way to get the telephone number of the local tire shop, check the weather instead of looking out my window, and converting worthless dollars into high-value pounds. Why remember? Google or Live.com or Yahoo are there to do the heavy lifting for me.

Educators are in the business of transmitting certain skills to students. When digital technology seeps into the process, the hegemony begins to erode, so the argument goes. Ms. Brabazon joins Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985) and more recently Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur, 2007) among others in documenting the emergence of what I call the “inattention economy.”

I don’t like the loss of what weird expertise I possessed that allowed me to get good grades the old-fashioned way, but it’s reality. The notion that Google is more than an online service is interesting. I have argued in my two Google studies that Google is indeed much more than a Web search system growing fat on advertisers’ money. My research reveals little about Google as a corrosive effect on a teacher’s ability to get students to do their work using a range of research tools. Who wouldn’t use an online service to locate a journal article or book? I remember how comfortable my little study nook was in the rat hole in which I lived as a student, then slogging through the Illinois winter, dealing with the Easter egg hunt in the library stuffed with physical books that were never shelved in sequence, and manually taking notes or feeding 10-cent coins into a foul-smelling photocopy machine that rarely produced a readable copy. Give me my laptop and a high-speed Internet connection. I’m a dinosaur, and I don’t want to go back to my research roots. I am confident that the professor who shaped my research style–Professor William Gillis, may he rest in peace–neither knew nor cared how I gathered my information, performed my analyses, and assembled the blather that whizzed me through university and graduate school.

If a dinosaur can figure out a better way, Tefloned along by Google, a savvy teen will too. Draw your own conclusions about the “whitebread” argument, but it does reinforce my research that suggests a powerful “pull” exists for search systems that work better, faster, and more intelligently than those today. Where there’s a market pull, there’s change. So, the notion of going back to the days of taking class notes on wax in wooden frames and wandering with a professor under the lemon trees is charming but irrelevant.

The Researcher of the Future

The British Library is a highly-regarded, venerable institution. Some of its managers have great confidence that their perception of online in general and Google in particular is informed, substantiated by facts, and well-considered. The Library’s Web site offers a summary of a new study called (and I’m not sure of the bibliographic niceties for this title): A Ciber [sic] Briefing Paper. Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 11 January 2008. My system’s spelling checker is flashing madly regarding the spelling of cyber as ciber, but I’m certainly not intellectually as sharp as the erudite folks at the British Library, living in rural Kentucky and working by the light of buring coal. You can download this 1.67 megabyte 35 page document Researcher of the Future.

The British Library’s Web site article identifies the key point of the study as “research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users — impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs — are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.” The British Library has learned that online is changing research habits. (As I noted in the first section of this essay, an old dinosaur like me figured out that doing research online faster, easier, and cheaper than playing “Find the Info” in my university’s library.)

My reading of this weirdly formatted document, which looks as if it was a PowerPoint presentation converted to a handout, identified several other important points. Let me share my reading of this unusual study’s findings with you:

1. The study was a “virtual longitudinal study”. My take on this is that the researchers did the type of work identified as questionable in the “whitebread” argument summarized in the first section of the paper. If the British Library does “Googley research”, I posit that Ms. Brabazon’s and other defenders of the “right way” to do research have lost their battle. Score: 1 for Google-Live.com-Yahoo. Nil for Ms. Brabazon and the British Library.
2. Libraries will be affected by the shift to online, virtualization, pervasive computing, and other impedimentia of the modern world for affluent people. Score 1 for Google-Live.com-Yahoo. Nil for Mr. Brabazon, nil for the British Library, nil for traditional libraries. I bet librarians reading this study will be really surprised to hear that traditional libraries have been affected by the online revolution.
3. The Google generation is comprised of “expert searchers”. The reader learns that most people are lousy searchers. Companies developing new search systems are working overtime to create smarter search systems because most online users–forget about age, gentle reader–are really terrible searchers and researchers. The “fix” is computational intelligence in the search systems, not in the users. Score 1 more for Google-Live.com-Yahoo and any other search vendor. Nil for the British Library, nil for traditional education. Give Ms. Brabazon a bonus point because she reached her conclusion without spending money for the CIBER researchers to “validate” the change in learning behavior.
4. The future is “a unified Web culture,” more digital content, eBooks, and the Semantic Web. The word unified stopped my ageing synapses. My research yielded data that suggest the emergence of monopolies in certain functions, and increasing fragmentation of information and markets. Unified is not a word I can apply to the online landscape.In my BearStearns’ report published in 2007 as Google’s Semantic Web: The Radical Change Coming to Search and the Profound Implications to Yahoo & Microsoft, I revealed that Google wants to become the Semantic Web.

Wrap Up

I look forward to heated debate about Google’s role in “whitebreading” youth. (Sounds similar to waterboarding, doesn’t it?) I also hunger for more reports from CIBER, the British Library, and folks a heck of lot smarter than I am. Nevertheless, my Beyond Search study will assert the following:

1. Search has to get smarter. Most users aren’t progressing as rapidly as young information retrieval experts.
2. The traditional ways of doing research, meeting people, even conversing are being altered as information flows course through thought and action.
3. The future is going to be different from what big thinkers posit.

Traditional libraries will be buffeted by bits and bytes and Boards of Directors who favor quill pens and scratching on shards. Publishers want their old monopolies back. Universities want that darned trivium too. These are notions I support but recognize that the odds are indeed long.

Stephen E. Arnold, January 17, 2008

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