Category Archives: News & Content

Letting the Foxes into Journalism’s Hen(Hedgehog) House

First published March 27, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

fanhI am rooting for Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight.com, his latest attempt to introduce a little data-driven veracity into the murky and anecdotal world of journalism. But I may be one of the few, at least if we take the current backlash as a non-scientific, non-quantitative sample:

I have long been a fan of Nate Silver, but so far I don’t think this is working. – Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

Nate Silver’s new venture may become yet another outlet for misinformation when it comes to the issue of human-caused climate change, Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Here’s hoping that Nate Silver and company up their game, soon. – Paul Krugman, NY Times

Krugman also states:

You can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking.

Now..Nate Silver doesn’t disagree with this. In fact, he says pretty much the same thing in his book, The Signal and the Noise:

The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.

But he goes on,

Like Caesar, we may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.

And it’s this construal that Silver is hoping to nip in the bud with FiveThirtyEight. In essence, he wants to do it by being a Fox, to borrow from Isaiah Berlin’s analogy.

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ We take a pluralistic approach and we hope to contribute to your understanding of the news in a variety of ways.

Silver thinks the media’s preoccupation with punditry is a dangerous thing. Pundits, whether they’re coming from the right or left, are Hedgehogs. They get paid for their expertise on “one big thing.” And the more controversial their stand, the more attention they get. This can lead to a dangerous spiral, as researcher Philip Tetlock found out:

What experts think matters far less than how they think. If we want realistic odds on what will happen next, coupled to a willingness to admit mistakes, we are better off turning to experts who embody the intellectual traits of Isaiah Berlin’s prototypical fox—those who “know many little things,” draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction as inevitable features of life.

Tetlock was researching how expertise correlated with the ability to make good predictions. What he found was that it was actually an inverse relationship. The higher the degree of expertise, the more likely the person in question was a hedgehog. Media pundits are usually extreme versions of hedgehogs, which not only have one worldview, but also love to talk about it. Nate Silver believes that to get an objective view of world events, you need to be a fox, first, but secondly; you should be a fox that’s good at sifting through data:

Conventional news organizations on the whole are lacking in data journalism skills, in my view. Some of this is a matter of self-selection. Students who enter college with the intent to major in journalism or communications have above-average test scores in reading and writing, but below-average scores in mathematics.

So, all this makes sense. The problem in Silver’s approach is that journalism is the way it is because that’s the way humans want it. While I applaud Silver’s determination to change it, he may be trying to push water up hill. Pundits exist not just because the media keeps pushing them in front of us – they exist because we keep listening. Humans like opinions and anecdotes. We’re not hardwired to process data and objectively rationalize. We connect with stories and we’re drawn to decisive opinion leaders. Silver will have to find some middle ground here, and that seems to be where the problems arise. The minute writers add commentary to data; they have to impose an ideological viewpoint. It’s impossible not to. And when you do that, you introduce a degree of abstraction.

The backlash against Fivethirtyeight.com generally falls into two camps: Foxes like Silver that have no problem with the approach but disagree with the specific data put forward and Hedgehogs that just don’t like the entire concept. The first camp may come onside as Silver and his team work out the inevitable hiccups in their approach. The second, which, it should be noted, have a large number of pundits in their midst, will never become fans of Silver and his foxlike approach.

In the end though, it really doesn’t matter what columnists and journalists think. It’s up to the consumers of news media. We’ll decide what we like better – hedgehogs or foxes.

Losing My Google Glass Virginity

Originally published October 17, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Rob, I took your advice.

A few columns back, when I said Google’s Glass might not be ready for mass adoption, fellow Search Insider Rob Garner gave me this advice:“Don’t knock it until you try it.”  So, when a fellow presenter at a conference I was at last week brought along his Glass and offered me a chance to try them (Or “it”? Does anyone else find Google’s messing around with plural forms confusing and irritating?), I took him up on it. To say I jumped at it may be overstating the case – let’s just say I enthusiastically ambled to it.

I get Google Glass. I truly do. To be honest, the actual experience of using them came up a little short of my expectations, but not much. It’s impressive technology.

But here’s the problem. I’m a classic early adopter. I always look at what things will be, overlooking the limitations of what currently “is.” I can see the dots of potential extending toward a horizon of unlimited possibility, and don’t sweat the fact that those dots still have to be connected.

