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Do you remember the days when acquiring information meant reading a book, looking through the encyclopaedia (yes, I know, it’s also a book, or a series of books), or heading to the library to search the card catalogue for….books. The card catalogue, that staple of every library, every bibliophile’s best friend, has been usurped by the computer keyboard.

The days of the card catalogue were the days when information seemed limitless, but took effort to filter and understand in a larger context. I feel like just holding a book gave weight to the information. It took effort to write it, edit it, proofread it, typeset it, review it, print it, bind it, transport it to the library, catalogue it, file it, and so on.

All that before it was taken off a shelf, checked out, and carried home for reading.

Books held reverence for me. They still do.

But there has been a dramatic shift in the availability of information, the access to information and, more importantly, the quality of widely accessible and available information.

Now any yutz can write a blog and gain an audience. And it seems like the more irrational the content, the more society laps it up.

The good information, the quality information, it’s getting lost in the noise, and the noise seems to be winning the information pull.

Now my students head for Google or Wikipedia, enter a few keywords, grab some sentences and paragraphs, rearrange them and add a few words of their own, and hand it in with a feeling that they now fully understand everything available on the topic at hand.

They don’t, that much is patently clear when I read most of their papers. Don’t get me wrong, every once in a while a paper stands out as well researched, thoughtfully considered, and makes me think about their view.

But most of them don’t have views, or at least not views based on what they have read, because they don’t research and read to understand very often. Most of the time they read and research to find information that meets their own thoughts, which aren’t usually thoughts they came up with on their own, but thoughts they have been bombarded with by the new and improved information resources.

There is now so much information available and accessible that we are overwhelmed. One of the biggest problems is that our teaching of “how” to filter and use that information, of “what” constitutes “good” information, has been slow to react. We seem to have taken the approach of ‘just put it all out there and they will figure out how to use it properly themselves’.

But without some base rules on what constitutes “good information”, how can they possibly manage that?

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How Google Scrambled the Academic Mind

THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

By Timothy Messer-Kruse – May 29, 2019

Experts once organized knowledge. Now search engines do. The result?? Anarchy…….

Beginning in the 1980s, as the personal computer became ubiquitous, a series of international conferences brought prominent scholars together to consider the impact on the humanities. In 1991, Jean-Claude Gardin, the French pioneer of digital archaeology, predicted that computers would advance the humanities by augmenting human analytical abilities. He did not, however, think that computers would alter the structure of knowledge itself, writing that the shift from the printing press to the computer network “does not impose sweeping changes in the articulation of scientific or technical thought.” Another participant in those early conferences, David S. Miall, a specialist in English literature who was among the first adopters of computers in the humanities, was similarly sanguine. In any digital database, he insisted, “The principal form of
representation … remains the mind of the humanities researcher.”

Time has proven those predictions wrong. Thirty years on, an epochal shift is occurring: Computer networks are shredding longstanding structures of knowledge. Allow me to illustrate this dynamic by remembering a defunct but once-fundamental humanities technology, the library card catalog.

Beginning in the 1990s, libraries began carting off their card catalogs and replacing them with terminals connected to databases. I remember the day I was walking through an alley at the rear of my alma mater’s library and saw the end of a beautiful old walnut catalog cabinet leaning out of a dumpster. Not long after that I recall reaching for a slip of note paper on a desk at this same research library — only to discover a discarded card from the same catalog. On the upper edge was a heading indicating several levels of subject category in descending order of generality, followed by the citation for the item and its location in the library, and finally, at the very bottom, a list of related topics and subjects, usually prefaced by the inviting words “See also.” The card I’d just turned over, like many in the old card catalogs, had a handwritten note a patron had added sometime in the past century responding to that “See also” suggestion. It said: “Don’t bother — formalist trash.” That was the precursor to the wiki.

“Informational organization has given way to informational anarchy.”

At the time, many thought the replacement of card catalogs by digital databases was a simple act of data transference. All the information that had been so clumsily and inefficiently stored on 3-by-5 paper cards was being moved to computers, where it could be more quickly and readily used. Imagine, we thought, how wonderful it would be to consult our beloved card catalog from our own offices or even our homes! The process was euphemistically called “digitization,” as if all that was happening was the direct translation of the typed words on those cards into electronic bytes.

Little did I appreciate at the time that the process did much more than just move information from one medium into another. It was only after the online catalog was joined by innumerable other search services — journal aggregators, commercial databases, wikis, and, of course, Google — that the sea change was apparent. “Digitization” was not the equivalent of the replacement of the scribe and the illuminated manuscript by the printer and the book. It did not just alter the medium upon which knowledge was preserved and communicated. It revolutionized the way it was organized. It was the beginning of a new regime of knowledge.

