global voices, one world

Last weekend I was attending a wonderful conference organized by the Berkman Center and USC Annenberg on participatory media. One of the plenary sessions was moderated by the inimitable Jonathan Zittrain, and as the moderator, he reserved the right to poll the audience at the end of the session. He asked us: “will it be easier to find information in 2013?” Most people raised their hands. And what about those who disagree with that statement? I raised my hand. As the only one. That was, uhm yes, a little bit awkward.

The session came to an end and, as all good conferences, time was running out and I didn’t have a chance to actually defend myself. So I am taking this opportunity to give a rough sketch of what answer I would have given if I had been asked to speak up at that moment:

I too believe it will be easier to find information in 2013. This is without doubt true for anybody who is currently in this room and attending this conference. But will it also be true for everybody else out there?

As David Weinberger eloquently explained: we live in an age of abundance. The way we solve the problem of information overload is through meta-data: in other words, we have information about information; we use information to organize our information. We create tools that will help us create that metadata – tools like social tagging, better search, social networking.

But better tools doesn’t mean that most people will be able to take advantage of it. Eszter Hargittai has done much impressive work on how people actually use links – expertise, her research suggests, is really important in helping people make sense of links – which ones are bad, which ones are good? The irony is that the hyperlink originally was ofcourse conceived to be a tool to help us navigate (literally) through the information. A lot of people just cannot seem to distinguish bad from good links – there is a gap in ‘link literacy’. Now if some people already have trouble using links, can you imagine them using social tagging or other more sophisticated tools? Tools by themselves are not enough to empower people. Left without education, literacy and expertise, the rich will only get richer and the poor only .. poorer.

But let’s accept for the sake of argument that it indeed will be easier. Does easier in this case also mean better? That’s not necessarily the case. As Markus Prior shows in his research on cable television, faced with an abundance of choice, two things will happen: the news junkies will read more news, while the rest will read more entertainment and less news. Ironically, people generally read more news when there is less choice: if there is nothing else, people will read news, but faced with a choice? It’s like the equivalent of having a balanced meal with vegetables, proteine, etc or a meal where it is all-you-can-eat-dessert (and I live in Philadelphia).

So there you go. Even if we develop better tools, for most people, it does not necessarily mean that it will be easier to find information. And even if it does become easier, it doesn’t mean it will necessarily be better.