Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart
Chad
Wellmon
Reprinted from The Hedgehog
Review 14.1 (Spring 2012). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or
redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission.
Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.
The
Hedgehog Review: Spring
2012
(Volume 14 | Issue 1)
Last year The Economist
published a special report not on the global financial crisis or the
polarization of the American electorate, but on the era of big data. Article
after article cited one big number after another to bolster the claim that we
live in an age of information superabundance. The data are impressive: 300
billion emails, 200 million tweets, and 2.5 billion text messages course
through our digital networks every day, and, if these numbers were not
staggering enough, scientists are reportedly awash in even more information.
This past January astronomers surveying the sky with the Sloan telescope in New
Mexico released over 49.5 terabytes of information—a mass of images and
measurements—in one data drop. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European
Organization for Nuclear Research), however, produces almost that much
information per second. Last year alone, the world’s information base is
estimated to have doubled every eleven hours. Just a decade ago, computer
professionals spoke of kilobytes and megabytes. Today they talk of the
terabyte, the petabyte, the exabyte, the zettabyte, and now the yottabyte, each
a thousand times bigger than the last.
Some see this as information
abundance, others as information overload. The advent of digital information
and with it the era of big data allows geneticists to decode the human genome,
humanists to search entire bodies of literature, and businesses to spot
economic trends. But it is also creating for many the sense that we are being
overwhelmed by information. How are we to manage it all? What are we to make,
as Ann Blair asks, of a zettabyte of information—a one with 21 zeros after it?1
From a more embodied, human perspective, these tremendous scales of information
are rather meaningless. We do not experience information as pure data, be it a
byte or a yottabyte, but as filtered and framed through the keyboards, screens,
and touchpads of our digital technologies. However impressive these
astronomical scales of information may be, our contemporary awe and increasing
worry about all this data obscures the ways in which we actually engage it and
the world of which it and we are a part. All of the chatter about information
superabundance and overload tends not only to marginalize human persons, but
also to render technology just as abstract as a yottabyte. An email is reduced
to yet another data point, the Web to an infinite complex of protocols and
machinery, Google to a neutral machine for producing information. Our
compulsive talk about information overload can isolate and abstract digital
technology from society, human persons, and our broader culture. We have become
distracted by all the data and inarticulate about our digital technologies.
The more pressing, if more complex,
task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the
yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically
formed world.2
In order to understand how our lives are already deeply formed by technology,
we need to consider information not only in the abstract terms of terrabytes
and zettabytes, but also in more cultural terms. How do the technologies that
humans form to engage the world come in turn to form us? What do these
technologies that are of our own making and irreducible elements of our own
being do to us? The analytical task lies in identifying and embracing forms of
human agency particular to our digital age, without reducing technology to a
mere mechanical extension of the human, to a mere tool. In short, asking
whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the
wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology
that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable.
Two
Narratives
The history of this mutual
constitution of humans and technology has been obscured as of late by the
crystallization of two competing narratives about how we experience all of this
information. On the one hand, there are those who claim that the digitization
efforts of Google, the social-networking power of Facebook, and the era of big
data in general are finally realizing that ancient dream of unifying all
knowledge. The digital world will become a “single liquid fabric of
interconnected words and ideas,” a form of knowledge without distinctions or
differences.3
Unlike other technological innovations, like print, which was limited to the
educated elite, the internet is a network of “densely interlinked Web pages,
blogs, news articles and Tweets [that] are all visible to anyone and everyone.”4
Our information age is unique not only in its scale, but in its inherently open
and democratic arrangement of information. Information has finally been set
free. Digital technologies, claim the most optimistic among us, will deliver a
universal knowledge that will make us smarter and ultimately liberate us.5
These utopic claims are related to similar visions about a trans-humanist
future in which technology will overcome what were once the historical limits
of humanity: physical, intellectual, and psychological. The dream is of a
post-human era.6
On the other hand, less sanguine
observers interpret the advent of digitization and big data as portending an
age of information overload. We are suffering under a deluge of data. Many
worry that the Web’s hyperlinks that propel us from page to page, the blogs
that reduce long articles to a more consumable line or two, and the tweets that
condense thoughts to 140 characters have all created a culture of distraction.
