August 15, 2010 06:44 PM UTC

Googled!

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• by: JO

(An interesting question posed by JO – promoted by ClubTwitty)

Political science, you say? Hmmmm.

The scientific approach, supposedly, is to gather data and reach a conclusion.

The political approach is to reach a conclusion and then gather facts that support it. It’s an approach much in evidence on sites like this one (and not just this one–not picking in ColoradoPols this morning, at least not yet).

Seems to me that I’ve detected one particular technique in carrying out the political approach, viz. to ask Google to collect some facts, given that we’re rather busy to do research among paper archives and anyway, why bother when we have Google? (Bing, presumably, is reserved for religious research once a week. Bingo! The fact is that…)

So an honest question: how many of us/you who conduct research with Google go beyond the first page of results?

My larger question was sparked by an article in The Observer, “The internet: is it changing the way we think?” ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/tech… ) which gets at larger issues of attention spans and the way we tend to think in the age of the internet. It occurred to me that whether or not Google affects your thinking, it might very well affect the way political debates are conducted–and, more important, what passes for facts/reality in that debate.

Have we inadvertently, unconsciously, handed over to the algorithms of Google a key element in how we think about society, government, and politics?