How Google changes information markets

by on December 18, 2005 at 7:48 am in Web/Tech | Permalink

The underappreciated David Zetland loves Google but sees two negative externalities:

One externality is a reduction in community bonds between individuals who consume more commodified knowledge and less common knowledge. The second externality is a reduction in the creation of new knowledge when Google delivers others’ presentations too quickly–removing the Aha! moment when composing a known concept generates a completely new one. To not be evil, Google should act to offset these externalities. I suggest solutions to build community bonds and increase innovation.

Here is the paper.  I too love Google, but I see the negative externalities differently.  My main worry is that we learn more about topics with readily imagined keywords, and we neglect hard-to-define abstract concepts.  We are headed toward a culture of facts and small bites of information, and may neglect the sort of judgmental wisdom found in, say, John Stuart Mill.  I call this kind of knowledge "Factor X."  In relative terms, Factor X is becoming more difficult to disseminate; whether it is declining in absolute terms is harder to say.

David’s philosophy of travel offers some Factor X.  An excerpt:

I wasn’t sick very often. Someone asked me what I learned in five
years. I learned that parents love their children. The rest of my experience was
about coping with me, what I wanted, what I couldn’t get and why that hardly
mattered.

If you wish to offer an alternative account of the knowledge biases in Google, comments are open.

Chris Stiles December 18, 2005 at 9:19 am

On subjects with a variety of viewpoints it promotes the current consensus, which in turn has a self-reinforcing effect.

jim in auston December 18, 2005 at 11:35 am

I would like to see the equivalent of a search thesaurus. For all I know it may already exist in some search tool. Begin a search with one or several keywords and have the tool suggest others that could be selectively added to the search to expand or refine it. It would be nice if this expansion was part of the normal search process, could be toggled on or off and be adjustable as to scope.

DK December 18, 2005 at 2:33 pm

We’re already losing spelling, and I fear we will lose the poetry of a well-turned phrase once Google brings us effective automatic translation. Machine translation will be great for social scientists, but, poetry and clever wordplay will still be lost in translation.

This might be just another form of “Factor X.”

David Zetland December 18, 2005 at 8:12 pm

Thanks to Tyler for the post and to others for their comments. I have a little feedback for a few:

1) Chris Stiles is less right than Gabriel Mihalache. In the paper, I argue against the hegemony of some ideas over others, an idea that is popular with conspiracy theorists but without foundation.

2) jim in auston take a look at http://www.kartoo.com/, http://www.aeiwi.com/ or http://www.grokker.com/ (the last is marketed for internal company use)

3) In the paper, I suggest that the only solution for dumbing down (re: Kent Guida’s comment) will be the positive lifetime effect on young people of guidance from their teachers and parents. I suggested that Google initiate some carrots for innovation. (Their summer camp for coders is an excellent example). The sad thing, as KG would recognize, is that students do not only cut and paste their “knowledge” into essays, but download and hand-in entire essays as their own work. That problem is the same as the “problem” with porn – it will destroy you if you are not able to handle it.

4) DK will note, of course, that Google (and the Internet) can bring out new poetic voices (as does wikipedia, by offering pages in many languages). So that machine translation (eg, Altavista babelfish) will merely be a tool for abuse. See also (1), above.

DZ

hb December 19, 2005 at 9:23 am

Sorry for the shameless self-publicity, I have some work in progress (with Guillermo Caruana and Vicente Cuñat) that tries to formally model a related externality.

The starting point is that goods are multi-dimensional and we can find out about some characteristics without learning everythings. As a consquence, there are indirect externalities in the way different people search for goods (since our choices of what to look for and what to base our decisions on affects what is provided). This puts us into the world of the second best where funny things can happen (in particular the one we highlight is that a fall in the cost of acquiring certain kinds of information can reduce welfare).

We motivated the paper primarily with a discussion of business school rankings but also have a small discussion on how the search on the internet may have made it easier to gain information on hard definable characteristics while the relative costs of obtaining information on the kind on intangible, stimulating, joyful ones (riffing off Scitovsky’s beautiful book “The Joyless Economy”) has not changed much. It is conceivable that as a result society is worse off.

This sort of analysis needs qualification (which we do not yet have in the paper) insofar as there are distributional consequences that may need careful thought – again using Scitovsky’s language it is certainly conceivable that as a society we are first more concerned about satisfying needs and those who are currently unable to do so.

For the curious, our paper (which still needs some considerable re-writing, and at the very least a better title) is available at http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~hbar-isa/hbigcvccheap.pdf

Unknown December 19, 2005 at 7:43 pm

“…knowledge, which I agree is being shunted aside in favor of information with current retrieval technologies.”

How do we get knowledge? Does it not come from analysis of information? Don’t shoot the messenger. Retrieval technologies may make it easier for the lazy to be lazy, but they don’t change the fundamental methods for gaining understanding. Would paper-based card catalogs and indexes to periodicals be better than Google?

David Zetland December 21, 2005 at 5:38 am

To Melinda and Unknown: In the paper I state that Google is overwhelmingly useful for research. I also note that a small negative effect is the reduction in innovation that occurs when brain cells are not engaged in generating presentations (b/c they are downloaded) and the far more dangerous problem that they may never be able to generate presentations b/c of the onslaught of “useful” material from the web removes that problem. (I borrowed this theme from Cowen’s book “Creative Destruction”.) This second effect is part of the “dumbing-down” effect that some see as no big deal, since video games are teaching us useful skills. It is already present when students download papers to hand in.

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