Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS SEARCHING QUESTIONS TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Diane Coyle Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 27.07.06 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 30.07.06 2130-2200 Tape Number: Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Professor Wendy Hall University of Southampton David Edgerton Author ‘The Shock of the Old’ John Battelle Author of ‘Search’ Matt Smith Co-Founder The Viral Factory Ed Robinson Co-Founder The Viral Factory Ralph Schroeder Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute Dr Paul Cundy GP British Medical Association Computers Spokesman COYLE: Are you one of the two in every three Britons who searches or shops on the internet? Perhaps you’re even listening to Analysis online? Then welcome to the brave new world of the information society. HALL: The amazing thing is that it’s only just over ten years old and it now is probably the standard way in which most people get their information. COYLE: Professor Wendy Hall of Southampton University, one of the leading experts on the internet, sees it as a change of historic proportions in our access to knowledge. HALL: Of course it’s happening faster than the growth of literacy following the printing press. If you look back at the stories of how printing evolved, most of the companies that started out printing books lost money and it was hundreds of years before publishers really became profitable. That’s partly because when they were first publishing nobody could read or only a small hand… and it’s a chicken and egg situation. And we’ve got that same situation now, but it’s all happening so much faster. Now we’ve had one dot-com boom and a bust and I remember the journalists, “Right oh that’s it, we’re never … no business will ever run on the internet again”. What rubbish! Look what has happened since the dot-com boom with the eBays and the Googles and the whole internet shopping and everything else you do on the internet – iTunes, all these things. We’re on the edge of another wave of new companies coming along. EDGERTON: I don’t think we’ve got much more of an information society than we have had for the last hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred years. COYLE: David Edgerton has looked at the history of how we use new technologies for his forthcoming book, The Shock of the Old. As the title suggests, he’s not convinced that information technology will make life radically different, and he points out that it’s never easy to distinguish the hype from the reality. EDGERTON: We have a very complex society in which information like lots of other things is of very great importance. It’s dangerous to isolate one element. Of course we’ve often done this, so we’ve had the railway age, we’ve had the steam age, we’ve had the oil age, we had the atomic age, which may finally be upon us, but none of these descriptions are really of much use if one is to understand the underlying dynamics of the economy. COYLE: So what do you think the internet has done for us? EDGERTON: The internet made a lot of sources of information a lot cheaper; it’s opened up the amount of information we can access very quickly. Whether it’s transformed our ability to process information, to acquire it beyond making it a lot easier, is I think open to doubt. COYLE: Have Google and other search engines really transformed our lives? It can certainly feel like it to people like me who use them every day. The world wide web, all the documents linked up on the internet, was only born in the early 1990s and within a few years the amount of information available online was estimated at the equivalent of seventeen times the size of the largest print library in the world. It’s been growing exponentially ever since. A wealth of information, accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Yet even enthusiasts for the potential of online search acknowledge its limitations. BATTELLE: The organisational piece of the mission should not be overlooked because information is useless until some sort of organisation turns it into knowledge. COYLE: John Battelle is the author of Search. This bestseller about Google and its competitors is of course another example of that old information technology, the book. BATTELLE: One of the big problems in search that is unsolved is how to get all the stuff you wish you could search but isn’t available to be searched into the index. Most of the world’s video information is not searchable. Most of the world’s books (out of print anyway) are not searchable. Most of the world’s government records are not searchable – at least not by you or me. Most of the world’s transactions, commercial transactions are not searchable. So that’s one of the big problems, is 95% of the data isn’t even searchable. Another is that if you think about it in terms of the way we interact with computing. Remember the early days of how we interacted with computers. We had the C prompt and you would put a command in like DIR and it would give you a list of things that were on the hard drive. And that was a very rudimentary interface to the computer and we’re really right at that point now with search. We have a box and a blinking cursor and we put some words in and hit return and we get a list. COYLE: Optimists think search is in its infancy, and will become more and more useful in future. Computer scientist Wendy Hall is working with Sir Tim Berners- Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, to improve the user- friendliness of the information we can find online. They’re building what’s called the semantic web. An online search today gives you a long list of documents which you have to read through to discover the answer to your question. It’s a bit hit and miss. The semantic web will link together the raw information itself, the actual content of all the documents you’re pointed to at the moment, so a web search in the future will present you with your answer directly. Professor Wendy Hall. HALL: Well it involves effectively freeing