Interacting with Information

After 20 years of Google, it’s like we are reading the indexes of the books first.

The more we use services like Google, the more our brains organize the world in an index-based fashion. This also means people who make a living providing information are increasingly organizing their presentation to catch eyeballs looking for specific details in indexes.

As a result, the way we interact with information is largely more disjointed than it was for our ancestors.

And as you search for information…

And if the answer that pops up is wrong, you have no reason to question it. If it clashes with your prior but mistaken notion of the timeline, you might decide the answer is wrong even if it’s not. You got your answer in an efficient manner, but you’re relying on your own prior knowledge to digest it.