On that level, Google Glass is tremendously exciting, for two reasons that I’ll get to in a second. For many technologies, I’ll even connect a few dots myself, willing to trade off pain for gain. That’s what early adopters do. But not everyone is an early adopter. Even given my proclivity for nerdiness, I felt a bit like a jerk standing in a hotel lobby, wearing Glass, staring into space, my hand cupped over the built-in mike, repeating instructions until Glass understood me. I learned there’s a new label for this; for a few minutes I became a “Glasshole.”Screen-Shot-2013-05-19-at-2.09.03-AM

Sorry Rob, I still can’t see the mainstream going down this road in the near future.

But there are two massive reasons why I’m still tremendously bullish on wearable technology as a concept. One, it leverages the importance of use case in a way no previous technology has ever done. And two, it has the potential to overcome what I’ll call “rational lag time.”

The importance of use case in technology can be summed up in one word: iPad. There is absolutely no technological reason why tablets, and iPads in particular, should be as popular as they are. There is nothing in an iPad that did not exist in another form before. It’s a big iPhone, without the phone. The magic of an iPad lies in the fact that it’s a brilliant compromise: the functionality of a smartphone in a form factor that makes it just a little bit more user-friendly. And because of that, it introduced a new use case and became the “lounge” device. Unlike a smartphone, where size limits the user experience in some critical ways (primarily in input and output), tablets offer acceptable functionality in a more enjoyable form. And that is why almost 120 million tablets were sold last year, a number projected (by Gartner) to triple by 2016.

The use case of wearable technology still needs to be refined by the market, but the potential to create an addictive user experiences is exceptional. Even with Glass’ current quirks, it’s a very cool interface. Use case alone leads me to think the recent $19 billion by 2018 estimate of the size of the wearable technology market is, if anything, a bit on the conservative side.

But it’s the “rational lag time” factor that truly makes wearable technology a game changer.  Currently, all our connected technologies can’t keep up with our brains. When we decide to do something, our brains register subconscious activity in about 100 milliseconds, or about one tenth of a second. However, it takes another 500 milliseconds (half a second) before our conscious brain catches up and we become aware of our decision to act. In more complex actions, a further lag happens when we rationalize our decision and think through our possible alternatives. Finally, there’s the action lag, where we have to physically do something to act on our intention. At each stage, our brains can shut down  impulses if it feels like they require too much effort.  Humans are, neurologically speaking, rather lazy (or energy-efficient, depending on how you look at it).

So we have a sequence of potential lags before we act on our intent: Unconscious Stimulation > Conscious Awareness > Rational Deliberation > Possible Action. Our current interactions with technology live at the end of this chain. Even if we have a smartphone in our pocket, it takes several seconds before we’re actively engaging with it. While that might not seem like much, when the brain measures action in split seconds, that’s an eternity of time.

But technology has the potential to work backward along this chain. Let’s move just one step back, to rational deliberation. If we had an “always on” link where we could engage in less than one second, we could utilize technology to help us deliberate. We still have to go through the messiness of framing a request and interpreting results, but it’s a quantum step forward from where we currently are.

The greatest potential (and the greatest fear) lies one step further back – at conscious awareness. Now we’re moving from wearable technology to implantable technology. Imagine if technology could be activated at the speed of conscious thought, so the unconscious stimulation is detected and parsed and by the time our conscious brain kicks into gear, relevant information and potential actions are already gathered and waiting for us. At this point, any artifice of the interface is gone, and technology has eliminated the rational lag. This is the beginning of Kurzweil’s Singularity: the destination on a path that devices like Google Glass are starting down.

As I said, I like to look at the dots. Someone else can worry about how to connect them.

What is this “Online” You Speak Of?

First published September 12, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider.

I was in an airport yesterday, and I was eavesdropping. That’s what I do in airports. It’s much more entertaining than watching the monitors. In this particular case, I was listening to a conversation between a well-dressed elderly gentleman, probably in his late ’80s, and what appeared to be his son. They were waiting for pre-boarding. The son was making that awkward small talk — you know, the conversation you have when you don’t really know your parent well enough anymore to be able to talk about what they’re really interested in, but you still feel the need to fill the silence. In this case, the son was talking to his dad about a magazine: “I used to get a copy every time I flew to London,” he said. “But they don’t publish it anymore. It’s all done online.”

The father, who had the look and appearance of a retired university professor, looked at his son quizzically for a few minutes. It’s as if the son had suddenly switched from English to Swahili midstream in his conversation.

“What’s ‘online’?”

“Online — on the Internet. It’s published electronically. There’s no print version anymore?”

The father grappled with the impact of this statement, then shook his head slowly and sadly. “That’s very sad. I suppose the mail service’s days are numbered too.”

The son replied, “Oh yes, I’m sure. No one mails things anymore.”