the data that’s in the databases. It’s about making the data available or getting organisations to make the data available in a way that is understandable by people and machines and certainly in a way that machines can interrogate. I think of it as we’ll have in the future personal agents on the web that will effectively understand who we are and what our characteristics are - so when you say I want to go to Barcelona for the weekend, your agent will know maybe the services or know how to get at the data about the hotels and do that interrogation for you and come back with an answer or a small list of potential answers. COYLE: But would you want an electronic personal agent scuttering around the web searching out your hotel for you? Whether or not we can trust search results is an absolutely fundamental issue. There are huge commercial pressures on Google, the dominant search engine, and the others like Yahoo. They make money out of advertising linked to search results but that system’s been manipulated. Some companies click on other links to raise the cost of their competitors’ advertising – it’s called clickfraud. And because hardly anybody looks beyond the first page or two of search results, any kind of trick that gets a website into the top handful is extremely valuable. It’s known as search engine optimisation. So does the profit motive undermine the usefulness of search? John Battelle thinks not, although he does agree it’s something the search engines have to guard against constantly. BATTELLE: I think that the problem of clickfraud is inevitable. It’s an outgrowth of the success of these engines as economic drivers. Anywhere there is someone who can make a quick buck, there’ll be ten thousand more right behind them and so there is something of an arms race between the people who are you know working in an above board fashion using the tools and people who are trying to take advantage of them. I would guess that Google didn’t expect that they would be expending as much energy as they are trying to combat this issue, but I do see it as an inevitable cost to business. COYLE: Despite the abuses, online advertising has become a multi-billion pound industry, and it’s growing rapidly. The more time people spend searching online, the more companies are turning to new techniques to attract surfing customers. One of these is what’s known as viral marketing. SMITH/ROBINSON: COYLE: I wondered about the use of the term ‘viral’ because it’s not a very cuddly word, is it? SMITH No. ROBINSON It’s terrible. SMITH We’re not very cuddly people. No it’s not, it’s a horrible word. It’s descriptive though of how content spreads. ROBINSON Unfortunately yeah it has seemed to have stuck and we’ve got it in our company name. So we obviously get very odd looks when we go through into America through customs, as you can imagine. COYLE: Ed Robinson and Matt Smith are co-founders of an online marketing agency, the Viral Factory. The agency does what the name says: it manufactures entertaining websites and videos on behalf of clients, and releases them onto the internet in the hope they’ll spread from one user to another. For this online equivalent of word of mouth to work, the content has to be funny or tap right into what they call the zeitgeist of the day. When one of their campaigns succeeds, it will be seen by hundreds of millions of internet users, a staggering reach compared with conventional advertising. But does a lack of trust undermine viral advertising? SMITH: People aren’t quite sure whether the information they’re getting has been paid for or not and I think Google try their best to make it clear, but there are ways that are beyond Google’s control as well. You know people who do search engine optimisation on behalf of a client are effectively fooling the search engine. They would argue that they’re optimising it, but you know what they’re basically doing is kind of fooling you. But the interesting thing about the internet is that the consumer is much more empowered. It’s much more a case of caveat emptor because you, the individual, have to evaluate the information you’ve been given much, much more than I think in other forms of the media, so it’s worth cross checking. ROBINSON What we found, actually the online audience is incredibly sophisticated and what we’ve noticed in the last two or three years is that people recognise and are even using the word ‘viral’ – this is a viral campaign by so and so. SMITH Can I butt in because I think there’s a huge danger of a backlash? For every possible potential successful viral that is created by lots of people liking what you’ve done and sending it on, there’s actually a very fine line between people using the exact same distribution mechanism to completely slag you off. You know and we’ve seen it. The backlash is terrifying because it’ll be on a similar kind of scale. You know tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people just slagging you off. It’s a terrifying prospect and it keeps us in check. The kind of cumulative knowledge and brainpower out on the net that is all linked up and people are communicating constantly, you will get found out. Assume that if you’re going to try and do something a little bit underhand online, you will get found out. COYLE: But are internet users as sophisticated and sceptical as the viral marketeers believe? Ralph Schroeder, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, has been checking what some very experienced users actually look at when they search the web, and what he found isn’t reassuring. SCHROEDER: We’ve interviewed researchers in four different areas and these four areas we chose because they have a global scope, and those are terrorism, internet in society, HIV Aids and climate change. What we find is researchers admitting sometimes somewhat sheepishly that they no longer go to the library as much as they did and also that some of them hardly go to the library any more at all, which I think is quite a shift from ten or even five years ago. COYLE: Does that matter? Are people aware of the limitations of