The very technologies that help us manage all of this information are
undermining our ability to read with any depth or care. The Web, according to
some, is a deeply flawed medium that facilitates a less intensive, more
superficial form of reading. When we read online, we browse, we scan, we skim.
The superabundance of information, such critics charge, however, is changing
not only our reading habits, but also the way we think. As Nicholas Carr puts
it, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for
concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the
way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”7
The constant distractions of the internet—think of all those hyperlinks and new
message warnings that flash up on the screen—are degrading our ability “to pay
sustained attention,” to read in depth, to reflect, to remember. For Carr and
many others like him, true knowledge is deep, and its depth is proportional to
the intensity of our attentiveness. In our digital world that encourages
quantity over quality, Google is making us stupid.
Each of these narratives points to
real changes in how technology impacts humans. Both the scale and the
acceleration of information production and dissemination in our digital age are
unique. Google, like every technology before it, may well be part of broader
changes in the ways we think and experience the world. Both narratives,
however, make two basic mistakes.
First, they imagine our information
age to be unprecedented, but information explosions and the utopian and
apocalyptic pronouncements that accompany them are an old concern. The
emergence of every new information technology brings with it new methods and
modes for storing and transmitting ever more information, and these
technologies deeply impact the ways in which humans interact with the world.
Both the optimism of technophiles who predict the emergence of a digital
“liquid” intelligence and the pessimism of those who fear that Google is
“making us stupid” echo historical hopes and complaints about large amounts of
information.
Second, both narratives make a key
conceptual error by isolating the causal effects of technology. Technologies,
be it the printed book or Google, do not make us unboundedly free or
unflaggingly stupid. Such a sharp dichotomy between humans and technology
simplifies the complex, unpredictable, and thoroughly historical ways in which
humans and technologies interact and form each other. Simple claims about the
effects of technology obscure basic assumptions, for good or bad, about
technology as an independent cause that eclipses causes of other kinds. They
assume the effects of technology can be easily isolated and abstracted from
their social and historical contexts.
Instead of thinking in such
dichotomies or worrying about all of those impending yottabytes, we might
consider a perhaps simple but oftentimes overlooked fact: we access, use, and
engage information through technologies that help us select, filter, and
delimit. Web browsers, hyperlinks, blogs, online newspapers, computational
algorithms, rss feeds, Facebook, and Google help us turn all of those
terrabytes of data into something more useful and particular, that is,
something that can be remade and repurposed by an embodied human person. These
now ubiquitous technologies help us filter the essential from the excess and
search for the needle in the haystack, and in so doing they have become central
mediums for our experience of the world.
In this sense, technology is neither
an abstract flood of data nor a simple machine-like appendage subordinate to
human intentions, but instead the very manner in which humans engage the world.
To celebrate the Web, or any other technology, as inherently edifying or
stultifying is to ignore its more human scale: our individual access to this
imagined expanse of pure information is made possible by technologies that are
constructed, designed, and constantly tweaked by human decisions and
experiences. These technologies do not exist independently of the human persons
who design and use them. Likewise, to suggest that Google is making us stupid
is to ignore the historical fact that over time technologies have had an effect
on how we think, but in ways that are much more complex and not at all reducible
to simple statements like “Google is making us stupid.”
Think of it this way: the Web in its
entirety—just like those terrabytes of information that we imagine weighing
down upon us—is inaccessible to the ill-equipped person. Digital technologies make
the Web accessible by making it seem much smaller and more manageable than we
imagine it to be. The Web does not exist. In this sense, the history of
information overload is instructive less for what it teaches us about the
quantity of information than what it teaches us about how the technologies that
we design to engage the world come in turn to shape us. The specific
technologies developed to manage information can give us insight into how we
organize, produce, and distribute knowledge—that is, the history of information
overload is a history of how we know what we know. It is not only the history
of data, books, and the tools used to cope with them. It is also a history of
ourselves and of the environment within which we make and in turn are made by technologies.
In the following sections, I put our
information age in historical context in an effort to demonstrate that
technology’s impact on the human is both precedented and constitutive of new
forms of life, new norms, and new cultures. The concluding sections focus on
Google in particular and consider how it is impacting our very notion of what
it is to be human in the digital age. Carr and other critics of the ways we
have come to interact with our digital technologies have good reason to be
concerned, but, as I hope to show, for rather different reasons than they might
think. The core issue concerns not particular modes of accommodating new
technologies—nifty advice on dealing with email or limiting screen time—but our
very conception of the relationship between the human and technology.
