Changing minds in a changing world

For more than thirty centuries now writing has been key to the preservation of knowledge: oral traditions were a workable solution for illiterate societies but they were plagued with omissions and inaccuracies, and the knowledge required constant retelling both to keep it fresh and to transmit it from one generation to the next. Writing enabled the transfer of spoken words into a physical medium which allowed their preservation for decades and centuries, and as long as the materials were not damaged the words were guaranteed to stay unchanged even if no one had read them recently.

This method for the propagation of knowledge actually implied two different levels of gate keeping: on the one hand, it required knowledge of the script, so uneducated people could not profit from it; on the other hand, the need to physically access the medium where the knowledge was registered meant that it was not available to anyone. If we consider the middle ages in Europe, there were not many who could read and even less who would have access to a well furnished library, especially because books were typically copied by hand, which was a terribly arduous work mostly limited to the hands of monks. The invention of the printing press eased on the difficulties to (re-)produce books, but it still required specialized equipment so, even if the books became significantly cheaper, printing was typically limited to a bunch of publishers in each city.

Photo: Amboo Who

By the beginning of the 17th century printing had become so commonplace and cheap that it started to make sense not only printing books as time capsules for the preservation and diffusion of knowledge but also newspapers, with a very limited lifespan. The fact that they were headed for the trash (or reuse) after just a couple of days and at most a few readings justified that they were of noticeable worse printed quality than the books. And all the while, literacy continued to be a significant barrier for the popular classes to access both the news and the general knowledge.

The great caveat of holding knowledge in books is that it is usually bundled in big volumes, typically covering several related topics, so to answer a certain question a researcher must first succeed in finding the appropriate book and then succeed a second time in locating the required answer within the book. To this end, most books contain not only a table of contents, typically listing all chapters, but also an index, which includes relevant terms pointing to the page or pages where they are mentioned. In some sense, they were the first search engines. Libraries follow a similar approach on a bigger scale, building indexes not only by title, but also by author and even by subject. And librarians, who were in charge of keeping the indexes up to date as books came in (and sometimes went away) were, as I mentioned before, the human version of Google, which could frequently point you exactly to the book you needed.

Digitization changed the landscape in three fundamental forms: first, it made copies much easier, since duplicating a file cost essentially nothing, in can give you a copy of my electronic book without having to relinquish my own; second, because digital files can be transferred over the internet it is not necessary anymore to go physically to the library, so in principle all the knowledge of the internet is accessible simultaneously to everyone; and finally,  digital files can be searched for a given term, so it is now very easy to locate all appearances of a given word in the whole book. These three changes are already resulting in a transition even in the professional sphere, where instead of knowledgeable workers companies look more and more often for search-capable workers, people which, even if they do not know a lot of solutions by heart, are particularly apt at searching for solutions. The paradigm of this trend is the website stackexchange.com, which is suspected to have programming solutions for almost any imaginable problem or, failing that, someone who will give you a tailored solution in no time.

Unfortunately the quick and reliable performance of search engines is permeating always more aspects of the digital life. As I was growing up and later in college it was essential to keep your files in a reasonably organized directory structure so that you could keep together the things that belong together and, at the same time, to be able to quickly find whatever you needed. However, as reported in this excellent article by Monica Chin for The Verge, the addition of powerful file search engines to both cell phones and personal computers is allowing the up-and-coming generation Z to completely give up on that sort of organization. It does not matter if your desktop contains thousands of files in no particular order, because your file search will be able to pick it up amongst the mess as long as you have named it appropriately. To quote the article, "it is like having all your clothes in a laundry basket and a robot that finds for you whatever you want to wear".

This might just be another symptom of a changing world, not much different than when cell phones started to memorize the phone numbers of everyone we knew and phone books fell out of fashion to the point most people know their own number (from filling forms), but not many more. It is worrying though that many programming languages and technological devices are still relying on the directory structures to function properly, and this causes some tension between the needs of the tools for order and the inability of the users to provide it. Personally, I have always been able to keep some structure although not to the level of being paranoid because sometimes the number of folders just grows too large. In all likelihood it will soon be enough to cite a short quote from the document and the computer will find it, freeing us from even having to name the files. I will stay on the lookout for whatever comes to try to adapt as best as I can.