Feature
Who needs to know?
by Matt Nippert
Continued from page 1...
“The consequence is that, oddly enough, despite the internet, highly educated people are more insular.”
Abrahams’ concerns are more concrete. Far from being more efficient, trading in memory for the ability to summon data from the internet can be counterproductive. “If you have to check the internet each time to find a commonly used equation, that doesn’t strike me as very efficient,” he says.
“I guess I’m old-school in this regard.”
Google, the $150 billion internet giant, is hardly the sole cause of this shift in behaviour. But because its results are so fast and seemingly authoritative – it handles 91 million searches per day, half of all internet searches – it has become the standard-bearer for a new way of -thinking.
Greg Lastowka, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, put this dominance in stark terms in a recent journal article: “Google’s control over results constitutes an awesome ability to set the course of human knowledge.”
The heart of the Google search engine is a closely guarded process called
PageRank, which sorts the billions of websites and orders them.
The speed at which information now spreads can disseminate rumour as fast as fact. Outrageous lies, by virtue of their eye-popping claims, spread like wildfire via email and blogs. More references online make it more likely PageRank will display the rumour in a prominent location after a search. Given that most people do not progress past the first page of 10 results, high placement matters.
According to myth-busting website Snopes, the tenth most common false internet rumour is an emailed warning to parents that drug dealers are giving strawberry-flavoured crystal methamphetamine to children in their area.
The spread of myths is most clearly illustrated by searches around contentious topics. Search for either of the US presidential candidates, add the word “truth”, and the top two results returned by Google are opposition-run attack vehicles.
One such site promotes a book that “exposes the dark side of presidential candidate John McCain”; another deals with Snopes’ number one subject of online rumour: “An exhaustive list of Barack Obama’s lies and misdirections.”
Gideon Haigh, writing in 2006 in Australian magazine the Monthly, noted that a search for “Martin Luther King” has a prominent result authored by a former Ku Klux Klan member who smears the civil rights leader as a communist and philanderer.
And after a search on “global warming”, two of the top three search results are diametrically opposed advocacy sites that seek to categorically prove that the Earth is – or isn’t – heating up. The third is a reference to Wikipedia, an online, user-written encyclopedia with its own problems.
Because of its anarchic framework – anyone can write about anything – Wikipedia is in a constant state of flux and can include misleading material or downright offensive vandalism.
Helen Clark and John Key’s pages have both been subjected to vandalism in the past three months. Although the most gratuitous internet graffiti was removed within minutes, Key’s page for a while included the statement: “Don’t vote for him, were you happy with Jenny Shipley? No you were not. So you won’t be happy with him,” while elsewhere Helen Clark was named as Prime Minister of Germany who “may have had connections with Adolf Hitler”.
And then there is Sarah Palin, whose public image doesn’t need internet graffiti to inspire ridicule, and prompts a jaw-dropping response from people wondering if she’s knowledgeable enough to be the US Vice-President. In an interview with CBS news anchor Katie Couric, Palin managed to inject her own lack of knowledge – and a difficulty with sentence structure – into her answers.
One classic:
Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.
Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our next-door neighbours are foreign countries, there in the State that I am the executive of.
And on-line, gaffes and accusations of bias at the write-it-yourself Wikipedia have spawned offshoots. Conservapedia, established in 2006, bills itself as a “clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth. We do not allow liberal bias to deceive and distort here.”
Stephen Colbert, a celebrated US comedian who trades on the persona of an outraged faux right-wing pundit, called on viewers of his self-titled television show to rewrite Wikipedia to make facts fit his blowhard opinions.
The end result of this crusade was the establishment of Wikiality, a satirical online encyclopedia written in the voice of Colbert’s uninformed pundit. New Zealand, for example, is described in Wikiality as being “discovered in 1642 by American explorer Abel Tasman, who later went on to play the character ‘Taz’ in Looney Tunes”.
Our most famous native fauna is, apparently, “the Maori – a small, adorable, flightless bird with a taste for
human flesh. Especially Australians and French Secret Service agents.”
So what would prevent a student citing the British Medical Journal in the same breath as Wikiality? Jude Carroll says teachers have to change how they set coursework, as well as get across the importance of assessing sources.
“One study in 2006 found that for 80% of students, research meant ‘I Googled’. Yet only a tiny percentage of those hits are peer-reviewed or vetted in any way. While this seems an easy ‘fact’ to get across to students, getting them to act on it when the current methods are so fast and wondrously productive, is another thing altogether.”
