Have your Google searches started turning up far more chaff than wheat? The pace of information is starting to choke Google’s algorithms. My recent search for digitized notepaper took half an hour and many search tries before I found a lined paper generator that delivered my desire.
New media scholar and activist Geert Lovink spoke to this issue at a lunch meeting hosted on Wednesday by by the UCHRI. He’s also addressed the issue in a compelling article on Eurozine.
Geert began his talk with a scene dear to my heart: the computer in the kitchen. “We’ve got a lap top right there on the kitchen table,” Geert confided. “And anytime some one has a question, we just Google it. Search is the way we live now. But soon we will search and only get lost.” At stake, Lovink argues, is not only the overtaxed algorithm, but the extent to which we have entrusted our sense of certainty to a tool organized by popularity, not by content.
In the works are new search tools that are sensitive to content (semantic webs and natural language search engines) rather than rankings (the Google calculator that has come to rule our daily access of information). But what makes Lovink such a stimulating thinker and writer is not his attention to technical problems (I’m just trusting that the geeks out there are going to come up with solutions to my searching woes soon), but rather the way he takes those impasses as opportunities for reflection on the everyday life of technology and its philosophical significance. Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, writes Lovink, has devolved into the new society of the query, whose only difference consists in the call to interact.
Lovink asks us to “Stop searching, and start questioning.” And he suggests that we turn to “artists, designers, and architects” for new models of how to live with information. Now just try Googling that.
— Julia Lupton · 2009-02-06
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THE BOOK