Too
Many Books
As historian Ann Blair has recently
demonstrated, our contemporary worries about information overload resonate with
historical complaints about “too many books.” Historical analogues afford us
insight not only into the history of particular anxieties, but also into the
ways humans have always been impacted by their own technologies. These
complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making
books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books
is a distraction”8;
and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps
growing.”9
After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in
book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these
complaints took on new meaning. As the German philosopher and critic Johann
Gottfried Herder put it in the late eighteenth century, the printing press
“gave wings” to paper.10
Complaints about too many books
gained particular urgency over the course of the eighteenth century when the
book market exploded, especially in England, France, and Germany. Whereas today
we imagine ourselves to be engulfed by a flood of digital data, late eighteenth-century
German readers, for example, imagined themselves to have been infested by a
plague of books [Bücherseuche]. Books circulated like contagions through
the reading public. These anxieties corresponded to a rapid increase in new
print titles in the last third of the eighteenth century, an increase of about
150 percent from 1770 to 1800 alone.
Similar to contemporary worries that
Google and Wikipedia are making us stupid, these eighteenth-century complaints
about “excess” were not merely descriptive. In 1702 the jurist and philosopher
Christian Thomasius laid out some of the normative concerns that would gain
increasing traction over the course of the century. He described the writing
and business of books as a
kind of Epidemic disease, which hath
afflicted Europe for a long time, and is more fit to fill warehouses of
booksellers, than the libraries of the Learned. Any one may understand this to
be meant of that itching desire to write books, which people are troubled with
at this time. Heretofore none but the learned, or at least such as ought to be
accounted so, meddled with this subject, but now-a-days there is nothing more
common, it extends itself through all professions, so that now almost the very
Coblers, and Women who can scarce read, are ambitious to appear in print, and
then we may see them carrying their books from door to door, as a Hawker does
his comb cases, pins and laces.11
The emergence of a print book market
lowered the bar of entry for authors and gradually began to render traditional
filters and constraints on the production of books increasingly inadequate. The
perception of an excess of books was motivated by a more basic assumption about
who should and should not write them.
At the end of the century, even book
dealers had grown weary of a market that seemed to be growing out of control.
In his 1795 screed, Appeal to My Nation: On the Plague of German Books,
the German bookseller and publisher Johann Georg Heinzmann lamented that “no
nation has printed so much as the Germans.”12
For Heinzmann, late eighteenth-century German readers suffered under a “reign
of books” in which they were the unwitting pawns of ideas that were not their
own. Giving this broad cultural anxiety a philosophical frame, and beating Carr
to the punch by more than two centuries, Immanuel Kant complained that such an
overabundance of books encouraged people to “read a lot” and “superficially.”13
Extensive reading not only fostered bad reading habits, but also caused a more
general pathological condition, Belesenheit [the quality of being
well-read], because it exposed readers to the great “waste” [Verderb] of
books. It cultivated uncritical thought.
Like contemporary worries about
“excess,” these were fundamentally normative. They made particular claims not
only about what was good or bad about print, but about what constituted “true”
knowledge. First, they presumed some unstated yet normative level of
information or, in the case of a Bücherseuche, some normative number of books.
There are too many books; there is too much data. But compared to what? Second,
such laments presumed the normative value of particular practices and
technologies for dealing with all of these books and all of this information.
Every complaint about excess was followed by a proposal on how to fix the
apparent problem. To insist that there are too many books was to insist that
there were too many books to be read or dealt with in a particular way and thus
to assume the normative value of one form of reading over another.
Enlightenment
Reading Technologies
Not so dissimilar to contemporary
readers with their digital tools, eighteenth-century German readers had a range
of technologies and methods at their disposal for dealing with the
proliferation of print—dictionaries, bibliographies, reviews, note-taking,
encyclopedias, marginalia, commonplace books, footnotes. These technologies
made the increasing amounts of print more manageable by helping readers to
select, summarize, and organize an ever-increasing store of information. The
sheer range of technologies demonstrates that humans usually deal with
information overload through creative and sometimes surprising solutions that
blur the line between humans and technology.
