Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content

I recently posted a four part series on the Darwin Discovery Engine Blog on Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content. I will not repeat the whole series here. Below are links to the first three posts. Then I offer the concluding post, Rising Above the Quantification of Content: Part Four Google vs. Darwin. I encourage you to look at the first three before moving to this final episode. 

Rising Above the Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget

Rising Above the Quantification of Content: Part Two: Pritchard vs. Williams (aka Keating)

Rising Above the Quantification of Content: Part Three: Powerpoint versus Text and Conversation

In this last part of the series on the value of providing people the opportunity to exercise their own cognitive powers to make sense of content, see the connections between content, and decide what is valuable to them. I have reviewed some efforts to over measure topics beginning with Robert Parker on wine and J. Evans Pritchard on poetry and looked some effects of media on cognition by exploring what PowerPoint may be doing to us as reported in the New York Times.  Nick Carr addresses similar questions in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? He provides some anecdotal evidence but admits that the proper scientific research has not been done.

I do not feel that Google actually makes us stupid but also do not feel that it is not going to be the key to understanding the universe that seems to be the quest for Google.  I am also not suggesting that Darwin is here to replace Google. It simply complements it and does things that Google is not so good at. Google is a search engine and it helps you find things you are looking for. I keep using it to write this post. Darwin is a discovery engine and it helps you explore a topic and develop a greater awareness of its context and uncover things about the topic that you did not know to search for. I have written about the Google question before (see Will Google Make Us Stupid? in the FastForward blog). I concluded that like any information tool, the final responsibility for determining the value of the content lies with the person using it. Darwin is designed to give the user a greater opportunity to make these decisions.

I do agree with Nick Carr that media and knowledge related technology effect cognition, that the means we use to work with information have effects on our thought process. I underplayed this aspect of the Google question in my FastForward post. Our communication channels, whether they are words, charts, PowerPoint, or Twitter, provide structure to our thoughts and help shape them and our subsequent thinking. This was the focus of my psychological research in the 70s, first at the University of Toronto and then at Harvard.

One clear example of the effects of media on cognition comes from comparing spoken language with sign language. For example while errors in speech often reflect the structure of spoken language, the neuroscientist Ursula Bellugi found that errors in sign language reflect its parameters: space, direction, and movement. Likewise the poetry of spoken language reflects the rhythms of sound while the poetry of sign language is based on the rhythms of visual movement. A communication medium does more than convey information. It helps to structure your thoughts.  In the last post in this series I discussed a bit about the effects of the phonetic alphabet on thought.

Carr offers a clear example of the effects of knowledge related technology when he discusses how the mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, changed aspects of thought. He refers to the work of Lewis Mumford, the historian and cultural critic who described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

So both technology and communication media can effect thought. The Web is a mixture of both. Carr wonders about the effects of using the Internet on our cognitive abilities. He writes, “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.”

Carr considers Google to be the “Internet’s high church” and he goes into great depth on how Google’s obsession is with measurement, like Fred Taylor, Robert Parker, and J. Evans Pritchard. He quotes the Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that Google is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything.”  Sound familiar?

Carr goes on to write, “It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” 

He also notes that the economic model of massive page views drives them to encourage us to skim from page to page, not stopping to explore and contemplate.  Google provides a linear list of results organizer according to Google’s concept of what is useful to us. Google tries to be the decider on value. Carr is concerned that this is causing us to move away from reflective thought and focused reading for a deeper meaning.

Darwin takes an opposite view. It views the Web as too massive to understand and human reasoning too complex and individualized to fully progam. Rather that drawing inspiration for Fred Taylor’s time and motion studies and attempting to understand and control the universe of content on the Web, Darwin is inspired by Edward Norton Lorenz’s work on Chaos Theory in mathematics and weather prediction. Darwin does not try to impose an order on content, it lets content self-organize. During the 1950s, Lorenz became skeptical of the appropriateness of the linear statistical models in meteorology, as most atmospheric phenomena involved in weather forecasting are non-linear. Instead he proposed the concept of attractors that operate within a dynamic system that evolves over time in a complex, non-repeating pattern.  This is the complete opposite of Fred Taylor’s repeatable time and motion approach.

We think the two approaches complement each other. The Darwin approach does not require human intervention to be organized; it is self-organizing based on the content itself and therefore more representative of what is happening as it occurs, and respectful of each unique context. It also eliminates the possibilities of search optimization and spam.  Instead of providing a linear list, Darwin offers a Scan Cloud of the top 100 themes related to your topic of interest (see below).  Your chosen topic acts as an attractor to collect related content. Darwin allows you to move within the Scan Cloud to explore the related themes that are of interest to you and the Scan Cloud dynamically changes to reflect your movement. 

A list of the actual content within each theme is found next to the Scan Cloud (see below) and it dynamically changes to reflect your movements.  Darwin does not try to understand the universe of content nor does it try to understand your intentions or values. Instead it helps you to achieve your own understanding of what is happening in the world of Web content.

Darwin promotes exploration, contemplation, and discovery. We do not make any claims on its lasting impact on thought but it does address some of the concerns that Nick Carr raises. We invite you to contact us to take a look at our Darwin web site.