“But what will I do? I still buy things from catalogs.” It was as if the entire weight of the last two-and-a-half decades had suddenly settled on the frail gentleman’s shoulders.

At first, I couldn’t believe that anyone still alive didn’t know what “online” was. Isn’t that pretty much equivalent to oxygen or gravity now? Hasn’t it reached the point of ubiquity at which we all just take it for granted, no longer needing to think about it?

But then, because in the big countdown of life, I’m also on the downhill slope, closer to the end than to the beginning, I started thinking about how wrenching technological change has become. If you don’t keep up, the world you know is swept away, to be replaced with a world where your mail carrier’s days are numbered, the catalogs you depend on are within a few years of disappearing, and everything seems to be headed for the mysterious destination known as “online.”

As luck would have it, my seat on the airplane was close enough to this gentleman’s that I was able to continue my eavesdropping (if you see me at an airport, I advise you to move well out of earshot). You might have thought, as I first did, that he was in danger of losing his marbles. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. For over four hours, he carried on intelligent, informed conversations on multiple topics, made some amazing sketches in pencil, and generally showed every sign of being the man I hope to be when I’m approaching 90. This was not a man who had lost touch with reality; this was a man who is continually surprised (and, I would assume, somewhat frustrated) to find that reality seems to be a moving target.

We, the innovatively smug, may currently feel secure in our own technophilia, but our ability to keep up with the times may slip a little in the coming years. It’s human to feel secure with the world we grew up and functioned in. Our evolutionary environment was substantially more stable than the one we know today. As we step back from the hectic pace, don’t be surprised if we lose a little ground. Someday, when our children speak to us of the realities of their world, don’t be surprised if some of the terms they use sound a little foreign to our ears.

The Swapping of the Old “Middle” for the New

First published November 8, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

For the past several columns, I’ve been talking about disintermediation. My hypothesis is that technology is driving a general disintermediation of the marketplace (well, it’s not really my hypothesis — it’s a pretty commonly held view) and is eliminating a vast “middle” infrastructure that has accounted for much of the economic activity of the past several decades. It’s a massive shift (read “disruption”) in the market that will play out over the next several years.

But every good hypothesis must stand up to challenge, and an interesting one came from a recent article in Slate, which talks about the growth of a brand new kind of “gatekeeper,” the new “bots” that crawl the Web and filter (or, in some cases, generate) content based on a preset algorithm. These bots can crawl blog posts, pinpointing spam and malicious posts so they can be removed. The sophistication is impressive, as the most advanced of these tap into the social graph to learn, in real time, the context of posts so it can make nuanced judgment calls about what is and isn’t spam.

But these bots don’t simply patrol the online frontier, they also contribute to it. They can generate automated social content based on pre-identified themes. In other words, they can become propaganda generators. So now we have a new layer of “middle” that acts both as censor and propagandist. Have we gained anything here?

The key concept here is one of control. The “middle” used to control both ends of the market. It did so because it controlled the bridge between the producers and consumers.  This was control in every sense: control of the flow of finance, control of the physical market itself, and control of communication.

With disintermediation, direct connections are being built between producers and consumers. With this comes a redefinition of control. In terms of financial control, disintermediation should (theoretically) produce a more efficient marketplace, resulting in more profit for producers and better prices for consumers. That drastically oversimplifies the pain involved in getting to a more efficient marketplace, but you get the idea.  In this case, the only loser is the middle, so there’s no real incentive for the producers or consumers to ensure its survival.

Disintermediation of the physical market essentially works itself out. If the product needs a face-to-face representative, the middle will survive. If not, then we’ll figure out how to facilitate the sale online, and you can expect to see a lot of UPS vans in your neighborhood. We consumers may mourn the loss of a “face” in some segments of our marketplace, but we’ll get over it.

When it comes to control of communication, it’s more difficult to crystal-ball what might happen in the future. This area is also where new gatekeepers are most likely to appear.

Communication between marketers and the market used to be tightly channeled and controlled by the “middle.” It also used to flow in essentially one direction – from the marketer to the market. It was always very difficult for true communication to flow the other way.

But now, content is sprouting everywhere and becomes publicly accessible through a multitude of online touch points. It could soon become overwhelming to navigate through, both for consumers and producers. In this case, arguably, the middle served a very real service to both producers and consumers. The middle could edit communication, saving us from wading through a mountain of content to get what we were looking for.  It could also ensure that the messages producers wanted to get to the market were effectively delivered. The channels were under the control of the marketplace. For this reason, both marketers and the market may be reluctant to see disintermediation when it comes to communication.

