The Crush of Search

There is something very sad to me about search engine optimization, that the search for content is ruled often by a very savvy computer algorithm devoid of human emotion searching out what it has been told (partly by me and partly by coders and partly by its own interactions with the web) are the things I want without ever engaging with me on a purely human level. I think that may be why as Andrew Sullivan argues so many of the main media aggregation sites, the Daily Dish, Huffpo, Drudge, et al. have a single human being at their core. You trust that person to deliver the news of the day filtered through their own foibles and unabashed human uniqueness. We still seek out human connection on the web even though we are interfacing through so much inhuman code. It's why facebook and twitter have seen such explosive growth. We go to people we know, people we can interact with to get the information we're after. Of course some might argue that since code is a human creation it can't really be inhuman. Perhaps I just don't understand it well enough to see the human behind its creation. But of course code is designed to straighten the lines of what it means to be human. It is not designed to be a cardigan wearing bespectacled librarian with an exquisite and intricate knowledge of 19th century Russian literature, it is designed to take me to the site with the most connections to the search terms I entered, whether that is the best source of information I was looking for or not. Search is of course an incredible innovation that has made finding information millions of times easier than it ever was before. Information no longer has to be cataloged, it simply has to be available for search. But there is a loss implicit in this transaction, and perhaps that loss is worth it, but there is a loss just the same in that we no longer connect with people as directly (and by that I mean there are now layers of technology between us)as we once did in our search for information, and that leaves me a little cold.

H/T Andrew Sullivan