the information they might be getting? SCHROEDER: I think what we find is that they’re much less aware than they could be. So, for example, when they use search engines and Google, in particular, they’re not aware that that has particular limitations or even biases. COYLE: What kind of things would they not find if their first move or maybe last move is to go to Google? SCHROEDER: Well the first thing we know about when people use search engines generally is that they tend only to look at the first page or the first two or three pages at the very most, so it’s those results that will get the greatest number of hits there that they will find. Now if you ask them about whether those are the sources that they would also consult, they will typically say something like oh yes, those are five sites that I do use, but where are those other ones that I’m missing here? So that’s a very typical result across the board. COYLE: It’s not quite the picture of ever present, easy access information that we might have had in mind. SCHROEDER: That may be an unfortunate thing, but I think also I think people will over the course of time become better at avoiding certain gatekeepers or gateways to information and will find various ways of gaining information that you really want. But I think a great deal of education is required in telling schoolchildren for example how they best get the most varied and least biased sources of information. COYLE: If academic researchers need educating about the limitations of online search, what hope is there for the rest of us? Professor Wendy Hall says what we need is a dose of healthy, old-fashioned common sense. HALL: That isn’t any different to the way we deal with information or dealt with information before the Web. You could read stuff in the newspapers you don’t know. You know the phrase don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. It’s the same for the Web – don’t believe everything you read on the Web – and you at the moment have to check the provenance of that information. This is why the companies that do well on the Web are the companies that already have a track record. So I would happily buy something from a shop that I’m very used to on the High Street because I have some trust that what they’re going to be selling me is good stuff. COYLE: So you have an offline reputation to build the trust? HALL: Yes and this is why people who are searching – health is a good example – searching for a miracle cure for the disease they’ve got, you’ve got to really know what you’re doing. You’ve got to get into it and understand where the authorities are. The whole idea of trust and provenance is very important as we go forward. CUNDY: I’m offered several times a day penis enlargements through spam mail. Getting hold of drugs over the internet is a complete no no. It must not be done. It’s extremely dangerous and this is a message that we’ve put out consistently. When you’re online to someone, you don’t actually know who you’re communicating with. COYLE: Paul Cundy is a GP and the British Medical Association’s spokesman on computers. We certainly want to be able to rely on the information we’re getting about health online. It’s not just spam email about bogus drugs which concerns Dr Cundy, though, but also the advertising of genuine drugs. CUNDY: We also know of some websites which appear to be autonomous – you know patient- led, user-group led sites which in fact are funded via the pharmaceutical companies. Now it’s accepted that the pharmaceutical industry no longer sells in the sense of scientific justification to medical practitioners. It now sells directly to the public. It’s a problem with the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and I must say I’m actually horrified at some of the things that they’re getting up to. Well luckily I don’t require any pharmaceutical assistance at the moment, but as a patient I think you have to be as savvy about these sites as about any other site. COYLE: The lesson is that we have to be cautious about taking any information online on trust. Sometimes the real world reputation of an institution can reassure us about its website, like the BMA’s own site besttreatments.co.uk. Sometimes, though, we need to work harder and make sure we look at a variety of different searches and sources of information to cross-check them. If we do take enough care, though, Dr Cundy thinks online search is a blessing rather than a curse. CUNDY: In general my patients tend to be looking for treatment options and I think that’s a good thing. I think their looking prior to consultation is always good and I think one of the problems that doctors have to accept is that we can’t now know everything about everything. I mean I certainly don’t know everything about everything that comes through the door. And especially for some very precise and specific diagnoses, the rarer diagnoses, the patient will often know more than I do about the condition, so I’m only too happy for them to gather information and bring that to the consultation because in a way they’ve done part of my job for me. COYLE: Search optimist John Battelle sees being forced to root around more thoroughly in the mass of information available as a positive benefit, although whether enough people will do so is another matter. BATTELLE: There are always going to be in our culture those people – and I believe they’re going to be more and more valuable – who are diggers, who engage in the art of bricolage. It’s not a surprise that the first class of people who truly discovered Google were journalists who realised the power of this tool and their ability to sort of poke around until they found what they wanted, a search structure that you might call discovery versus people who are just looking for an answer, right, recovery. They just want to get to what they think they know already. And my hope for our culture is that we create more people interested in discovery and less interested in recovery and that we teach our children how to discover and do interpretation rather than simply get the right