The new gatekeepers, such as those featured in the Slate article, seem to serve both ends of the market. They help consumers access higher quality information by weeding out spam and objectionable content. And they help producers exercise some degree of control over negative content generated by the marketplace. In the absence of tight control of channels, a concept that’s gone the way of the dodo, this scalable, automated gatekeeper seems to serve a purpose.

If the need is great enough on both sides of the market, we are likely to find a new “middle” emerge: an “infomediary,” to use the term coined by John Hagel, Marc Singer and Jeffrey Rayport. According to this definition of the middle, Google emerges as the biggest of the “infomediaries.”

The question is, how much control are we willing to give this new evolution of the middle? In return for hacking some semblance of sanity out of the chaos that is an unmediated information marketplace, how much are we willing to pay in return? And, where does this control (and with it, the associated power) now live?  Who owns the new gatekeepers?  And who are those gatekeepers accountable to?

Living a B-Rated Life

First published August 16, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I love ratings and reviews — and I’m not alone.  4.7 people out of 5 people love reviews. We give them two thumbs up. They rate 96.5% on the Tomato-meter.  I find it hard to imagine what my life would be without those ubiquitous 5 stars to guide me.

This past weekend, I was in Banff, Alberta for my sister’s wedding. My family decided to find a place to go for breakfast. The first thing I did was check with Yelp, and soon we were stacking up the Eggs Benny at a passable breakfast buffet less than two miles from our hotel. I never knew said buffet existed before checking the reviews — but once I found it, I trusted the wisdom of crowds. It seldom steers me wrong.

Now, you do have to learn how to read between the lines of a typical review site. Just before heading to my sister’s wedding, I spent the day in Seattle at the Bazaar Voice user event and was fascinated to learn that their user research shows that the typical number of reviews scanned is generally about seven. Once people hit seven reviews, they feel they have a good handle on the overall tone, even if there are 1,000 reviews in total. This seems right to me. It’s about the number of reviews I scan if possible.

But we also rely on the average rating summaries that typically show above the individual reviews and comments. When I read a review, I tend to follow these rules of thumb:

  • Look for the entry with the most reviews.
  • Find one that has a high average, but be suspicious of ones that have absolutely no negative reviews (unusual if you follow Rule One).
  • Scan the top six or seven reviews to get an overall sense of what people like and dislike.
  • Sort by the most negative reviews and read at least one to see what people hate.
  • Decide whether the negative reviews are the result of a one-off bad experience, or possibly an impossible-to-please customer (you can usually pick them out by their comments).
  • Do the “sniff test” to see if there are planted reviews (again, they’re not that hard to pick out).

I’ve used the same approach for restaurants, hotels, consumer electronics, cars, movies, books, hot tubs – pretty much anything I’ve had to open my wallet for in the past five or six years. It’s made buying so much easier. Ratings and reviews are like the Cole’s notes of word of mouth. They condense the opinions of the marketplace down to the bare essentials.

It’s little wonder that Google is starting to invest heavily in this area, with recent acquisitions of Zagat and Frommer’s. These are companies that built entire businesses on eliminating risk through reviews. The aggregation and organization of opinion is a natural extension for search engines. Of course, we should give it a fancy name, like “social graph,”, so we can sound really smart at industry conferences, but the foundations are built on plain common sense. Our attraction to reviews is hardwired into our noggins. We are social animals and like to travel in packs.  Language evolved so we could point each other to the best cassava root patch and pass along the finer points of mastodon hunting.

As Google acquires more and more socially informed content, it will be integrated into Google’s algorithms. This is why Google had to launch its own social network. Unfortunately, Google+ hasn’t gained the critical mass needed to provide the signals Google is looking for. I personally haven’t had a Google+ invite in months. Despite Larry Page’s insistence that it’s a roaring success, others have pointed out that Google+ seems to be a network of tire kickers, with little in the way of ongoing engagement. Contrast that with Pinterest, which is all the various women in my life seem to talk about — and is outperforming even Twitter when it comes to driving referrals.

I personally love the proliferation of structured word-of-mouth. Some say it negates serendipity, but I actually believe I will be more apt to explore if there is some reassurance I won’t have a horrible experience. Otherwise, this weekend my family and I would have been having Egg McMuffins at the Banff McDonald’s — and really, is that the life you want?

The 1% of News that Matters

First published March 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider.

I first heard about the earthquake in Japan from a cab driver in Milwaukee. By the time I got to the airport, it was all over the monitors. And by the time I could find a Wi-Fi connection, the first details were just starting to emerge.

