UnequalOpportunity.com

Don’t read this link . I say don’t read it. The culture of blogs and research databases has been promoted as a way of democratizing the business of ideas; everyone can have a voice, and the most minority of minority positions can gain leverage. As the Boston Globe writes, “For scholars—especially who like to wear pajamas—the Internet has been a godsend. It allows instant communication with colleagues around the globe, and makes tracking down published research a matter of seconds. But perhaps the greatest boon is the sheer quantity of readily accessible knowledge.”

Yet, as a slew of social scientists has begun to point out, the end result is more often the opposite; the ideas and news that actually gain attention is a narrower, and often more arbitrarily selected, pool than before:

The explosion of online materials has two, somewhat contradictory effects. The scope of available information expands, remarkably so; but as a consequence, the information needs to be filtered somehow.

To make sense of this overwhelming sea of data, search tools must present results in some kind of order. Scholars, like other Internet users, rely on tools that rank results primarily in two ways: in reverse chronological order, and by popularity. (Google’s algorithms, for example, take into account the number of times a website is linked from other websites.)

For lack of a better system, Google searches determine our reading lists DEHE , and the number of Web hits rank our Google searches. It’s a vicious cycle, and the separation of the wheat from the chaff is no guaranteed byproduct. I am reminded, again, of these lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay—an excellent, unwitting metaphor for the Information Age:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no look
To weave it into fabric.