By the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, European readers dealt with the influx of new titles and
the lack of funds and time to read them all by creating virtual libraries
called bibliotheca. At first these printed texts were simply listings of
books that had been published or displayed at book fairs, but over time they
began to include short reviews and summaries intended to guide the collector,
scholar, and amateur in their choice and reading of books. They also allowed
eighteenth-century readers to avoid reading entire books by providing summaries
of individual books.
Eighteenth-century readers also made
use of an increasing array of encyclopedias. In contrast to their early modern
Latin predecessors that sought to summarize the most significant branches of
established knowledge (designed to present an enkuklios paideia, or common
knowledge), these Enlightenment encyclopedias were produced and sold as
reference books that disseminated information more widely and efficiently by
compiling, selecting, and summarizing more specialized and, above all, new
knowledge. It made knowledge more general and common by sifting and
constraining the purview of knowledge.14
Similarly, compilations, which date
from at least the early modern period, employed cut and paste technologies,
rather than summarization, to select, collect, and distribute the best passages
from an array of books.15
A related search technology, the biblical concordance—the first dates back to
1247—indexed every word of the Bible and facilitated its broader use for
sermons and, after its translations into the vernacular, even broader
audiences. Similarly, indexes became increasingly popular and big selling
points of printed texts by the sixteenth century.16
All of these technologies
facilitated a consultative reading that allowed a text to be accessed in parts
instead of reading a text straight through from beginning to end.17
By the early eighteenth century, there was even a science devoted to organizing
and accounting for all of these technologies and books: historia literaria. It
produced books about books. The technologies and methods for organizing and
managing all of these books and information were embedded into other forms and
even other sciences.
All of these devices and
technologies provided shortcuts and methods for filtering and searching the
mass of printed or scribal texts. They were technologies for managing two
perennially precious resources: money (books and manuscripts were expensive)
and time (it takes a lot of time to read every word).
While many overwhelmed readers
welcomed these techniques and technologies, some, especially by the late
eighteenth century, began to complain that they led to a derivative,
second-hand form of knowledge. One of Kant’s students and a key figure of the
German Enlightenment, J. G. Herder, mocked the French for their attempts to
deal with such a proliferation of print through encyclopedias:
Now encyclopedias are being made,
even Diderot and D’Alembert have lowered themselves to this. And that book that
is a triumph for the French is for us the first sign of their decline. They
have nothing to write and, thus, produce Abregés, vocabularies, esprits,
encyclopedias—the original works fall away.18
Echoing contemporary concerns about
how our reliance on Google and Wikipedia might lead to superficial forms of
knowledge, Herder worried that these technologies reduced knowledge to discrete
units of information. Journals reduced entire books to a paragraph or blurb;
encyclopedias aggregated huge swaths of information into a deceptively simple
form; compilations separated readers from the original texts.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the
word “polymath”—previously used positively to describe a learned person—became
synonymous with dilettante, one who merely skimmed, aggregated, and heaped
together mounds of information but never knew much at all. In sum, encyclopedias
and the like had reduced the Enlightenment project, these critics claimed, to
mere information management. At stake was the definition of “true” knowledge.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, German thinkers and authors began to
make a normative distinction between what they termed Gelehrsamkeit and Wissen,
between mere pedantry and true knowledge.