Our society digests news differently now. Electronic media paints news in broad strokes. Digital media offers a never-ending deep dive into the details. In the few days since disaster struck, the Web has already built up a vast repository of information about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The Web stretches infinitely to accommodate new content, stretching its digital boundaries as required. The shelf life of broadcast news is much shorter. Time constrains the content. Detail has to be sacrificed for impact.

But on the Web, news is also a participatory experience. News isn’t a broadcast, it’s a conversation, guided by editors and journalists but often veering in unexpected directions as our collective voice hits its stride. We shape the coverage by voicing our opinions, our concerns and, for those who are in the middle of the news, our experiences. The world is smaller, rawer, more visceral, more vital — and, hopefully, more human.

In the convergence of these two shifts in how we digest what happens in the world, there lies something impactful. Traditionally, because news was a shifting canvas where yesterday’s events quickly faded to make room for today’s, we had no choice but to move on to the next story. But now, thanks to the Web, the content remains, if we choose to seek it out. While Japan’s pain is still horribly fresh, more than a year later the traumatic story of Haiti is still unwinding online.

The fact is that 99% of the news you hear nightly won’t really make much of a difference in your life in five years. They’re stories of passing interest, but in the big scheme of things, they’re rather inconsequential. And the things that will make a difference seldom make the news. But, on the Web, the time limitation of being “new” doesn’t artificially constrain what is news. For those who continue to care about Haiti, the information is there, living on in indelible binary bits.

It’s this concept of “caring” about news that is served so well online. Humans tend to react to our surroundings in two distinct ways. We react to the immediate and awesome (in both its negative and positive connotations) simply because we’re wired to notice dramatic and potentially harmful events in our environment. But, if it has no personal impact, we move on with our lives. We’re like a herd of sheep that goes back to its collective grazing after a loud noise startles us in our pasture. For this fleeting level of engagement, broadcast news works exceedingly well. It’s been designed to impact us at this transitory level, hammering us for maximum effect by a parade of violence, negativity and trauma.

But for the 1% of stories that do affect us, that will matter to us in a very personal way in five years, the 30-second sound bite is simply not enough. If news can affect our well-being, the second level of human engagement kicks in. Now, we are hungry for information. We need to dive deep into the details, so we can understand what the personal impact might be.

Consider the difference in how I would react to the news coming out of Japan if, rather than observing it at arm’s length as I did, I had a child who was teaching English as a second language in Sendai, the epicenter of the quake. Think about how I would voraciously devour any information I could find online, trying to determine if my child was safe.

For the 1% of news that does matter to us, online provides us something we never had before. It takes the temporal and archives it at a scale never before possible. Individual slivers of history are frozen in a digital record. It allows us to connect to information that is personally relevant, even long after it qualifies as “news.”

The World Out of Context

First published January 20, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Did you see Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes? No? Neither did I. Neither did about 98% of the population of North America, according to the ratings numbers. Yet I would bet in the past week that we all knew about it, and we all talked about it. But we’re basing our judgments, opinions and conversations on something we’ve, at best, read online, heard about through the network (virtual or otherwise) or seen on YouTube. We’re experiencing the simultaneous pleasure and pain of Ricky’s Golden Globe Roast through hearsay and sound bites.

This isn’t an isolated incident. More and more, our view of the world comes after the fact, often filtered through fragments found somewhere online. Most of our experience of the world is out of its original context. This phenomenon isn’t new. Gossip is as old as language. We all love to talk about what’s happened. But the prevalence of digital footprints throws a new spin on this inherently human tendency. The impact of that spin, I’m afraid, is still to be determined.

The World as I Remember It

Memories are funny things. We like to think of them as snapshots of the past, accurately recording where we’ve been. The truth is, memories aren’t all that reliable. We tend to remember high points and low points, removing much of the distracting noise in the middle that makes up the stuff of our everyday lives. It’s like a Reader’s Digest condensed version of our past, except we tend to rewrite the actual content to match our view of the world. And once we rewrite our memories to match our beliefs, we believe them to be true (see Danny Kahneman’s TED talk on remembered happiness). It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that helps maintain the consistency of our worldview, but it’s a far stretch from what actually happened. Even more disturbing, if you’re a fan of the truth, is that we can’t seem to resist tweaking the story to make it more interesting. We love to build memes that take on a life of their own, spreading virally across the social landscape.

