In yet another demonstration that the most interesting ‘work’ things happen whenever I take a day off, former Harvard Business Review Executive Editor Nick Carr published a blog post earlier this week in which he illustrated connections between some of his own recent work on search engines and the world of academic publishing. Of that, more in a moment.

Carr is no stranger to the big - and contentious - issues of the technology sphere, having previously suggested (in Does IT Matter?) that IT is ‘merely’ a necessary commodity cost rather than a differentiator for most businesses, and (in The Big Switch, which I wrote about here) that the move toward concentrating too much power in the utility computing ‘Cloud’ of a small number of companies should be of concern.

In his latest article, published in The Atlantic, Carr asks ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?,’ and follows up with background links to support this contention on his blog.

The article is not long, and it’s well worth a read. Carr’s basic contention (with which I almost agree) is captured in this paragraph from the piece;

“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many… [b]ut that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
(my emphasis)

I can definitely see a similar change in my own interaction with information; a tendency to dip in and out of that ’stream of particles,’ and to move quite rapidly across a wide swathe of resources relevant to the topic at hand. It’s certainly different from the mind-numbing tedium of the library-based ‘book work’ behind my Doctoral research over a decade ago, but I’m not necessarily convinced that it’s ‘worse.’ I - like you - can build up an overview (and no, I don’t just mean reading the Wikipedia page, although that’s certainly a valid part of the process) of a new topic with quite remarkable speed and breadth. Just as I learned a set of skills to manage in ‘The Library’ (ugh), so I am developing a different set of skills that enable me to make effective decisions as to the utility and value of these newer forms of resource. Those skills (should) enable me to go deep when I need to… and should enable me to make effective decisions as to when that really is necessary. I’d suggest that increased breadth may actually mean that we ‘need’ to go deep less often than we might previously have thought.

Has Google made me stupid? No, definitely not. But ‘differently intelligent.’ The old measures don’t work for this. So do we throw out the opportunity because it doesn’t fit our metrics… or do we revise those metrics for a new - and different - reality?

All of which brings me back to Carr’s blog post this week…

In it he points to a recent paper (and summarising blog post for those without access to Science or $10 to buy the article) by James A. Evans, ‘Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.’

In his blog post, Evans suggests;

“For a report published in Science (July 18), I used a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005) and online availability (1998 to 2005), and showed that as more journals and articles came online, the actual number of them cited in research decreased, and those that were cited tended to be of more recent vintage. This proved true for virtually all fields of science.”

In responding, Carr notes;

“When the efficiency ethic moves from the realm of goods production to the realm of intellectual exploration, as it is doing with the Net, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a narrowing rather than a broadening of the field of study. Search engines, after all, are popularity engines that concentrate attention rather than expanding it, and, as Evans notes, efficiency amplifies our native laziness.”

Evans opens his paper by writing;

“Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print — scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse — electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science.”

The rest of the paper includes more in the same vein, with plenty of hard data to support Evans’ assertions (for those paying to get access, the separately downloaded 14 pages of ‘Supporting Online Material’ is worth taking, too!)

As I continue to absorb the implications of his work - one excellent example of a place in which going deep would appear warranted - I can’t help wondering if the problem isn’t scholars succumbing to what Carr sees as their (our?) native laziness by taking the ‘easy option,’ so much as those same scholars struggling to cope with the firehose spray of material with which they are all-too-easily bombarded these days?

Just like every other community, this is one in which existing behaviours, existing networks, and existing trust relationships could and should be put far more effectively to work. Rather than every individual having to search out the ‘best’ material (which, probably, leads to a narrowing of focus as everyone takes the easy option and focusses their attention on the major journals), why not provide publisher-independent tools that enable the community to share its discoveries; thus freeing effort previously spent on tracking the mainstream to focus on uncovering the edge cases that are truly insightful?

I am now off work for the next two weeks… so that’s at least ten more interesting things for the rest of you to look forward to in my absence.