If you spend a lot of time on the Internet, you may think search engines are making you smarter. In fact, says PhD student Alon Sela, they’re making everybody more alike
Is Google making us into electric sheeple?
By News on the Net Times of Israel——Bio and Archives--October 12, 2015
Imagine you’re a teacher who assigns your students a report on, say, Alaska. One group of students uses only search engines. Because they’re diligent students, they don’t plagiarize Wikipedia articles, but actually visit several websites and write a report based on all the information they perused.
A second group of students uses word of mouth. They speak to librarians, contact people they know in Alaska and follow Twitter users who employ the hashtag #Alaska. Which group of students do you think will produce better reports? All else being equal, let’s assume a better report means one containing original information and insights.
For Alon Sela, a PhD candidate in Industrial Engineering at Tel Aviv University, this question lies at the heart of his doctoral dissertation. Sela and his advisor Professor Irad Ben-Gal, now on sabbatical at Stanford University, have studied how information spreads in society. Using mathematical models, they concluded that when people use a search engine, even one as sophisticated as Google, the variety and breadth of information a society is exposed to is significantly narrower than when the source is other human beings.
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