subject: The Changing Nature Of The Way People Find Information [print this page] The Changing Nature Of The Way People Find Information
In 2008, Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" was published in the Atlantic. A couple of years later, August 15, 2010 to be exact, The Guardian's John Naughton wrote an article titled, The internet: is it changing the way we think? In it, he readdresses the main point of Carr's essay, which is the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes. It's true, Naughton points out, that with the arrival of a new communications technology, comes moral panic. This was the case when the telephone, the camera, and the printing press were developed. In his essay Carr mentions the impact connected technology has had on his reading attention span. He noted that since the emergence of the internet, he can't read more than a few pages without getting distracted by something, whereas he used to be able to read for hours at a time. Naughton notes that even the great philosopher, Plato, argued that the technology of writing would destroy the art of remembering.But it's not just the technology of writing, it is the technology of researching and information sharing in general. The internet has become an all-knowing thing, where people believe they can find the answers to anything and everything. As a result, search engines are tools used to ask questions. Whether you want to lean an address, a recipe, the number of calories in a cupcake, or the famous line Woody Harrelson said in his latest movie, Google will have the answer for you. And with so much published information available, it seems the more questions one asks, the more answers appear. This reality has become something that internet marketers can manipulate in an effort to promote the consumer brands they represent. Brands from all over the world, are hiring internet marketing companies to optimise their web content so that it appears first when people search for basic terms. Internet marketers stay on top of search engine algorithms and do a variety of things to optimise their clients content. On a consumer level, this demoncratises online business. In other words, all business, no matter how small, have an equal chance of being found for the same keywords. And knowing that searching keywords is how people look for the things they buy, this means a lot for business. However, it also means that when we look things up online, we are often inundated with information that isn't authoritative, which means that the internet isn't always as all-knowing as people may think.So, if you're going to hire a search marketing company to optimise your site, make sure that they play by the rules and that they publish valid and interesting content for you.
