Ruined by Google

13 Jan

Information on tap is a boon. But if it means that the only thing we will end up knowing—have in your heads—is where to go to find the information, it may also be a bane.

Accessible stored cognitions are vital. They allow us to verify and contextualize new information. If we need to look things up, because of laziness or forgetfulness, we will end up accepting some false statements, which we would have easily refuted had we had the relevant information in our memory, or we will fail to contextualize some statements appropriately.

Information on tap also produces another malaise. It changes the topography of what we know. As search costs go down, people move from learning about a topic systematically to narrowly searching for whatever they need to know, now. And knowledge built on narrow searches looks like Swiss cheese.

Worse, many a time when people find the narrow thing they are looking for, they think that that is all there to know. For instance, in Computer Science and Machine Learning, people can increasingly execute sophisticated things without knowing much. (And that is a mostly a good thing.) But getting something to work—by copying the code from StackOverflow—gives people the sense that they “know.” And when we think we know, we also know that there is not much more to know. Thus, information on tap reduces the horizons of our knowledge about our ignorance.

In becoming better at fulfilling our narrower needs, lower search costs may be killing expertise. And that is mostly a bad thing.

See also this paper that suggests that searching on Google causes you to think that you know more.