As this brief history of
Enlightenment information technologies suggests, to claim that a particular
technology has one unique effect, either positive or negative, is to reduce
both historically and conceptually the complex causal nexus within which humans
and technologies interact and shape each other. Carr’s recent and broadly
well-received arguments wondering if Google makes us stupid, for example, rely
on a historical parallel that he draws with print. He claims that the invention
of printing “caused a more intensive” form of reading and, by extrapolation,
print caused a more reflective form of thought—words on a page focused the
reader.19
Historically speaking, this is
hyperbolic techno-determinism. Carr assumes that technologies simply “determine
our situation,” independent of human persons, but these very technologies,
methods, and media emerge from particular historical situations with their own
complex of factors.20
Carr relies on quick allusions to historians of print to bolster his case and
inoculate himself from counter-arguments, but the historian of print to whom he
appeals, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, warns that “efforts to summarize changes
wrought by printing in any simple or single formula are likely to lead us
astray.”21
Arguments like Carr’s—and I focus on
him because he has become the vocal advocate of this view—also tend to ignore
the fact that, historically, print facilitated a range of reading habits and
styles. Francis Bacon, himself prone to condemning printed books, laid out at
least three ways to read books: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be
swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”22
As a host of scholars have demonstrated of late, different ways of reading
co-existed in the print era.23
Extensive or consultative forms of reading—those that Carr might describe as
distracted or unfocused—existed alongside more intensive forms of reading—those
that he might describe as deep, careful, prolonged engagements with particular
texts in the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century German Pietists read the Bible
very closely, but they also consistently consulted Bible concordances and Latin
encyclopedias.24
Even the form of intensive reading held up today as a dying practice, novel
reading, was often derided in the eighteenth century as weakening the memory
and leading to “habitual distraction,” as Kant put it.25
It was thought especially dangerous to women who, according to Kant, were
already prone to such lesser forms of thought. In short, print did not cause
one particular form of reading; instead, it facilitated a range of ever-newer
technologies, methods, and innovations that were deeply interwoven with new
forms of human life and new ways of experiencing the world.
The problem with suggestions that
Google makes us stupid, smart, or whatever else we might imagine, however, is
not just their historical myopia. Such reductions elide the fact that Google
and print technology do not operate independently of the humans who design,
interact with, and constantly modify them, just as humans do not exist
independently of technologies. By focusing on technology’s capacity to
determine the human (by insisting that Google makes us stupid, that print makes
us deeper readers), we risk losing sight of just how deeply our own agency is
wrapped up with technology. We forego a more anthropological perspective from
which we can observe “the activity of situated people trying to solve local
problems.”26
To emphasize a single and direct causal link between technology and a
particular form of thought is to isolate technology from the very forms of life
with which it is bound up.
Considering our anxieties and utopic
fantasies about technology or information superabundance in a more historical
light is one way to mitigate this tendency and gain some conceptual clarity.
Thus far I have offered some very general historical and conceptual
observations about technology and the history of information overload. In the
next sections, I focus on one particular historical technology—the footnote—and
its afterlife in our contemporary digital world.
The
Footnote: From Kant to Google
Today our most common tools for
organizing knowledge are algorithms and data structures. We often imagine them
to be unprecedented. But Google’s search engines take advantage of a rather old
technology—that most academic and seemingly useless thing called the footnote.
Although Google continues to tweak and improve its search engines, the data
that continue to fuel them are hyperlinks, those blue colored bits of texts on
the Web that if clicked will take you to another page. They are the sinews of
the Web, which is simply the totality of all hyperlinks. The World Wide Web
emerged in part from the efforts of a British physicist working at CERN in the
early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee. Frustrated by the confusion that resulted from a
proliferation of computers, each with its own codes and formats, he wondered
how they could all be connected. He took advantage of the fact that regardless
of the particular code, every computer had documents. He went on to work on
codes for html, URLs, and http that could link these documents regardless of
the differences among the computers themselves. It turns out that these digital
hyperlinks have a revealing historical and conceptual antecedent in the
Enlightenment footnote.
The modern hyperlink and the
Enlightenment footnote share a logic that is grounded in assumptions about the
text-based nature of knowledge. Both assume that documents, the printed texts
of the eighteenth century or the digitized ones of the twenty-first century,
are the basis of knowledge. And these assumptions have come to dominate not
only the way we search the web, but also the ways we interact with our digital
world. The history of the footnote is a curious but perspicuous example, then,
of how normative, cultural assumptions and values become embedded in
technology.
Footnotes have a long history in
biblical commentaries and medieval annotations. Whereas these scriptural
commentaries simply “buttressed a text” that derived its ultimate authority
from some divine source, Enlightenment footnotes pointed to other Enlightenment
texts.27
They highlighted the fact that these texts were precisely not divine or
transcendent. They located the work in a particular time and place. The modern
footnote anchors a text and grounds its authority not in some transcendent
realm, but in the footnotes themselves. Unlike biblical commentaries, modern
footnotes “seek to show that the work they support claims authority and
solidity from the historical conditions of its creation.”28
The Enlightenment’s citational logic is fundamentally self-referential and
recursive—that is, the criteria for judgment are always given by the system of
texts themselves and not something external, like divine or ecclesial
authority. The value and authority of one text is established by the fact that
other texts point to it. The more footnotes that point to a particular text,
the more authoritative that text becomes by dent of the fact that other texts
point to it.