This revolution was profoundly destructive. Digitization proceeded not by reproducing the knowledge inherent in the card catalog, but by vaporizing it. Subjects used to be curated by experts who adjudicated where a book fit into the universe of accumulated human knowledge. The question of the organization of knowledge was not a technical enterprise left to engineers but a fundamental pursuit that preoccupied philosophers. Card catalogs with their headings and subheadings, their cross-references and Library of Congress numbers, grouped things together systematically and consciously. Such categorizations were not perfect; they were subject to the fickleness and fallibility of human judgment, to the winnowing of history and the sometimes wrongheaded consensus of the academy. But the process was deliberate.

The card catalog has been replaced not by a better taxonomical scheme of knowledge, but by the total abandonment of any scheme of knowledge in favor of the devices of keywords, metadata, frequency indexes, and algorithms of interconnectedness. Informational organization has given way to informational anarchy, while disguising its anarchical nature by its instantaneous, seamless, and systematic self-presentation. Search engines have created the illusion that vastly more information exists than ever before and that this information lies just a keystroke away. Today people “search” rather than “study.”

I am not here to register a cranky protest against the democratization of information and the undermining of the power of experts. Plenty of blind spots and biases were hammered into the academic- knowledge structures of the past. Aspects of the socialmedia era have powerfully contributed to correcting those distortions by opening space for minority voices and viewpoints, and by democratizing publishing. But such examples of democratization as topics getting voted to the top of the Reddit newsfeed, or Wikipedia entries open to crowdsourcing, are both forms of human curation and conscious knowledge organization that, in the long run, digitization is destroying. The emerging search-enginebased knowledge regime is in fact profoundly undemocratic because it treats information as isolated packages of data, as commodities perhaps, rather than as the organized products of the human mind.

Take book categorization. Before reliance on search engines, publishers would carefully hone the subject heading of a book to best reflect its place in a field. Those subject headings became the primary guideposts for librarians and bibliographers who translated them into catalog entries. Search engines have shifted incentives by rewarding publishers who tag their books with a larger array of subject headings and identifying metadata. Rather than aiming to place a book into its proper knowledge category, these new incentives reward the most profligate descriptions so they may appear in the widest variety of searches. The result is not the replacement of one traditional structure of knowledge with a new one but its destruction in favor of chance.

If I type “digital humanities” into my library search engine, 41,905 items are returned. If I decide this is too many to sift through and want just those items that are in the subject of “digital humanities,” I may choose instead to restrict my search to the subject heading “digital humanities,” which cuts the daunting total down to a manageable 30,975. Unlike the old card catalog, there is no tree structure of information should I wish to begin at “digital humanities” and descend through layers of specificity to discretely arranged topics. A conscious regime of knowledge organization has been destroyed and replaced by a kind of randomness. Knowledge has become alienated from its creators and its interpreters. By undermining the existing structures of academic knowledge, the search engine has fostered a new information consciousness among those who have grown up in its shadow.

My undergraduates are probably the most academically prepared and responsible students I have taught over the past quarter century, but they seem at a loss when I ask them to come up with a research question to answer in a term paper. Perfectly able to conceive of a topic, they struggle and fumble over the idea that there might be something to say about a topic that hasn’t been said before.

“You mean what I think about it?” they ask, as if the only undetermined thing in the universe is their own relation to the subject.

“No,” I answer. “I mean what might you want to learn or know about your topic that is not in your textbook or the encyclopedia.”

Blank stares.

“Digitization proceeded not by reproducing the knowledge inherent in the card catalog, but by vaporizing it. “

Under the regime of search-engine knowledge, every interaction with a search engine conveys the impression that all knowledge is accessible if one can only string the right keywords together. Search engines, unlike card catalogs, point to no gaps in a bibliography, expose no seams in knowledge, betray no areas where information is thin or outdated. When something cannot be found, it is not a problem of epistemology but a result of user error. There are few counterweights to the overwhelming randomness of digital knowledge, other than the vestiges of past practices. Underneath ProQuest’s Summon search engine, if one knows where to look, is an old-style library catalog, with books organized into fields and subfields. But perusing these lists I find numerous notable absences and head-scratching inclusions. Such catalog bibliographies are clearly being progressively bent to the anarchy of the metatag. Likewise, Wikipedia’s list of references at the bottom of each entry, while usually containing one or two standard works, is hardly representative of the standard bibliographies of their topics.

Perhaps the antidote to all this is to rethink how we teach students. Rather than explaining the Dewey decimal system or the Library of Congress classification system, as was common in the mid-20th century, some argue that we should instruct students in the use of Boolean search modifiers. But this is not replacing equivalents — the one is a structure of knowledge, the other is like learning how to best lay down your chips when playing roulette.

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University.