My parents surprised me with an iPad for my birthday, and since the device arrived last week I’ve been spending a lot of time putting it through its paces. I’ve posted my thoughts on the tablet itself, as well as some free and paid apps, on my personal site.
John Battelle has famously described search engines and their collection of search queries as a database of intentions:
This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward.
The key to his description, of course, is intent. Sally is interested in a new umbrella, so she goes on Bing to search for umbrellas. Bob wants to know the score of the latest World Cup game, and he jumps on Google to find it. Amanda wants to find a quick headache remedy, so she fires up her browser and tries a search on Yahoo.
People who work on search sometimes refer to this as the “lean forward” experience. You have an objective or an “intent” for your online journey, and you are using a search engine to achieve that objective or satisfy that intent. As you search, you leave behind artifacts of your exploration for the search engine to analyze: the keywords you used, the results you clicked, your location, and even whether you came back to the search results quickly (a sign that the page you went to didn’t quite fit) or decided to stick with your chosen result.
The aggregation of these expressed intents provides useful insight into what the world finds interesting. One way that Google exposes this information is through Google Trends, which shows the top search keywords and topics in real time. Google Flu Trends takes the same approach but filters for flu-related queries only, which rivals other sources at predicting the outbreak of influenza.
But as modern life becomes increasingly digital, and more and more devices and everyday objects sprout a connection to the web, the idea of search as “intent” may start to give way to a different phenomenon: the “lean back” experience. Or, what I would simply call “collateral search.”
Continue reading ‘Collateral Search and the Decline of Intention’
I’ve been following Nicholas Carr’s thoughts and writing since I picked up The Big Switch a couple of years ago (I analyzed one particular section of the book here on Tropophilia). Shortly after that — right around when I was getting ready to move to California to join Google — Carr published the very controversial piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. Since then, he has been developing and expanding his theory that the Internet is rewiring our brains for the worse. He has just this month released the results in book form with The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.
Carr’s central argument is that with the increased use of the Web comes a decreased ability to engage in long-form reading and deep thought. Now, a while back, I blew up at another author who made similar claims without providing much, if any, causal evidence. I am happy to see from a few of Carr’s recent shorter pieces that he at least relies on published research to back his arguments.
Calls for “Delinkification”
Believe it or not, I’ve actually just committed what Carr deems to be one of the primary crimes perpetrated by the Web against deep reading and thinking: inline, contextual hyperlinking. He explains in a post (oops, I did it again!) on his blog:
The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.
Carr describes a multiplicity of reasons why the link distracts from long-form reading and comprehension:
- The link, by its very existence, makes us pause in our consideration and comprehension of the overlying and surrounding text to make a decision: do I click this, or do I ignore it?
- If we choose to click it, we are taken to a different page completely. Our brains must reset to prepare to capture and understand the new information. We lose focus on what we were on before.
- The problem can compound if the new page itself has links for us to decide on, and possibly follow further away from the original document.
Carr concludes that “people who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.”
In his blog post, Carr cites a few experiments in “bottom linking” that seek to mitigate this allegedly attention-degrading practice. It’s just what it sounds like: instead of linking within the text to other destinations on the web, one simply collects links at the bottom of the post. I’ve seen this from time to time, and I don’t like it for a few reasons.
Saturday was the unofficial 300 year anniversary of copyright, as first formalized in Britain’s Statute of Anne in 1710. I took the opportunity to reflect a little bit on my personal blog about my own interest in copyright law (part of a broader interest in technology and Internet law).
At the end of the post in a section called “© needs reform,” I get to the real reason I am fascinated by copyright law: because it is in major disrepair, and failing to keep pace with the rate of innovation we’re seeing today. In short, I’m interested in copyright because I want to help fix it.
I thought it would be appropriate to flag that section for you here on Tropophilia, since it is something I’d love to change.
Image used under a CC-BY-SA license from Wikipedia Commons.
The dream employee for a lot of companies is a twenty-something with as little of a life as possible outside of work–someone who’ll be fine working fourteen-hour days and sleeping under his desk. But packing a room full of these burn-the-midnight-oil types isn’t as great as it seems. [. . .] You don’t need more hours; you need better hours. When people have something to do at home, they get down to business. They get their work done because they have somewhere else to be. They find ways to be more efficient because they have to.
-Rework
(affiliate link)
The 37 Signals team behind the project management software I and thousands of others use daily (Basecamp) published a new book laying out some of the principles behind their success. They call Rework
[E]mulate famous chefs. They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? This book is our cookbook.
And it’s full of direct, combative, written-with-purpose recipes for running an un-apologetically small but thriving business. The book is organized into a series of brief essays on a variety of work topics; read on for a few passages I found particularly compelling and a special video dialogue where Jarred and I discuss the book:
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