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Online Forever

I’ve been online forever, starting in 1987. That sounds about as topical as sharing an elevator with the Barry Manilow catalog.

Such qualifiers unmask my digital immigrant status. I drag my immigration status all over a digital footprint that thrives on habitual, uncritical behavior. Imagine we were aware of our virtual surroundings. It’s graspable those of us raised on a device called “TV” that we would control our involvement with screens called devices —  sort of a virtual open house meet and greet with our hosts.  And while that invitation never arrived, it didn’t change the very different expectations baby boomers harbor in our experience of the web. Particularly to the virtual world that existed before it.

A pre-internet intro to online means a very different take on a virtual world as a gateway to knowledge — and not the destination itself. We came with an agenda that prevented us from logging off, without addressing each of the items in it:

1. “What’s the 1991 forecast for baby food? … How much of that is fed to house pets?”

2. “Who are the leading suppliers of corrugated cardboard?”

3. “Where should ecotourism operators advertise to jet-setters?”

A manufacturer of business supplies wanted to know the history of the loose‐leaf notebook. A food company needed a list of ranking experts on potato chips. Still another company was interested in the consumption trend of Bloody Marys. A foreign concern, for some reason, was curious where shepherd’s crooks could be found and how much they went for.

These are examples of the commerce pulses an information broker might handle at a research consulting firm called Find/SVP circa post Internet pre web. Each broker was a pressure-tested account holder of a DIALOG, LEXIS/LEXIS or Dow Jones News Retrieval password. We entered these networks with already known metadata patterns and predetermined classifiers, READ: a research plan.

Sometimes, if we were truly on our games, we’d have the questions queued in our command lines before we even logged in. The answers from the database would land in our pre-configured floppies and the response was complete. The client had what they came for. 

Find/SVP had all those answers. The young company, which occupies sprawling, modern offices at Fifth Avenue and 43d Street, has been trail breaker in what is shaping up as a bustling information industry. Instead of putting together their own research centers (or straining to answer really sticky questions), other companies can call Find and get whatever they need. It has 50 employees; 30 of them do nothing but rummage for answers.*

A generation plus later, time online is too cheap to monitor. It’s also plenty costly for the search engine customers who want us to loiter on their sites, catch them on Instagram, and internalize their messages. The only online players, it seems, with a course of action are the platforms that monetize our unguarded online moments. But that begs the point: We still need answers from search engines. We still need our personal and professional intentions translated by a synthetic programming logic and served back to us in digestible chunks on a welcoming interface.

As long as our lives are lived in what we nostalgically call “the real world,” the internet will remain a medium for research. And we take our more telling search results offline so we can interpret motives, weigh evidence, and come to our own conclusions as investigators. Yes, our search patterns are now treated as influenceable streams of habit-forming time sucks. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless to resist the filter bubbles, affinity bias, and other “black box” efforts by the digital giants to qualify and package us as targets for insatiable marketers.

Searching Out Loud is a method for restoring intentionality to interactions between researchers and search engines. Even more broadly, how to revive a long dormant two way conversation between machines and our true learning selves — the part of our creative impulses that are biased towards curiosity and empiricism — the willingness to step back from our own assumptions and experience to consider wider perspectives, competing explanations, and new evidence gathered in light of what we can uncover online and what we can’t.


* Answering QuestionsBusiness Is Asking, By N. R. Kleinfield, The New York Times, October 6, 1977