It’s what I call “the indexing problem”. The larger the amount of data that we are offered for consumption, the more we really need to have quality professionals to curate that data: To create an index of usefulness. When I was growing up, those were the newspaper editors… and the professional reporters. They really believed in the importance of their service, and worked hard to make it as good as possible. Now, we have “crowd sourced indexing” and the providers of the service (Google, Bing, etc) basically sell clicks to advertisers. The more you click through, the more they get. That has little to do with the intrinsic quality of what you’re seeing, and much to do with the immediate visceral “must … click … through …” response.
And don’t get me started on “social media” which seems to be mainly a device for reinforcing your own opinions with very little corrective power. Seriously: Do you read stuff you disagree with?
It’s what I call “the indexing problem”. The larger the amount of data that we are offered for consumption, the more we really need to have quality professionals to curate that data: To create an index of usefulness. When I was growing up, those were the newspaper editors… and the professional reporters. They really believed in the importance of their service, and worked hard to make it as good as possible. Now, we have “crowd sourced indexing” and the providers of the service (Google, Bing, etc) basically sell clicks to advertisers. The more you click through, the more they get. That has little to do with the intrinsic quality of what you’re seeing, and much to do with the immediate visceral “must … click … through …” response.
And don’t get me started on “social media” which seems to be mainly a device for reinforcing your own opinions with very little corrective power. Seriously: Do you read stuff you disagree with?