By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
9/16/2008
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve heard this all before: "Like the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, the Internet will reshape the fortunes of companies, countries and people.”[1] Or as 16th Century philosopher Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge and human power are synonymous.” But while information is the basic foundation for knowledge, having lots of information available at your fingertips doesn’t mean that you’re knowledgeable. Don’t believe us, believe singer-songwriter Fiona Apple who once observed, “I read on the Internet that I was dead.”
There have been a number of recent studies and commentaries about how the Internet is changing not only how we gather information but also how we evaluate it. Much of the work has been focused on the “digital” generation (people born from the early 1980’s onward). According to an article published in January 2008 by University College London (UK), research into how young people use the web reveals that “…the speed of young people’s web searching indicates that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority and children have been observed printing-off and using Internet pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them.” [2]
These studies notwithstanding, the issue doesn’t appear to be limited to young people. In fact, the difference between information and knowledge in the grown up world of business was underlined in bold on September 7th when the stock price of United Airlines plummeted 75% after a 2002 story about UA’s decision to seek Chapter 11 protection from creditors was mistakenly circulated as new news by a securities advisory newsletter. The story was dutifully picked up as verifiable fact by the Bloomberg financial news service, and the panic was on. Duh!
The question arises, is information veracity the responsibility of the “provider” or the “consumer”? The obvious answer is “both.” I remember my father reading two daily newspapers because (he said), ”between them I’ll find out what’s really going on in the world.” But with the sheer volume of information available via digital channels, shouldn’t the provider bear more responsibility? How can information consumers sift through it all to make any judgment to the veracity of information?
These questions don’t only apply to the Internet, but to all 24x7 digital information media. None other than John Stewart of “The Daily Show” fame recently took aim at the news media for intellectual laziness and for what he called "that false sense of urgency they create, the sense that everything is breaking news…." Inherent in his criticism is that in their rush to beat the other guy to the story, they don’t check to see if the information is correct or even relevant, instead leaving it (by default) to the consumer to decide… or maybe to comedians who specialize in pointing out the ludicrous.
Incredibly, many (for example, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) see this as an opportunity for a technology “answer.” The UCL study conjectures that “A system where, currently, humans express simple searches in everyday language, to order groceries, reserve a library book or look up a railway timetable, could be superseded by a system in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, this could mean eventually that ‘the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines’.” [3]
Great… we’ll just let technology do our thinking for us.
In his Atlantic Magazine article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicholas Carr wrote about how the ancients feared that the introduction of new technology would compromise people’s ability to think. “In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, ‘cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.’ And because they would be able to ‘receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,’ they would ‘be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.’” [4]
We at RSR know the difference between information and knowledge intimately, and we’re not waiting for new search algorithms on the Web to tell us how to think. The biggest challenge to what we and other quality analyst firms do is the web search engine. Anyone interested in anything relating to retail and technology simply has to type in a search argument, and Google or Yahoo will return dozens if not hundreds of references. But just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean its right.
We’re working to do our part as content providers, verifying “generally accepted” versions of the current state of retail with real information from real retailers, to help provide the “proper instruction” that Socrates spoke of (that’s why we highlight the behaviors of retail “Winners” in all of our studies). But it is ultimately up to you, dear reader, to do your bit to filter “signal” from “noise.” With so much information available to us all nowadays, that takes more work (not less) than before.
If you have an example of “false knowledge” that you’ve found on the Internet, please share it with other Retail Paradox Weekly readers!
[1] John Chambers, Cisco, 11/2/1998
[2] Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, University College London, 1/2008, p.23
[3] Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, ibid., p.28
[4]Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr, Atlantic July/August 2008
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