Online newspapers and blogs are
central to our public debates, but printed journals were the central medium of
the Enlightenment. One of the most famous German journals was the Berlinische
Monatsschrift published between 1783 and 1811. It published the most
important articles to a broad and increasingly diverse reading public. In its
first issue, the editors wrote that the journal sought “news from the entire
empire [Reich] of the sciences”—ethnographic reports, biographical reports
about interesting people, translations, excerpts from texts from foreign lands.
The editors envisioned the journal as a central node in the broader world of
information exchange and circulation. This editorial plan was then carried out
according to a citational logic that structured the entire journal.
The journal’s first essay, “On the
Origin of the Fable of the Woman in White,” centers on a fable “drawn” from
another text of 1723. This citation is followed by another one citing another
history, published in 1753, on the origins of the fable. The rest of the essay
cites “various language scholars and scholars of antiquity” [Sprach- und
Alterthumsforscher] to authorize its own claims. The citations and
footnotes that fill the margins and the parenthetical directives that are
peppered throughout the main text not only give authority to the broader
argument and narrative, but also create a web of interconnected texts.
Even Kant’s famous essay on the
question of Enlightenment, which appeared in the same journal in 1784, begins
not with a philosophical argument, but with a footnote directly underneath the
title, directing the reader to a footnote from another essay published in
December of 1783 that posed the original question: “What is Enlightenment?”
This essay in turn directs readers to yet another article on Enlightenment from
September of that year. The traditional understanding of Enlightenment is based
on the self-legislation and autonomy of reason, but all of these footnotes
suggest that Enlightenment reason was bound up with print technology from the
beginning.
One of the central mediums of the
Enlightenment, journals, operated according to a citational logic. The
authority, relevance, and value of a text was undergirded—both conceptually and
visually—by an array of footnotes that pointed to other texts. Like our
contemporary hyperlinks, these citations interrupted the flow of reading—marked
as they often were by a big asterisk or a “see page 516.” Perhaps most
importantly, however, all of these footnotes and citations pointed not to a
single divinely inspired or authoritative text, but to a much broader network
of texts. Footnotes and citations were the pointing sinews that connected and
coordinated an abundance of print. By the end of the eighteenth century, there
even emerged a term for all of this pointing: the language of books [Büchersprache].
Books were imagined to speak to one another because they constantly pointed to
and cited one another. The possibility of knowledge and interaction with the
broader world in the Enlightenment rested not only on the pensive, autonomous
philosopher, but also within the links from book to book, essay to essay.
Google’s
Citational Logic
The founders of Google, Larry Page
and Sergey Brin, modeled their revolutionary search engine on the citational
logic of the footnote and thus transposed many of its assumptions about
knowledge and technology into a digital medium. Google “organizes the world’s
information,” as their motto goes, by modeling the hyperlink structure inherent
in the document-based Web; that is, it produces search results based on all of
the pointing between digital texts that hyperlinks do. Taking advantage of the
enormous scaling power afforded by digitization, Google, however, takes this citational
logic to both a conceptual and practical extreme. Whereas the footnotes in
Enlightenment texts were always bound to particular pages, Google uses each
hyperlink as a data point for its algorithms and creates a digitized map of all
possible links among documents.