answer according to what the book says. COYLE: It’s a lovely image, the crafting of new knowledge from the bits and pieces we can find lying around on the World Wide Web. Since the dawn of the Internet there’s been a strong strand of enthusiasm for the democratic potential of the technology. One of its pioneers coined the phrase ‘information wants to be free’. The viral marketers insist that big corporations can’t control the information about them that’s out there on the Web; instead they have to campaign to win the vote of those hundreds of millions of consumers or shareholders or activists. Media companies, at the sharp end of this technology- enabled customer democracy, are showing other corporations what their future will be. Ed Robinson of The Viral Factory. ROBINSON: It’s all about the audience. It’s the empowered generation really. It’s the demand culture. And the Internet really paints a picture in a way for where media is going, we think, in that suddenly people realise that on the internet you’re the boss; that they can decide en masse if they want to see porn or if they want to see feature films, if they want to download their own music, etcetera. There’s no one who’s controlling the schedules and no one who’s kind of sitting there chomping a cigar and saying this is what you, the populace, are going to watch. And really it kind of paints a picture for maybe how media is going as we get all of our content probably from download. It’s TV on demand, etcetera. And because of that, the audience is absolutely king. COYLE: It’s hard to shake off the suspicion that corporations have a lot more influence than this suggests over what we download and how much we pay for it. And their advertising budgets give them an enormous head start in attracting people’s attention. Because another problem with the romantic vision of online democracy is that we the people feel simply overwhelmed by the amount of information we’re being asked to sift through. Nobody has the time or capacity to exploit the promise of the information age. We’re drowning in the stuff. Internet expert Ralph Schroeder restricts his online time to the office, ignores emails at home and doesn’t even own a mobile phone. SCHROEDER: What happens in our daily lives - not in our search for information necessarily but in our daily lives and in how we communicate with others – is that we have such a variety of channels nowadays through which we maintain contact with each other – mobile phones, e-mail, plain old telephony, face to face and so on – and that we have to increasingly choose between these channels and the urgency of the message, the way in which we want to make ourselves accessible to others and the way we want them to access us. I do think that people are increasingly selective in how they use the different media. I don’t think that in general we’ve found a way of coping with this adequately yet. COYLE: He’s not alone in sometimes switching off the constant flow of information and communication. According to historian of technology David Edgerton, we shouldn’t over-estimate how much people are in fact searching on the Internet. EDGERTON: We know there’s more than one way to skin a cat, there’s more than one way to heat up food, there’s more than one way to get to work, there’s more than one way to get information, and that’s absolutely typical. Now there are some things that can only be in practice done one way because one particular method is so much better than all the others. Nevertheless what’s striking if one looks at the history of technology and the presence of technology is the multiplicity of methods that exist that are indeed in use at any one time. COYLE: Just as people continued to use horses and steam trains long after the introduction of the automobile, many of us still use libraries and print directories to search for information. Does that mean we should be a bit wary about the information age predictions that everything we need to know is moving online? Or of politicians concentrating resources on e-everything instead of other useful but old-fashioned means of communication? According to David Edgerton, politicians are suckers for the latest shiny new technology. EDGERTON: Politicians want to live in a world of promises of a future. New Labour being a case in point, they want us to forget the past because they want to say people who know anything about the past have nothing to say about our present and about our future. In the future of course anything goes and politicians and others want to take advantage of that. COYLE: And given that we have all these examples of technologies that have been hyped and not lived up to promise, why do we fall for the hype over and over again? Why are we so excited about them now? EDGERTON: Yes, exactly. It’s a very, very old trick and people have seen through it many times in the past. The difficulty is that it’s not easy to point out that the emperor has no clothes. It’s difficult to let oneself be seen potentially as somebody backward looking. But we have to say - those of us who are interested in a better future, in real change – need to expose the fake prospectus that we’re offered for change. And one of the most striking things about this fake prospectus is it’s the same fake prospectus that we’ve had many, many times before. I mean in the 19th century people argued that the steam ship and the train would bring us world peace because they’d bring the world together. Exactly the same argument was made in the inter-war years about the aeroplane. The radio again in the inter-war years was regarded as a peace creating technology of some power. The television took over that argument and more recently of course it’s been the Internet. So the argument stays the same; the technology changes. COYLE: Instead of grand dreams of world peace through technology, perhaps the politicians should focus on more mundane practicalities. Professor Wendy Hall thinks the real political failure would be to underestimate the speed with which the Internet is changing our daily lives, as we make payments and