I briefly met Nicolas Carr earlier this year at a Search Conference, I think, back in March, and have a copy of The Big Switch somewhere at home, but never read actually read it – who has time – I get a lot of books and find I can’t really get into that many of them – I just don’t have the bandwidth anymore – I guess I’m skimming – just like a lot of us do now – and according to Nicolas Carr, we’re starting to think like the tools we use – namely Google.

I don’t think thinking like Google is necessary a bad thing – but as this clip from the Colbert Report shows, many typically are processing information so quickly that we can only know a little about a lot of things or a lot about a few things.

It’s kind of one way, or the other – there is not that much middle ground here – because there’s so much information hitting us at any one moment – that we have had to learn to “skim” through it do decide what we want to focus on.

Does it get us to the point where we can’t focus on anything meaningful?  Is that what Google is doing to us, for example?

Or is Google and other search engines just creating for us that which we want, anyway – sorta like a cat chasing it’s tail (or is it a dog chasing it’s tail – forgotten).

I bet we can chart, and this is where the analysis comes in, the amount of information (“messages”) bombarding us over time, say in the last 30 years, against attention span, and come up with a downward slope – that’s my premise – what I’d expect to find if I did take a closer look.  Using the same “skimming” that Google now makes possible, by the way – here’s an interesting chart I came up with, or should I say, mashed up with my post here.   In other words, I gave up something, and I got something in return – the question is how you use that information, not if the trend, itself, is good or bad:

” ..By running a regression analysis across this data we can model a response curve to show how the effectiveness drops off with the increasing number of messages. It can immediately be seen that this is not a linear relationship – the effectiveness drops off quite sharply after the first few messages. Each additional message serves to negatively affect the overall delivery, with the greatest ‘damage’ occurring when there are relatively few messages to begin with.

This chart doesn’t really address the time span, but it does address attention span – we can’t take in too much information at once – and that fact has been  used, quite successfully, to blinsight us, particularly in Electoral Politics (ie: for example, John McCain‘s campaign invites medical doctors in for 3 hours to examine 1000′s of papers about his medical history – that are almost impossible to process – without the ability for doctors to take any notes, or just massive barriages of information that are meant to mislead and confuse us – so we can’t actually get the nuggets of real information from the noise that bombards us).

We’ve put up filters to tune out noise, and often, good information is in with the noise, and we tune that out too, and as I’ve maintained, some campaigns exist just on that – flood us with information that gets us to the point of being stupid – so we can’t process anything new – even though we should and new to.

From the same Measurement Matters blog post – I came up with another chart that ties in the number of information, stories that media can track well:

We brought together data from more than 200 organizations to see if there was a correlation between the number of messages that were tracked and how successfully those messages were conveyed in the media. While we were expecting some kind of pattern, we were surprised about how definitive the relationship was. Organizations with six or fewer messages were more than twice as likely to see those messages delivered as those with more. For those organizations with even fewer messages (one to three) it was even more profound – message delivery was on average three times more effective than those with more.

Put it another way, the reason Republican‘s have won more consistently is that their messages have tended to be fewer, more primal, more focused then Democrats (it has nothing to do with weather the messaging is correct or fair, it’s often not), that had much larger constituencies – communicating what you stand for is harder when there are a lot of voices talking -especially when there there is so much “noise” to filter out.

Even in the debate last night, McCain sought to emotionally connect and stay on just a few themes – it just so happens he’s on the wrong side of most of them – but that has not prevented candidates   from winning – especially if they can exploit the overloads of information.

However, the same trend that decreases our attention span also enables us to have a lot more information to think about, to write about, too.

I think, having so much information at our disposals, provided you have a point of view, should make it fairly easy mash up information, come up with new insights, that could not have happened, otherwise.

What I have noticed, however, is that there’s been a proliferation of information that is essentially duplicated, with little added value.

For example, if I look at information on a prescription I’m taking – or even a herbal medicine, you can often find the same thing repeated, but with almost no added information.

The News is often that way too – last night I watched the first Presidential Debate and got a headache – The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won and I feel that i could have passed on it – I already know who I’m voting for but for all the talk – little information from either candidate that was new, even on the eve of the largest financial bailout in history, the largest back failure in history, the beginning of a long recession, perhaps a depression, little information from either candidate.

And when you look online, the situation is not much better – what’s in the New York Times and Washington Post, about the same stuff, and cable / tv news is just repeating every couple minutes, the same things.

And even with all the 1000′s of cable channels which I can now choose from, on Time Warner – or for that matter, almost any cable provider – there’s often nothing to watch.

Why is that?

I think I know why; relative to consumers of information (all of us)  there are not that many people that produce it, and many of those who are, are looking at each other for information, there’s actually little original.

And here’s where Google could help, but doesn’t – this would be the positive side.  Yes, Google did try to suppress duplicate information for some time, but ….. due to the nature of using textual data and links (and some metadata) they can’t really distinguish the quality of information independant of the backlinks/reputation and text in a page/site.

In order to make Google and other search engines better, they’d need to be more “Social” and process the information from your friend and community – to resurface the information – and they’ve been working on it, Google has, I know they’re experimenting with a “Friendfeed” type of interface – that will allow for commenting on search results, will rerank search results, etc.

So I think, it’s possible that what we’re coming to is not a bad thing – we’re losing individual concentration and knowing a little about a lot of things, but not that much about much of anything – but … our “group” can, our “friends” can – and that’s what I think we’re moving into – that, to me, is the Big Switch, and technology can now enable that to happen, globally, where it could not have, in the past.