Google to Google conversation
by Bob on Novermber 24, 2007
Internet search engines are amazing things. They are almost universal oracles, which would appear to answer questions.
What is most amazing is when people are engaged in conversation, especially electronic intercourse such as email, or instant messengers in real time, one can seem to be quite erudite to the other party in conversing, but, in fact either or both of the conversants are engaged in looking up things on the internet whilst conversing, giving the pretense of knowing things which they really don't know.
So one person says something like "Do you know Seoul, Korea?" and the other person quickly jumps into Google and puts in "Seoul" and in real-time in the conversation answers back quickly, "Yes, I do" and then just read off the results of the search for "Seoul, Korea" which has information, of sorts. So to the original petitioner, it appears that the asked person seems to know about Seoul and Korea but, in truth, he is just reciting back information from the online real-time search.
It gets weirder if both people are pretending and using a search engine in real time in the conversation.
Then we have a double pretense, and what I choose to call a "Google-to-Google" conversation. And it's a very odd kind of conversation because it seems all perfectly sane and erudite. But it is all smoke and mirrors and pretense.
Unless, of course, the conversants agree that they are looking things up on the internet in real-time. Then the pretense is erased by mutual agreement.
But this is not usually the case. People are online all the time and wired. So they use the universal oracle to spice up their feigned erudition in a conversation.
It gets a little more obvious when a radio show talk host is conversing with an out-of-studio on-air guest and is looking things up whilst conversing on-air. You'd never know the host didn't really know what Quantum Mechanics was, or Epicureanism, or the Cost of Living Index.
The more unstable case is, as I said, when both parties are secretive, and unbeknownst to the other person, are looking up things on Google. It become an odd kind of high-brow conversation.
I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan who wrote that "the medium is the message" about the wired age and communications. And he coined the term "the global village", too.
In the case of both conversants secretively looking up things on a search engine, one wonders if they learn anything from doing so, or are just cutting and pasting sentences into their online conversation or vocal conversation.
Dr. Alan Turing, who proposed the "Turing Test" in 1950 as a corollary to his brilliant paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", I'm sure would be amused.
How, if we are not physically next to someone, and in person, do we know that they know what they are talking about ? That wasn't the Turing Test, but it is an interesting sub-case.
It is the bane of many a manager interviewing a possible employee for knowledge. And three months after he is hired by the manager for the job, it turns out he just memorised enough to get through the interview with no solid foundation. And in an hour's interview, how could one know ?
Well, human intuition is an amazing thing, if not a sixth sense. Sometimes we can tell.
But in general we can't, as Dr. Turing would have reminded us.
Dr. Turing, in his 1950 paper, essentially asked the pot-of-gold question: if we are typing in conversation into a computer keyboard with another person out of sight but answering us, can we tell if that which is on the other side of the conversation is a real human being or a computer pretending to be a human being. Well, we really can't so easily.
Moreover, Turing was asking what real human intelligence is. And if a machine could think. He thought that posing the problem of telling the difference between a machine and a human without peeking would be an important pre-requisite test. For, if we can't distinguish between a machine and another person, then is the machine "thinking" as a human would do ?
So in our modern world, with all its answering oracles such as search engines, we are stymied into wondering whether the other person online knows what he is talking about or just pasting back stuff from a lookup on the net.
This causes a bit of societal and interpersonal chaos: especially when we find out the other person really, underneath it all, doesn't know what he's talking about and is just a parrot of the information on the internet.
We wind up with language, linguistics, semiotics, semantics, and human interaction all mixed up in a frenzy of seeming facts.
We are also instructed by some recent research into children learning. If a child is asked "What is the capital city of New Jersey in the USA?", what will be their first instinct ? Will it be to pause and think if they know it, or will it be to simply put their fingers on the computer keyboard and type into a search engine "capital of New Jersey" ? The answer "Trenton" comes back very quickly on a google search. Literally, the first search hit is "New Jersey capital Trenton" ! We don't have to look far.
It's upsetting to think that recent research has shown that the latter might be the more frequent case. Fingers on keyboard rather than pausing to think if one knows the answer.
It makes us wonder who knows what, really, anymore. And that is a real societal issue to grapple with. Even if we ignore the deeper questions like is the information on the web actually verifiably correct, or is the other conversant who they say they are. We get stuck in an intellectual quagmire for these questions. Maybe we're just better off in an old-fashioned bohemian coffee house with intellectuals. Or in a classroom at a university. Still, there always persists the question as to how expert is the expert, or if the answerer knows the real answer. So we wind up with a certain issue of believability. No wonder we're in a modern quandary, specifically a state of perplexity or doubt. Thankfully, sometimes doubting is good and intellectually healthy. There seems not to be enough of it these days.