online applications for example. She says we’re already very vulnerable to our personal information being exploited. HALL: We’re down a road that there’s no going back from. When you think of the rate at which things are moving. Just take the way we get our music. That’s changed in the last couple of years. The way we get the books that we’ll listen to or read online, whichever way you want to do that, movies, increasingly the actual ability to do it any other way will die. It’s just the way of the world. COYLE: So you think it’s too late to be a refusenik? HALL: I’m afraid it is. I think if you’re going to be a refusenik, you’re going to have a very difficult time and you might have to travel a long, long way to actually walk into the front door of a bank, for example, or to buy a real book. You know these are going to become specialist services rather than everyday services. I think it’s inevitable that the whole concept of your digital identity will be something that people will have to learn to live with and I believe that in the future when babies are born, they will be given a website effectively, an identity on the web which will be theirs for their life. COYLE: Do you think we should speed this up rather than stumbling into it in a haphazard way? Should the government get its act together and start to regulate this? HALL: Yes, I think this is the government’s most important role in this area and I wish they’d focus on that rather than the whole ID card or national health e-patient record. I really believe that we should be thinking about it from the point of view of the people about whose information we’re talking. We do very well in this country if we get it right with independent regulators, and I think this is another area where it’s so absolutely crucial that we need that type of regulation. COYLE: One big issue for regulators will be ensuring the accuracy of our personal details online. Not many people realise how hard it is to remove out of date information from the global electronic noticeboard. Ralph Schroeder of the Oxford Internet Institute. SCHROEDER: One of the dangers that that entails is that some of the information that you may have had about yourself in the past may not necessarily be how you want to present yourself now or in the future and so unless you actively erase those old identities, that defines you and defines you unknowingly, perhaps. COYLE: It does seem surprising on the face of it that a technology that gives you instant access to up to the minute information actually makes it harder for you to erase old identities, out of date information. SCHROEDER: I think people again may not be aware so much that all the material that they’ve used to present themselves online may still be there and may influence the way in which people perceive them. Another example might be students. If in future you are interviewing a student for admission to a university, you might just Google them and find all sorts of different ways in which they’ve presented themselves, including very legitimate ones about their previous work, but you might also find other things which they may or may not want you to know about. COYLE: And I suppose it’s an even bigger problem to the extent that other people can put information about you online? SCHROEDER: Yes, I think that’s true. COYLE: Others don’t believe the flow of electronic information is quite so uncontrollable. David Edgerton argues that, on the contrary, it’s already more regulated than the internet enthusiasts believe, which is one reason the information revolution isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. EDGERTON: Some new information goes online. Not all new information is freely available, of course, you have to pay for it, and yes there is a lot of old information that isn’t yet online and probably never will be. But I think we need to distinguish between the possibility that all information would be freely and transparently available and the likelihood of that happening. I mean people can control information. I remember very well people arguing about ten years ago that it was impossible to regulate e-commerce because it would all be flowing through the ether in such a way that no one could touch it. Well of course this is absolute nonsense; you can control the ether extremely effectively. You can tap into it at very few nodes and process all the information about it that you need to. COYLE: So who will control all the information we find online? Already there are big companies, running viral marketing campaigns, and tracking our purchases and preferences. The search companies like Google are there trying to prevent the manipulation of search results but at the same time making their own advertising profit. And the government is regulating the commercial activity but monitoring and regulating us too. It’s a far cry from the early idealism of the information age. Internet guru John Battelle thinks it takes time to learn how best to manage any fundamental new technology. BATTELLE: This is the trade-off that you know we have made with technology during the whole course of human history. Almost always the most powerful technology cuts both ways and we as a culture have to reorganise ourselves around that. That has been true of nuclear weapons versus nuclear energy and so on and it’s been true of petroleum, it’s been true of … Any major significant leap forward in technology brings with it attendant and potentially equal downsides, and knowing and grasping the value of all of our information is extremely liberating and powerful but also potentially extremely dangerous. COYLE: I don’t want to fall victim to the hype, but the figures available do show that most of us are active online now, searching, shopping, dating, listening to the radio, and even foolishly ordering quack medicinal compounds. Will it all spread knowledge, or ignorance? Will it inform or deceive us? The technologies may be new but the balance between the benefits and drawbacks will depend on judgement, common sense, and trust, all very traditional human features. 3