Google, McLuhan, Academics and Reality

There is a recent article in Science by some researchers who comment on the loss of :knowledge" in a world where there is an intellectual crutch like Google.

When I was young my grandmother made me complete a 1,000 piece puzzle every Saturday before I could have my small handful of M&Ms or Kraft caramels. Puzzles are a reasonable metaphor for the Internet and Google. We assemble new knowledge by getting the pieces that Google presents and from that we can assemble a new picture. At least that is the way it works for creative people. It add substantial value to the human race. I can go out and reassemble pathways for cancer generation, look at the genes, look at the SNPs that may cause problems, look at microRNAs and the like and then share my thoughts with other. It is a new medium and the knowledge that it creates is a new form of knowledge.

But some people believe that Google has a negative side. It makes them rely upon the computer for the storage on knowledge. I suspect the same concern was there when alphabets were developed and we relied less upon oral memorization, and then books, and on and on. Clearly people worried that we would forget arithmetic when we used a calculator.

Avogadro’s Number, Planck’s Constant, Boltzmann’s Number, length of a single carbon to carbon bond in Angstroms, and the list goes on. What is important to remember. Well 2.54 centimeters to the inch is good and 5,280 feet to a mile. That helps. Anyone who has taken Organic Chemistry knows that the reactions are memorized and soon forgotten for the most part. Yet I recall most of the Krebs’s cycle, why? Now for a physician, human anatomy is remembered enough to pass the Board exam, then most likely 90% forgotten until clinical practice gets one to think that this nerve passes through this boned, which is impacting on this, …, well you get the idea.

As I wrote a few decades ago, before Google, but in clear anticipation of it:

To fully understand multimedia it is necessary to explore the work of two sets of major thinkers. The first is Marshall McLuhan and the second is Winograd and Flores. McLuhan, in Understanding Media, and Winograd and Flores in Understanding Computers and Cognition have complemented each other in a way in which their convergence of ideas lays the ground work for "Understanding Multimedia Communications". We shall be relying on these two sets of authors for a guide through the development of the meaning of multimedia. McLuhan has been discredited of late because of his simplistic views. We shall argue and shall attempt to show, that this may be a direct result of the critics, frequently the Pop Press, not understanding how perceptive McLuhan was in his more academic treatises. McLuhan will be the definer the "bright line" that results when a paradigm shift occurs in a new medium.

Winograd and Flores are the other set of lights that the author shall rely heavily upon. Unlike the Pop writers of the above definitions, Winograd and Flores have developed one of the most seminal works in the areas of computers and computation  that have ever been done. These authors have used access to the most recent philosophical understandings of knowledge and knowledge processing from a philosophical perspective to develop a philosophy for computing, especially software development. We shall, in this paper, develop and extend these concepts for the multimedia area.

To quote Drucker, who paraphrased McLuhan;

"Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors in the audience, "that you think that priting influenced the courses that the university taught and the role of university all together." "No sir," said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed printing determined what henceforth was going to be considered knowledge."

As Sparrow et al state:

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

The authors conclude with:

These results suggest that processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology. Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what the computer “knows” and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer-based memories. We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools (8), growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. This gives us the advantage of access to a vast range of information—although the disadvantages of being constantly “wired” are still being debated (9). It may be no more that nostalgia at this point, however, to wish we were less dependent on our gadgets. We have become dependent on them to the same degree we are dependent on all the knowledge we gain from our friends and coworkers—and lose if they are out of touch. The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows.

But I had also written:

The important observation that McLuhan makes is not often understood. He really means that the medium defines what is knowledge. A new medium, as a general construct, will define a new knowledge base. We all too often define knowledge so obtained with truth. In fact, truth is that relative reality that we find comfortable to our understanding, and all too often ascribe an absolute character to it. The essence of this paper will deal with these two issues; knowledge as defined in the McLuhanesque sense, and truth as a phenomenological expression of that knowledge. Multimedia communications will alter those definitions and will dramatically change the way we see, think, and ultimately act. We argue, for example, as with McLuhan, that television violence, for example, changes what is knowledge, the acceptance of moral norms, and this change in moral knowledge is reflected in the truths of everyday existence. The expansion of multimedia communications will take this minor concern many levels higher. Thus multimedia communications is a technological issue, a philosophical consideration, and ultimately a moral imperative.

So is Google good or bad, or is the McLuhan construct the key. Namely the new medium defines the new knowledge. We rarely memorize Homer, yet it was created to be memorized and recited. We see knowledge moving from oral, to written to being in a nether world of digital domains.

The point to make is simple, Google is progress, a massive amount of progress. It expands the human's ability to access and correlate data, information, and to create new linkages. For anyone who started as I did in a paper library, it was the slowest process ever. On line searching was cumbersome, costly, and less than productive. You paid a fortune for the article. But Google sets a new threshold, I can find what I need as I am creating. It changes the way I think, the way I write, the way things get done.

What the authors seem to be speaking of is the useless socializing on the Internet, the telling of others just what they had for lunch etc. I had a Facebook account driven by my MIT students but after a while saw it as not only a wast of time but as a mechanism which built a persona of me based on the persona of my Facebook friends, and I often did not agree with or even like what was being developed. Google allows me to work as I need to. It will change the way we think, and yea as McLuhan said, it will change what we perceive of as knowledge.