I always maintain that technology doesn’t change behaviors; it allows behaviors to change. Technology can’t force us down a road we don’t want to go. This drive to tweak little tidbits of the past is something baked into the human psyche. But the vast tableau we now have available to share it on is something quite new. “Going viral” now raises gossip to a whole new level.  Just ask a dorky little kid that goes by BeenerKeeKee 19952 online. His strangely compelling lip syncs to popular songs have turned him into an instant celebrity. His cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” has garnered close to 30 million views on YouTube, closing in on the popularity of the original video. He’s become so popular that 50 Cent popped into his bedroom to do a cameo recently.  But we know nothing of the kid behind the webcam. We don’t know the context of his life. We don’t know if he is bullied at school, has a life outside his bedroom or is good at baseball. All we know is what we can see in three minutes and 48 seconds.

Fool’s Gold

One recent example of this problem of context is Ted Williams, the homeless man with the golden voice who was plucked from the streets of Columbus, Ohio and placed on a world stage. The world judged the situation based on a 1 minute and 14 second Youtube clip. We saw what appeared to be injustice, and rushed to right the wrong. Job offers poured in. Williams became a celebrity. But it all happened without the context of the 53 years of an undeniably checkered past that preceded the fateful video clip. As it is turning out, as we gain the context, the real story is not nearly as simple or straightforward as we would like. Williams is already in rehab.

Acting on hearsay and secondhand information is nothing new. But as our communication abilities and our ability to archive history continue to expand, we get further and further from the true context of things. With the advent of online, word of mouth flows farther, faster and is more compelling than ever. More and more, we will act on little bits of information that are far removed from their true origins. We will pass judgment without the benefit of context. This will create more instant celebrities, basking in their 15 minutes of fame. And it will also create more viral sensations with self-destructive tendencies. There’s one thing about context – it may not lead to the instant gratification we crave, but it does tend to keep the egg off of one’s face.

Could Intel Hardwire Your Brain for Google?

Last week, Roger Dooley had an interesting post on his Neuromarketing Blog (great blog, by the way) about Intel’s efforts to implant a computer chip directly into our brains, essentially allowing us to interface directly with computers. Roger ponders whether this will, in fact, become a wired “buy button”. I wonder, instead, if this is the ultimate Google search appliance? The idea was floated, somewhat facetiously, by Eric Schmidt, in an interview with Michael Arrington on Tech Crunch this year:

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just – if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

The Singularity and Hardwired Brains

Okay, this crosses all kinds of boundaries of “creepy”, but if we stop to seriously consider this, it’s not as outlandish as it seems. Ray Kurzweil has been predicting just this for over two decades now..the merging of computing power and human thought, an event he calls the Singularity. Kurzweil even set the date: 2045 (by the way, the target date for the Intel implant is 2020, giving us 25 years to “get it right” after the first implant). Kurzweil’s predictions seem somehow apocalyptic, or, at the least, scary, but his logic is compelling. Computers can, even today, do some types of mental tasks far faster and more efficiently than the human brain. The brain excels at computations that tie into the intuition and experience of our lives – the softer, less rational types of mental activity. It the brain was simply a huge data cruncher, computers would already be kicking our butts. But there are leaps of insight and intuition that we regularly take as humans that have never been replicated in a digital circuit yet. Kurzweil predicts that, with the exponential increase of computing power, it will only be a matter of time until computers match and exceed the capabilities of human intuition.

Google’s Brain Wave

But Intel’s efforts bring up another possibility, the one posited by Google’s Sergey Brin – what if a chip can connect our human needs, intuitions and hunches with the data and processing power available through the grid of the Internet? What if we don’t have to go through the messy and wasteful effort of formulating all those neuronal flashes into language that then can be typed into a query box because there’s a direct pipeline that takes our thoughts and ports them directly to Google? What if the universe of data was “always on”, plugged directly into our brains? Now, that’s a fascinating, if somewhat scary, concept to contemplate.

Let’s explore this a little further. John Battelle, in a series of posts some time ago, asked why conversations were so much more helpful than web searching.  Battelle said that it’s because conversations are simply a much bigger communication pipeline and that’s essential if we’re talking about complex decisions.

What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow?

Well the answer is at once simple and maddeningly complex. Our ability to communicate using language is the result of millions of years of physical and cultural evolution, capped off by 15-25 years of personal childhood and early adult experience. But it comes so naturally, we forget how extraordinary this simple act really is.