Page and Brin started from the
insight that the web “was loosely based on the premise of citation and
annotation—after all, what is a link but a citation, and what was the text
describing that link but annotation.”29
Page himself saw this citational logic as the key to modeling the Web’s own
structure. Modern academic citation is simply the practice of pointing to other
people’s work—very much like the footnote. As we saw with Enlightenment
journals, a citation not only lists important information about another work,
but also confers authority on that work: “the process of citing others confers
their rank and authority upon you—a key concept that informs the way Google
works.”30
With his original Google project,
Page wanted to trace all of the links that connected different pages on the
Web, not only the outgoing links, but also their backward paths. Page argued
that pure computational power could produce a more complete model of the
citational structure of the Web—a map of interlinked and interdependent
documents by means of tracing hyperlinked citations. He intended to exploit
what computer scientists refer to as the Web Graph—the set of all nodes, corresponding
to static html pages, with directed hyperlinks from page A to page B. In early
1998 there were an estimated 150 million nodes joined by 2 billion links.31
Other search engines, however, had
had this modeling idea before. Given the proliferation of Web pages and with
them hyperlinks, Brin and Page, like all other search engineers, knew they had
to scale up “to keep up with the growth of the web.”32
By 1994 the World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) had indexed 110,000 pages, but by 1997
WebCrawler had indexed over 100 million Web documents. As Brin and Page put it
in 1998, it was “foreseeable” that by 2000 a comprehensive index would contain
over a billion documents. They were not merely intent on indexing pages or
modeling all of the links between documents on the Web, however. They were also
interested in increasing the “quality of results” that search engines returned.
In order for searches to improve, their search engine would focus not just on
the comprehensiveness, but on the relevance or quality of its results.
The insight that made Google Google
was the recognition that all links and all pages are not equal. In designing
their link analysis algorithm, PageRank, Brin and Page recognized that the real
power of this citational logic rested not just in counting links from all pages
equally, but in “normalizing by the number of links on a page.”33
The key difference between Google and early digital search technologies (like
the WWWW and the early Yahoo) was that it did not simply count or collate
citations. Other early search engines were too descriptive, too neutral. Brin
and Page reasoned that users wanted help not just in collecting but in
evaluating all of those millions of webpages. From its beginnings at Stanford,
the PageRank algorithm modeled the normative value of one page over another. It
was concerned not simply with questions of completeness or managerial
efficiency, but of value. It exploited the often-overlooked fact that
hyperlinks, like those Enlightenment footnotes, not only connected document to
document, but offered an implicit evaluation. The technology of the hyperlink,
like the footnote, is not neutral but laden with normative evaluations.
The
Algorithmic Self
In conclusion, I would like to
forestall a possible concern that in historicizing information overload, I risk
eliding the particularity of our own digital world and dismissing valid
concerns, like Carr’s, about how we interact with our digital technologies. In
highlighting the analogies between Google and Enlightenment print culture, I
have attempted to resist the alarmism and utopianism that tend to frame current
discussions of our digital culture, first by historicizing these concerns and
second by demonstrating that technology needs to be understood in deep,
embodied connection with the human. Considered in these terms, the question of
whether Google is making us stupid or smart might give way to more complex and
productive questions. What, for example, is the idea of the human person
underlying Google’s efforts to organize the world’s information and what forms
of human life does it facilitate?
In order to address such questions,
we need to understand that the Web relies on us as much as we rely on it. Every
time we click, type in a search term, or update our Facebook status, the Web
changes just a bit. “Google might not be making us stupid but we are making it
(and Facebook) smarter” because of all the information that we feed them both
every day.34
The links that make up the Web are evidence of this. They not only point to
other pages, but also highlight the contingency of the Web’s structure by
highlighting how the Web at any given moment is produced, manipulated, and
organized by hundreds of millions of individual users. Links embody the
contingency of the Web, its historical and ever-changing structure of which
humans are an essential element.
Thinking more in terms of a digital
ecology or environment and less in a human vs. technology dichotomy, we can
understand the Web, as James Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee, and colleagues recently
put it, not just as an isolated machine “to be engineered for improved
performance,” but as a “phenomenon with which we interact.” They write, “at the
micro-scale, the Web is an infra-structure of artificial languages and
protocols; it is a piece of engineering. However, it is the interaction of
human beings creating, linking, and consuming information that generates the
Web’s behavior as emergent properties at the macro-scale.”35
It is at this level of analysis,
where the human and its technologies are inextricable and together form
something like a digital ecology, that we can, for example, evaluate a recent
claim of one of Google’s founders. Discussing the future of the search firm,
Page described the “perfect search engine” as that which would “understand
exactly what I mean and give me back exactly what I want.”36
Such an “understanding,” however, is a function of the implicit normativity of
the citational logic that Google’s search engine shares with the Enlightenment
footnote. These technologies never leave our desires and thoughts unmediated
and unmanipulated. But Google’s search engines transform the normativity of the
citational logic of the footnote in important and particular ways that have
come to distinguish the digital age from the print age. Whereas an
Enlightenment reader might have been able to connect four or five footnotes
without much effort, Google’s search engine follows hundreds of millions of
links in a fraction of a second. The embodied human can all too easily seem to
disappear at such scales. If, as I have done above, the relevance of technology
has to be argued for in the Enlightenment, then the inverse is the case for our
digital age—the relevance of the embodied human agent has to be argued for
today.
