We think that all information is readily available to us. In the past, we had libraries where we went to dwell in all of the knowledge that mankind had acquired. Sure, it was tough to find everything as that information dump was immense. Our biggest libraries hold stores that would take us decades to go through. For instance, the Library of Congress in the United States contains over 147 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. That would be a really painful process to try to find and digest necessary information in a timely manner there. And that’s just one library in one country.
Then the Internet came along and provided an electronic archive that not only contains many of the works that man has created over time, but it also contains the collective lives of millions of people currently living. If you want to look at the activity done on the Internet for the year 2010, check out Royal Pingdom’s statistics. There are mind blowing numbers that most likely exceed the knowledge contained in all of our libraries combined. So we get information overload all over again.
While we adore the many features that search engines provide, we have to remember that they are driven by businesses behind them. The altruistic tendencies that first started their creation are slowly migrating towards monetary tendencies which are filtering how much information we’re actually getting our hands on.
Now, with the information overload that we’re all suffering from emails, tweets, posts and more, we initially think that filters are a good thing. But if you take the time to go past the first few pages of your search results, you’ll start to notice that some valuable information is hidden way past these pages that are typically viewed. We humans are not patient people. We want results instantaneously with a minimum of fuss. We have web sciences telling programmers how to design the sites, code, and content to allow for an instant stream of results. In order for that to happen, some information gets left behind or hidden.
When we allow someone other than ourselves to provide this filter, then we’re giving them permission to shape our views. As Eli Pariser (from Ted Talks) so aptly described in the video above, this can become dangerous as we lose the ability to hear about things that allow us to learn and grow. Avoiding the unpleasant or the uninteresting doesn’t make them go away. It just allows them to have the opportunity to sneak up on you unaware.
It’s time that we let our curiosity out and find those things that we’re missing in our perspectives. The choices we make to ignore a piece of information (or hopefully look for it) should be ours to make. It’s about time that we personalize our information search by expanding our reach, not limiting it.
