Stuart Corner
Sunday, 21 January 2007 10:05
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
So what? We have also lost contact with the primary experience of hunting killing, dismembering and cooking large beasts in order to eat, and that of being hunted, killed and dismembered by other wild beasts in the process: to name but one unpleasant experience that civilisation has deprived us of.
'Googlisation' would not only make books in their entirety eminently more accessible, as downloaded soft copies, but their information more easily located thanks to search technology. This would seem like a good thing, but Appleyard thinks otherwise.
"An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results are the product of an algorithm with information. Parents will already have seen the power of the algorithm. Google has supplanted the textbook as the source of homework research."
And it concerns him that "Google is a profit machine." Nothing wrong with that, he says, "as long as we don't delude ourselves into thinking it is an entirely neutral source of information." So? Most disseminators of information on the planet are profit machines. Why pick on Google? As a dominant profit-driven information provider it pales into insignificance compared to Sunday Times publisher, News Limited.
I would suggest that the indexes of most reference books today are complied largely by algorithms, not human indexers. And anyway search algorithms will inevitably improve - the industry is after all still in its infancy. But nevertheless Appleyard seems to believe that search technology applied to the great mass of published works will downgrade the way these are used and that our civilisation will be the poorer for it.
