Is Google making us into electric sheeple?

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.

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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. More...

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