As I was departing from hometown last weekend, I walked past the busy streets of the area which I had roamed around as a schoolboy. There is a small shop in the junction of two streets, hardly 4 feet by 10 feet, which I used to visit numerous times on my father's bicycle. It was 'Abu Circulating Library', a private lending library, a concept today having such flashy makeup like 'Justbooks clc'. I was not so privileged to lease a lot of books then, but Abu was a very kind man and used to allow me to read books standing there. The people who come there were unique and Abu had the knack of finding second hand books for them, on varying topics from science to fiction to philosophy. It was one of those wonderfully unique places in a small town where people go for their quest of knowledge.
Till the time Soviet Union collapsed, the wonderful soviet science books will find its way through to Tamilnadu. A number of pre-1990 books from Mir, Radhuga, Progress publishers bringing out with wonderful popular science books at nothing of a price. Books for Rs.5/- might seem odd, but given the soviet rouble troubles then, the distributors, New Century Book House (NCBH) surely would have got a good deal. Whenever I visit relatives in any town in Tamilnadu, I make it a point to visit NCBH and pick a 'Mir dwarf' or two. While I don't claim to have read much of these books, there was always effort required when we had to search for the right place to get our knowledge.
Those days were past, so I thought.
For today, everything is available at our finger tips, literally, given the smartphone explosion. Our knowledge base is just a few clicks or a google search away. Every person seems to be walking with a library, with the availability of thousands of books and articles that are spread across the Internet. Any question you ask a person, he is able to tell in just a few seconds and automatic knowledge comes when people read feeds on social networking sites like facebooks or email forwards from friends. But quite recently the trends that are setting in is pushing us back a few years and is asking for the same keenness and quest for knowledge.
The data available in the Internet has grown so much that the Search companies have been required to 'customize' the results before we see them. Our friends circle in social networking has grown so much that Facebook and others will 'customize' what feeds to we get to read. These were aptly described by Eli Pariser in this TED talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTPz7KnwIA
While this may seem not so relevant, the trend is not. The customized search can throw results which may look completely relevant but at the same time could be grossly wrong. For instance, if we are used to read everything from blogs, then a google search may customize results for us showing a lot of blog results for a topic, say, "alien ship lands in IITB gymkhana". It could all be ramblings of hundreds of us based on our dreams and hallucinations, but this may even convince us. Or take the recent out pour of emotions and science that are thrown on the Mullaiperiyar dam issue, with both Kerala and Tamilnadu sides pitching in to prove their case with varying degrees of emotion twisted scientific facts: all in blogs. Friends share blog article links through facebook and by putting arguments in 'nice' way, a lot of imagination becomes fact.
You may laugh at aliens or may not want to worry about such social issues, but in today's short attention span mentality, people would believe anything if put in a believable way. Take this case: recently a friend of mine cribbed about how the HR group had sent a 'motivation' mail to hundreds and thousands of employees, based on a nicely cooked up story of eagle reincarnation. It was just a regular forward and without making any attempt to verify the contents, it was sent with all sorts of 'confidentiality' impositions to the employees. The way the narration was done, the terms used, all can make people to believe that it is actually science and that the whole eagle story is true. Alas, just a google search will give a hoax slayer link in the first page and can blow you away (if you care to click it). And this we are talking about in one of the brightest set of people living in this country.
I'm not taking a pessimistic look here at the explosion of data available, but only pointing out to the necessary care we should take to be alert. While the situation is not yet as daunting as I'm trying to project, it is invariably going to go as the Internet keeps growing. Like in those olden days, quest for true knowledge will remain to be for those who are really keen and ready to go the extra mile. It may not take a few days or even hours like in those days, but it will definitely take some minutes, which will be too much for the short attention span of few seconds that we are developing.
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