What You Search For Is All There Is

I'm still slowly making my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow, and every now and then, ideas from the book pop into my head when considering some type of media use. Today, I was thinking about searching for information online and how the bias of "what you see is all there is" (WYSIATI) might be applied to it (WYSFIATI). Essentially, people have trouble factoring in the effects of relevant information to which they don't have access but that still affects outcomes of interest. People assume, wrongly, that what they see (i.e., the information to which they have access) is all there is (i.e., all the information that is relevant to the outcome of interest).

The types and scope of information to which we had access was largely dictated by physical proximity, our social circles, books, newspapers, TV shows, movies. These sources gave us an incomplete picture of reality. There's nothing wrong with this per se, as long as the individual knows the extent to which and the way in which their information is incomplete. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman cites numerous experiments in which people are asked to make decisions based on information which they are told has a particular likelihood (e.g., 50%) of being true. But the more common flaw in decision making seems not to be the extent to which people trust a source, but the extent to which they assume that the sources are supplying them with complete relevant information.

Media users often employ some kind of skepticism toward the information with which they are presented. For example, viewers often discount what they see on Reality TV: they assume that the behavior of people on such shows is authentic in some sense but not in others.

But what about searching for information? You start off with a question about an upcoming decision. Sometimes, you find a relatively concrete, straightforward answer. Other times, you're searching for something harder to answer: whether or not to have children after 40, say, or whether or not to vaccinate your children, or whether or not to travel to the Middle East, or whether o not that lump on your shoulder is a tumor (in my case, thankfully, it was not).

Again, it's important to say that we never had perfect information to help us make these decisions. As a culture, we probably weren't hip to this at first, but in the recent past, and certainly once the internet came along, skepticism (or rather, cynicism) about mainstream media went, well, mainstream. It is true that our personal social networks, newspapers, or books were incomplete and biased sources of information. I think that the information we acquire through online search is incomplete and biased in different ways, but I wonder if the very act of searching increases our erroneous belief that we're getting complete, or near complete, information. The act of searching, of picking your own source, is likely to make you think that you're acting independently.

But search really magnifies certain biases in ways that mainstream media did not. Search results are, of course, not all that there is. They are based on what others click on (and a "click" is as much an indication of immediate curiosity as it is of the veracity of the information) and based on what we've clicked on in the past. So, confirmation bias probably influences search results. But the act of searching from among many (sometimes hundreds or even thousands, if you're especially diligent) sources makes you feel like a careful information consumer, someone who's not simply being spoon-fed information by those interested in making a profit.

Perhaps mainstream media was always interested in making a profit. They also were (and continue to be) interested in maintaining the status quo. It's been pointed out many times how this maintenance of the status quo was a bad thing, how it keeps populations from questioning despotic regimes, antiquated laws, bigotry, etc. But getting free of status-quo-enforcing sources of information has it's potential downsides. We may be disappearing down information rabbit holes based on shock value and pre-existing notions of how the world is.

But the point I wanted to make here relates to the certainty we have when we search that what we find is all there is. It seems to me to be counterproductive to refer to this as the illusion of agency or the illusion of choice, as one might be tempted to do. All decisions are made from incomplete information menus that are influenced by others who do not necessarily have our best interests in mind. But you can be more or less aware of the degree to which the information presented in those menus is complete and how it may be biased. The very act of searching makes it a bit harder to see these things clearly.

The object of media literacy is not to eliminate bias in one's media diet or finally obtain complete information, but to increase awareness of bias and incompleteness.

Post script: what I've really been describing is "What You Find Is All There Is" (WYFIATI). "What You Search For Is All There Is" really describes the sense that the world is defined by what you're curios about or interested in, which is a separate but related cognitive bias.

"It depends what you mean by sex": Google and Language

While researching the effects of stress on learning, I decided to look at differences between the ways male students reacted to stress and the ways female students reacted to stress. I went to Google Scholar and typed in "gender learning college stress" or similar variants of that. While doing this, I recalled that there was a difference between gender and sex, or rather, the contested nature of the definitions of the words. Ultimately, I think I'm interested in a social role rather than the levels of estrogen and testosterone one possesses.

What if I was more concerned with the biological trait and violence, and I assumed (probably wrongly) that academic writers made a distinction between gender roles and biological sex? Then I'd have to google "sex violence", which, even in the relatively porn-free ecosystem of Google scholar, would yield plenty of irrelevant results related to the act of sex, not the characteristic of sex. Really, its just a homonym problem, but its interesting to consider the role this problem plays in debates like the one over the definition of "sex" and "gender".

Perhaps in the future, searching won't be entirely contingent on individual words free of any context. Maybe search will get smarter about what we want. But in the meantime, we're in a world in which words (or names, for that matter) are at a distinct disadvantage if they refer to too many different concepts or people. Of course, the people who started the debate over the meaning of the word "sex" or the word "womyn" or many other words weren't thinking about the impact of google on the efficacy of their intervention. Again, its hard to say how long we'll be living in the word of context-less word searches, but if you're banking on it being around for awhile, it pays to use unique terms.

This leads to another problem, one that has frustrated me for years: the tendency of scholars to come up with yet another term for a concept that is subtley different from another concept we have a term for just so they can have an "original" concept to base their career and reputation on. The reverse happens, too: theorists hijack each other's terms and re-brand them, much to the confusion of students everywhere. There's a point at which this behavior leads to a breakdown in communication: are you talking about "priming" or "priming"? (or perhaps "priming"!).

The evolution of language has always been messy, and while google does bring a kind of order to our information environment, it may not be doing wonders for our languages

Tattoos as Human Meta Tag

This is a bit more random than my usual posts, but I was just watching TV and an ad came on for the unfortunately named Lugz shoes (the male version of Uggs?). It caught my attention because of the way it combined sex appeal and violence: man wakes up in bed next to a sexy dame, thinks about an MMA fight he had, cut back and forth between the sexy woman, the dude sitting in bed remembering whilst pondering what shoes to wear today, and a brutal fight. I didn't have the sound loud enough to hear but the message seemed to be that men earn their women through fighting other men...and these men wear lugz. It was hard to tell if the guy in the ad was just some guy or if he was a particular MMA fighter. Without any mention of his name, it would be hard to google him to find out. However, he happened to have a huge, ostensibly unique tattoo across his chest: BROWN PRIDE. How many guys have that tattoo? I googled the tattoo and, sure enough, I came up with the guy from the ad who is, indeed, an MMA fighter: Cain Velasque.

I'm sure the same thing happened with Tupac, or would have if Google were more prominent when he was alive. It reminded me how text-based search (and the internet) still is. I keep waiting for facial recognition to get better, faster, and more accessible. Someday, I'll just be able to point my IPhone at the TV or at someone walking down the street and get their name and whatever else I want to know about them. Until then, I suggest we all get unique phrases tattooed in prominent places.

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.