Clive Thompson on Why Kids Can’t Search (Wired)
From the post:
We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list.
But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.
I agree with the conclusion but would add it illustrates a market for topic maps.
A market to deliver critically assessed information as opposed to teaching people to critically assess information. Critical assessment of information, like tensor calculus, can be taught, but how many people are capable of learning/applying it?
Take a practical example (US centric) of the evening news. Every night, for an hour, the news is mostly about murders, fatal accidents, crimes of other sorts, etc. So much so that personal security is a concern for most Americans and they want leaders who are tough on crime, terrorism, etc. Err, but crime rates, including violent crime have been falling for the last decade. They are approaching all time lows.
As far as terrorism, well, that is just a bogeyman for security and military budgets. Yes, 9/11, but 9/11 isn’t anything like having monthly or weekly suicide bombers is it? American are in more danger from the annual flu, medical malpractice, drunk drivers, heart disease, and a host of other causes more than terrorism. The insurance companies admit to 100,000 deaths a year to medical “misadventure.” How many Americans died from terrorist attacks last year in the U.S.? That would be the “naught” or “0” as I was taught.
I suppose my last point, about terrorism, brings up another point about “critical assessment” of information for topic maps. Depends on what your client thinks is “critical assessment.” If you are doing a topic map for the terror defense industry, I would suggest skipping my comparisons with medical malpractice. Legislative auditors, on the other hand, might appreciate a map of expenditures and results, which for the US Department of Homeland Security, would have a naught in the results column. Local police and the FBI, traditional law enforcement agencies, have been responsible for the few terrorist arrests since 9/11.
I read somewhere a long time ago that advertisers think of us as: “Insecure, sex-starved neurotics with attention spans of about 15 seconds.” I am not sure how to codify that as rules for content and interface design but it is a starting point.
I say all that to illustrate that critical assessment of information isn’t a strong point for the general population (or some of its leaders for that matter). Not just kids but their parents, grandparents, etc.
We may as well ask: Why people can’t critically assess information?
I don’t know the answer to that but I think the evidence indicates it is a rare talent, statistically speaking. And probably varies by domain. People who are capable of critical assessment in one domain may not be capable of it in another.
So, if it is a rare talent, statistically speaking, like hitting home runs, let’s market the ability to critically assess information.