Talking (or Better Yet – Thinking) to a Search Engine

As Battelle said, conversations are a deceptively rich communication medium. And it’s because they evolve on both sides to allow the conversant to quickly veer and refine the dialogue to keep up with our own mental processes. Conversations come closer to keeping up with our brains. And, if those conversations are held face-to-face, not only do we have our highly evolved language abilities, we also have the full power of body language. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Robert Eccles said in their book Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form and Action:

In contrast to interactions that are largely sequential, face-to-face interaction makes it possible for two people to be sending nod delivering messages simultaneously. The cycle of interruption, feed-back and repair possible in face-to-face interaction is so quick that it is virtually instantaneous. As (sociologist Erving) Goffman notes, “a speaker can see how others are responding to her message even before it is done and alter it midstream to elicit a different response’.”

The idea of a conversation as a digital assistance medium is interesting. It allows us to shape our queries and speak more intuitively and less literally. It allows us to interface and communicate the way we were intended to. In his post, Battelle despaired of an engine ever being this smart and suggested instead that the engine act as a matchmaker with a knowledgeable human on the other site, the Wikia/Mahalo approach. I can’t see this as a viable solution, because it lacks the scale necessary.

This is not about finding one piece of information, like a phone number or an address, but helping us through buying a house or a car. Search still fall far short here, something I touched on in my last Just Behave column on Search Engine Land. In those situations, we need more than a tool that relies on us feeding it a few words at a time and then doing its best to guess what we need. We need something similar to a conversation, in a form that can instantly scale to meet demand. Google, for all it’s limitations in a complex scenario, still has build the expectation of getting information just in time. And the bottle neck in these complex situations is the language interface and the communication process. Even if we’re talking to another person, with all the richness of communication that brings, we still have to transfer the ideas that sit in our head to their head.

So, back to Intel’s brain chip. What if our thoughts, in their entirety, could instantly be communicated to Google, or Bing, or what ever flavor of search assistant you want to imagine? What if refining all the  information that was presented was a split second closing of a synapse, rather than a laborious application of filters that sit on the interface?  Faster and far more efficiently than talking to another human, we could quickly sift through all the information and functionality available to mankind to tailor it specifically to what we needed at that time. That starts to boggle the imagination. But, is it feasible?

I believe so. Look again at the brain activity charts generated by the UCLA – Irvine research team that tracked people using a Google like web search interface, particularly the image in the lower right.

googlebrains

Let’s dig a little deeper into what is actually happening in the brain when we Google something. The image below is from the Internet Savvy group in the UC study (sorry about the fuzziness).

Brainactivity

The front section of the brain (A) shows the engagement of the frontal lobes, indicating decision making and reasoning. This is where we render judgment and make decisions in a rational, conscious way. The section along the left side of the brain (B) is our language centers, where we translate thought to words and vice versa. The structures in the centre part of the brain, hidden beneath the cortex are the sub-cortical structures (C), the autopilot of the brain, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus and hypothalamus. I touched on how these structures dictate what much of our online activity looks like in a post last week. Finally, the area right at the back of the brain indicates activation of the visual cortex, used both to translate input from our eyes and also to visualize something “in our mind’s eye”.  As shown by the strong activation of the language center, much of the heavy lifting of our brains when we’re Googling involves translation of thoughts to words.

Knowing that these are the parts of the brain activated, would it be possible to provide some neural short cuts? From example, what if you could take memories being drawn forward (activating both the hippocampus and the frontal lobes) and translate this directly into directives to retrieve information, without trying to translate into words? This “brain on Google” approach could be efficient at a degree several magnitudes greater than anything we can imagine currently.

By the way, this interface can work both ways. Not only could it feed our thoughts to the online grid. It can also take the results and information and receives and pipe it directly to the relevant parts of our brains. Images could be rendered instantly in our visual cortex, sounds in our audio cortex, facts and figures could pass directly to the prefrontal cortex. Call it the Matrix, call it virtual reality, call it what you want. The fact is, somewhere in an Intel research lab, they’re already working on it!

The Top 10 Reasons We Love Top Ten Lists

Somedays it seems to me that the whole world has become a search results page. I fear we have become obsessed with ranked and ordered lists. I’m not sure what it is in the human psyche that loves lists conveniently numbered for our perusal, but heaven knows we’re suckers for the Top Ten.

The Internet has fed this addiction to the point that I feel like the whole world can be sorted like an Excel spread sheet. Sort my best friends by geographic proximity and likelihood to lend me a wheelbarrow. Rank all the parties my teenage daughter will be invited to this year by availability of alcohol, physical presence of dictatorial parents and incidence rate of teenage boys who think they “have a shot”. Give me a list of the 10 things my wife hates so I can create a Pivot Table of my odds of doing one of them in the foreseeable future.

