The day I discovered that young people were using Tiktok as a search engine to consult information on the internet, I understood that I had definitely gotten old. Decades of collective effort making all human knowledge available on the web so that, among other things, it was indexable and retrievable by search engines (and therefore findable by humans) came face to face with an unbridgeable generation gap. But it’s 2024: queries, I suspect, are no longer made on Tiktok, but are made directly to chatGPT.
And actually, I understand it. The Internet that we knew as a general archive of human knowledge no longer exists for a long time. Or, at least, it is in very low hours. The tricks of web pages to get to the top of search results and the mental change from an internet based on the idea of open knowledge to one of infinite consumption and paywalls have borne fruit: the search engine takes it for granted that the cybernaut (what a term demodé) is no longer someone who goes to the Internet looking for information, but rather someone who is going to buy something. The consequence is that the result of searching on Google for practically anything is no longer a list of sources with relevant information to consult, but a purchase catalog. If information exists but the search system cannot recover it (or it appears buried on the umpteenth page of results) it is as if it did not exist.
#library #fire #wise #men #arrived
