Fungible Convictions

Writing in the New York Times this Sunday in a piece headlined “Searching for Dummies,” author Edward Tenner asks the question, “Are search engines making today’s students dumber?”

The answer, Tenner suggests obliquely, is no. He writes in closing:

Can better information in the classroom produce the literate, numerate society the Web once promised? There are two ways to proceed. More owners of free high-quality content should learn the tradecraft of tweaking their sites to improve search engine rankings. And Google can do more to educate users about the power — and frequent advisability — of its advanced search options. It would be a shame if brilliant technology were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that produced it.

But Tenner cites a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, “A First Look at the Literacy of Americans in the 21st Century,” which argues in one paragraph (item #8 on page 14) that the percentage of college graduates who can effectively interpret complex writing dropped from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003. The rest of the data in the study indicates, however, that reading levels, for Americans on the whole, remained steady or increased in that same period:

The percentage of adults (people age 16 and older living in households or prisons) with Below Basic document literacy decreased 2 percentage points between 1992 and 2003 and the percentage of adults with Below Basic quantitative literacy decreased by 4 percentage points (figure 2). The percentage of adults with Basic literacy did not change significantly between 1992 and 2003 on any of the three scales.The percentage of adults with Intermediate document literacy increased by 4 percentage points and the percentage of adults with Intermediate quantitative literacy increased by 3 percentage points. The percentage of adults with Proficient prose and document literacy decreased 2 percentage points between 1992 and 2003.

So I suppose Tenner only wanted to address the drop in very high-level reading skills of people—college graduates—who already possess very high-level reading skills. Seems kind of irrelevant. The study indicates that Americans are indeed becoming better readers, and we can thank our teachers for that. . . .
And we can also thank the Internet. The question Tenner tries to address—are search engines making students dumber—is, well, a half-asked one. The corrolary question is, are search engines making society dumber?

We’re not used to thinking in terms of collective knowledge. The National Center for Education Statistics is interested in individuals. We give single diplomas to single students, not one diploma to an entire class.

But the Internet has changed our knowledge of knowledge. Ontology is different. We now store our knowledge outside of ourselves. Not in our brains, not in our professors’ brains, and not merely in a monograph in a journal in a library. Our knowledge of ourselves is now on servers, on websites, on networks accessible to and often changable by anyone else with a web connection.

Because of this, the old way of measuring literacy no longer works. To illustrate: have cell phones made us dumber? Are we dumber because we can’t remember our friends’ phone numbers because the numbers are stored in our phones instead of our brains? Maybe we are. But now that those numbers are in our phones, and thus in our contact lists on our computers, and thus shared quickly and easily with others—aren’t we smarter as a whole?

Tenner makes a jump in his article, connecting literacy proficiency with research skills. Faulty though the jump is, poor literacy and poor research methods do share the same result: bad knowledge.

Bad knowledge is bad both at the individual and society level. Tenner’s article, though ultimately optimistic, belies a mistrust of both individuals and collective projects like the Internet, meaning he can have no real solution. One the one hand, individuals must become dumber the more they give up internal possession of knowledge, that is, if they become lax and put their faith in information found online. On the other hand, search engines can’t possibly organize information into knowledge for individual use.

This mistrust is wrong-headed.

First of all, we have always housed knowledge outside of ourselves, whether in oral traditions or at Alexandria. The level and amount of knowledge is now, of course, vastly higher and larger—and also more accessible. Second of all, people with strong and poor reading skills come together every day and generate valuable collective knowledge. We can make smarter car purchases, get better medical advice, and debunk bunk faster than we ever could in 1992, all because we can aggregate mediocre individual knowledge into valuable collective knowledge.

So do search engines make us dumber? No. In fact, search engines may be the entrance to the only place in the world where a billion “dumb” people can be multiplied together to one great big chunk of wisdom.