As any direct marketer, blogger, magazine publisher or show organizer will tell you, slapping the “Top Ten” on the front of anything virtually guarantees you an audience: The Top Ten Hot Dog Stands in Manhattan, The Top Ten Ways to Get Rich if You Love Wearing Pajamas All Day, The Top Ten Christmas Crafts that Can Be Made From Recyclable Yard Waste..It’s like we’re being spoon fed our lives by some idiot with a ranking algorithm for everything.

Why are we like this? Well, I think it’s because thinking is hard. It’s much easier to take someone else’s opinion about something, especially when it’s offered in the irresistible format of a ranked list. We can choose to agree or disagree, but we don’t actually have to think about it too much. Someone else has done it for us. Also, we travel in social herds, so it’s really important to know what everyone else feels about anything. And finally, the world just has too much complexity now. There are too many choices to think about in every aspect of our lives, even the stupid ones. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time wondering who the Ten Sexiest Olympians are this coming February. I know somewhere some obliging magazine publisher or blogger will do that Herculean intellectual task for me.

I guess ordered lists offer us the illusion of control. If we can slow the frenetic pace of the world down by looking at a list that someone has conveniently put numbers beside, our lives seem a tiny bit more orderly and organized. Yes, I know the economy and the environment is going to hell in a handbasket, yes, I know the global forces of power and control are undergoing a fundamental shift, but right now I’m focused on the 7 Greatest Reality TV Show Moments of 2009. I’ll worry about global warming some other day.

Of course, the urge to put a numbered list in as part of this post is overwhelming (get it..irony), so, I’ll give you the “Top 8 Reasons Why I Gave In and Did It”:

  1. I have the bladder control of an 80 year old man and have already had 2 cups of coffee, so I had to finish this post somehow
  2. I really want to see just how many of you will Tweet this list because you’ve been helplessly programmed to do so
  3. I’m obsessed with PostRank and I spend way too much of each day worried about my Engagement Score
  4. Given the choice between thought provoking content and a cheap laugh, guess which way I’ll always lean
  5. I’m still figuring out how numbered lists work in my blogging platform and needed the practice
  6. I felt guilty teasing you with a title about Top Lists and felt obliged to deliver. See, I really care about you, my readers and didn’t want to disappoint you
  7. I wanted to prove to my daughters that my brain is still capable of counting up to 8. There has been some question lately
  8. I believe that children are our future (Okay, I ran out of reasons, but I felt that Whitney deserved a plug because she’s trying really, really hard)

Print or Screen: The Zen of Reading

A very interesting post landed in my in-box yesterday. It came from The Chronicle of Higher Education and it looked at a recent paper by Anne Mangen in the journal of Research in Reading (2008, pp. 404 – 419), titled “Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion.” (I know..absolutely gripping title)

Mangen touches on a fascinating aspect of reading, specifically, the tangibility of reading. The look, feel, heft and smell of a book vs. the disembodied experience of reading from an electronic screen: “Unlike print texts, digital texts are ontologically intangible and detached from the physical and mechanical dimension of their material support, namely, their computer or e-book (or other devices, such as the PDA, the iPod or the mobile phone”

I’ve always disliked reading from a screen. Often, I even print off documents so I can review the old fashioned way. And I love books. If you want to want me to crack like a cheap plastic wine glass at a family reunion, put me in a room for an hour with no reading materials. I’ll be pacing in a cold sweat in a matter of minutes. I have multiple screens I can read from, and have read a few e-books, but the experience for me is a mere shadow of that feeling of turning a physical page (this, by the way, is what Mangen means by “haptics”).

Mangen says that the technology that enables digital reading actually gets in the way of a pure imaginative rendering of a fictional world. A print book has no distracting technology. A Kindle or iPhone does. These are some pretty heady concepts, but they touch on that vague feeling of dissatisfaction I have whenever I read something in digital form. I just don’t like it as much as a book, so while the rationality of keeping hundreds or thousands of books on my iPhone appeals to me, I still have several bookshelves and cardboard boxes full of books at home. Amazon loves me..a lot!

This whole topic becomes more material to me as I’m getting ready to self-publish my own book. Amazon will be producing the print version, but there will also be an electronic version. I wonder if my preference for paper is a generational thing. One of the topics I explore in the book is the difference between Digital Natives (people born after 1985 who grew up with digital technology) and Digital Immigrants (people born before 1985 who adopted digital technology as adults). Or is it deeper than that? Do we have some inherent bond with books? Do women feel differently than men?

I’ve launched a quick survey to explore this further. It’s only three questions long, so will take you about 40 seconds. I’ll share the results in a future post.