Over at Teekay’s

A (not particularly interesting) article in the Guardian on search engines has this quote:

But do we really want all this new information? “The end result of a perfect search world is that as fast as answers are generated and consumed, new questions come quicker, with the consequence that ignorance expands,” the internet guru Kevin Kelly writes in an email. “What we know we don’t know expands faster than what we know. This has been true for a while and will only continue. Science, in fact, will come to be measured as the expansion of our ignorance, rather than an expansion of our knowledge.”

Up to “quicker,” that statement is spot-on, but the rest seems to me precisely wrong.

If additional knowledge stimulates further questions, why does that translate into expanding ignorance, even if we can’t answer these new questions? Doesn’t being aware of such questions also constitute knowledge?

As the total sum of knowledge increases at a higher rate than our knowledge as individuals (or even just the total sum of information out there vs the information we can process or at least collect, a difference Kelly doesn’t seem to be interested in), the gap between “I know” and “we know” increases. But dealing effectively with information and knowledge — the thing information technology helps us to do — can help individuals catch up with the sum of knowledge or information out there. And that’s what search engines do: they don’t produce information (except perhaps in the unexpected links and associations they create, which surely also contributes to a better understanding of the world out there) but help us gain meaningful access to it.

But effective search engines may in fact contribute to the opposite of what Kelly seems to be saying: the mistaken impression not so much of being swamped but of being in control. It’s very simple: some people react to information abundance (and of course it’s already a subjective line that separates “abundance” from “overload”) with exasperation and apprehension, while others see opportunity and excitement.

What I’m afraid this may breed is a reduced understanding that what we don’t know still shapes our position in the world at large, a feeling of omnipotence in other words. (I should also mention the Rumsfeldian contribution to epistemology here, the distinction between known unknowns — less dangerous — and unknown unknowns — very dangerous.)

In other words, this situation may breed a new pseudo-knowledge and pseudo-understanding of the world out there:

Turkle, meanwhile, says she has noticed subtle transformations in the ways some of her students think and order their ideas. “There is this sense that the world is out there to be Googled,” she says, “and there is this associative glut. But linking from one thing to another is not the same as having something to say. A structured thought is more than a link.”