On the one hand, individual human
persons play a rather insignificant role in Google’s operations. When we
conduct a search on Google, the process of evaluation is fundamentally
different from the form of evaluation tied to the footnote. Because Google’s
search engine operates at such massive scales, it evaluates and normalizes
links (judges which ones are relevant) through a recursive function. PageRank
is an iterative algorithm—all outputs become inputs in an endless loop. The
value of something on the Web is determined simply by the history of what
millions of users have valued—that is, its inputs are always a function of its
outputs. It is a highly scaled-up feedback loop. A Google search can only ever
retrieve what is already in a document. It can only ever find what is known to
the system of linked documents. The system is defined not by a particular
object, operator, or node within the system, but rather by the history of the
algorithm’s own operations.
If my son’s Web page on the
construction of his tree house has no incoming links, then his page,
practically speaking, does not exist according to PageRank’s logic. Google web
crawlers will not find it—or if they do, it will have a very low rank—and thus,
because we experience the Web through Google, neither will you. The freedom of
the Web—the freedom to link and follow links—is a function of the closed and
recursive nature of the system, one that includes by necessarily excluding.
Most contemporary search engines, Google chief among them, now share the
assumption that a “hyperlink” is a marker of authority or endorsement.
Serendipity is nearly impossible in such a document-centric Web. Questions of
value and authority are functions of and subject to the purported wisdom of the
digital crowd that is itself a normalized product of an algorithmic calculation
of value and authority.37
The normative “I” that Google assumes,
the “I” that Page’s perfect search engine would understand, is an algorithmic
self. It is a function of a citational logic that has been extended to an
algorithmic logic. It is an “I” constructed by a limited and fundamentally
contingent Web marked by our own history of searches, our own well-worn paths.
What I want at any given moment is forever defined by what I have always wanted
or what my demographic others have always wanted.
On the other hand, individual human
persons are central agents in Google’s operations because they author
hyperlinks. Columnists like Paul Krugman and Peggy Noonan make decisions about
what to link to and what not to link to in their columns. Similarly, as we
click from link to link (or choose not to click), we too make decisions and
judgments about the value of a link and thus of the document that hosts it.
Because algorithms increase the
scale of such operations by processing millions of links, however, they obscure
this more human element of the Web. All of those decisions to link from one
particular page to the next, to click from one link to the next involve not
just a link-fed algorithm, but hundreds of millions of human persons
interacting with Google every minute. These are the human interactions that
have an impact on the Web at the macro-level, and they are concealed by the
promises of the Google search box.
Only at this macro-level of analysis
can we make sense of the fact that Google’s search algorithms do not operate in
absolute mechanical purity, free of outside interference. Only if we understand
the Web and our search and filter technologies as elements in a digital ecology
can we make sense of the emergent properties of the complex interactions of
humans and technology: gaming the Google system through search optimization
strategies, the decision by Google employees (not algorithms) to ban certain
webpages and privilege others (ever notice the relatively recent dominance of
Wikipedia pages in Google searches?). The Web is not just a technology but an
ecology of human-technology interaction. It is a dynamic culture with its own
norms and practices.
New technologies, be it the printed
encyclopedia or Wikipedia, are not abstract machines that independently render
us stupid or smart. As we saw with Enlightenment reading technologies,
knowledge emerges out of complex processes of selection, distinction, and
judgment—out of the irreducible interactions of humans and technology. We
should resist the false promise that the empty box below the Google logo has
come to represent—either unmediated access to pure knowledge or a life of
distraction and shallow information. It is a ruse. Knowledge is hard won; it is
crafted, created, and organized by humans and their technologies. Google’s
search algorithms are only the most recent in a long history of technologies
that humans have developed to organize, evaluate, and engage their world.
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