Google Truth

There is no such thing is bad publicity is far too simple a statement to be accurate. There are reasonable sentiments behind it that apply in certain situations at least. It may well be good for promoting a circus act but BP and Volkswagen I am sure feel differently about negative press. I want to look at how the internet is affecting information, perception and publicity. Broadly my conclusions are that, although it is still far from a unanimous fact, bad publicity is seeming to have some more notable positive effects in certain areas. I also am beginning to wonder about the notion of truth and how that seems to be changing.

The internet is fantastic, it is the mos significant human advance since the printing press and is still in its infancy. It is an exciting time to be alive.While there is still much more positive change to come as a result of the internet there are issues with any new technology. We take a while to adapt, to learn what is acceptable and what is not. We need to adjust as a species and work out new etiquette surrounding our new technological capabilities.

I am reluctant to bring my tastes and opinions into evidence but I have no other recourse to explain myself on these observations. Without wishing to name and shame I will simply say that a larger number of the top artists, performers and "celebrities" of the day seem to be quite unpleasant people than in previous decades. Extreme to the point of being interesting but not at all good examples of people. There seems this morbid interest in what horrific thing some of these people will do next and so they generate quite a lot of extra media interest. I am shocked to find such people with some of the highest followings on Twitter and other such social media outlets. Dim as my view is of humanity I can still only conclude that at least half of the followers of such characters are simply doing it for the same reasons one cannot avoid looking at a road accident as they pass by.

We measured things like popularity on sales prior to the internet. For record companies I am sure this is still the driving force behind most of their choices however the rest of us seem to now measure popularity based on internet traffic. The more internet traffic you get the more you are being advertised for free and the more you have data to support your popularity. It is one of those works both ways thing. You can be good and so people will hear about you or you can have people just hear about you and assume you are good. Either way you will end up with some sales. Twenty years ago there was a lot more success based on merit and far less based on appearances and character.

Put another way, you might hate a lot of the music being produced at present. You might hate the people doing it and watch their moves so as to relish in their falls, If this describes you then you are part of the reason these characters exist. We now have two types of celebrities, those we love for who they are and what they do and that are examples of how to be a good person. Then we have the anti celebrities which serve as a reminder of how not to be and what the troubles are with society.

There is a new currency in town, we used to have just money and votes and between those two things most political power was found. Now we also have hits, little votes we make all the time telling the web what we want to see and do.

This concept of the political power of internet hits leads to the concept I call Google Truth. It doesn't really have anything much to do with Google but I couldn't find a better word to summarise the mechanism at work and so I stuck with it. The way Google Translate works was explained to me as something that looks at as many copies of the same text in the two languages in question as possible and simply takes the most common translation as the right one. It was a breakthrough in automatic translation software and was only possible with vast amounts of data. I am sure search engines work similarly and use records of other peoples searches and most common hits to provide results for new searches.

Twenty years ago if I wanted to know something I would look in a text book or an encyclopedia. Now I ask Google, often it points me towards Wikipedia. Although it took a lot longer to find information before the internet I only needed to find it once. Now I find I am much more wary of the information I get. I will find several sources and compare them or I will go to places I can place in a known context of trust. When I know a little about a subject I am looking at I am a lot more aware of who I can ask, which sites are reliable and so forth. Finding out that kind of information is easy and feels reliable. When I am treading new waters am have no idea where to look or who has credible opinions and knowledge I am clueless and find the internet far less helpful. Yes, there is lots and lots of information but without context or sufficient other relevant information I find it to be less use than before in a lot of ways.

There are areas in which the internet seems to be a shouting contest rather than a vast encyclopedia. If  you are looking for information supporting anti-vaccination it is out there regardless of the truth of what a terrible idea it is to not get vaccinated. The more anti-vax content there is on the internet and the more people looking at it the more it will increase its online credibility all regardless of the facts.

The internet feels like it has the capacity to spread misinformation. It can reinforce your biases and opinions with no need of evidence to support doing so. This is the basis for the concept of Google Truth, it says that the position with the most hits is the truth and that is not necessarily the actual truth. It is good in that it forces me to analyse the information I find rather than accepting it as fact as I did last century.

Leaders have been creating false truths to propagate in society for centuries, this is nothing new. The change is that the mechanisms driving the internet mean that it is a naturally evolving thing rather than a specific planned thing. You don't need money or votes to affect the truth now, we all just slightly affect the various truths found online in our day to day browsing. Some naturally evolving things are good, the economy, evolution! My hope is that the actual truth has a survival advantage over a false Google Truth as it were in an evolutionary analogy. As such over time the truth will out as they say. Given the similarities with evolving systems it implies that there are environmental niches where false Google Truths will flourish. While we can assume the truth will out it will be a slow undulating process.

If misinformation online is a problem going forwards then perhaps there will become some accrediting body that certifies sites for accuracy. Like the BRC or ISO9001 so that consumers of the sites information could revert to those encyclopedia years and assume some accuracy of fact in what they are reading. Not mandatory but sufficiently recognized that the majority of sites became accredited.

If we learn to think about what we read then Google Truth's will not be a problem. If we just accept what we read then we will have lots the blind leading the blind. A couple of decades is not nearly long enough to assess the outcome of the internet at all, especially given the many variable associated with something in its infancy. It does seem like cultural progress is speeding up which again implies good sense is winning out over false Google Truths. It also seems like there is a lot more noise coming from sections of society with quite shocking and antiquated views. Broadly I think this is an indication of the potency of the internet in being able to magnify everything opinion and information based and not an indication that antiquated views are on the increase as a result of Google Truths.