We hear it said that “still waters run deep” or that a problem is merely the “tip of the iceberg.” The general prevalence of these metaphors suggests that we regard the hidden, the concealed, as an indicator of significance. “The meat of the matter” or the “center” of the debate, implying that the outer layers contain no data of critical interest.
This analogy is rooted in real world experiences such as peering into the darkness of a jungle to spot the tiger in the brush. We draw a quick impression from a glance. Often that’s the only opportunity we get to evaluate a wide range of connected events and entities.
That glance is our tea-leaf read on the present, because it is too complex and interconnected to truly assess in depth. We go in depth only with our specialties—academic, or entertainment. Star Wars fanatics who chronicle every single Jedi character in the franchise’s books, movies and video games take great pleasure in mastering a subject, in large part because a fictional world is simple and shallow enough to actually be mastered. Whether this tea-leaf perception is ultimately valid is beside the point. It’s valid enough for the general public to make snap decisions, which are often the only decision made about how to regard abstract or remote events.
The Great Oracle Google
I hit upon this notion through Google searches. Google is becoming our oracle, who sorts through the reams of knowledge to deliver a pithy and easily recalled executive summary. We like this format: on the news, they summed up the temperaments of the presidential candidates as “hot-headed” and “cool and collected.” Thanks, NPR aggregating lady! I want to vote for the Cool guy.
Recent weird search experiences, which lead me to believe that Google and aggregation in general serve as our tea-reading oracle of a new breed of hyper-reality:
One: Refrigerators
My day job consists of building and maintaining an ecommerce site for a chain of appliance stores. It’s rather satisfying, actually (see the Star Wars geek reference above; similar finite pleasure). Because we’re spending fat bucks on programming, salesmen stalk me. One, selling Search Engine Optimization services, approached me with a sheaf of printouts of sample searches. We’re a local company, so most of the searches included the keyword “Portland.”
One search, however, was broad, merely the word “refrigerators.” Unsurprisingly, refrigerator manufacturers like Maytag and Frigidaire came up first…but fifth in the list was a website called “Women in Refrigerators.” I knew this one! It is a modest little site by a comic writer I know through online games and correspondence, Gail Simone. The site details her research into comic book misogyny expressed through violence directed at female characters (thus, the title is quite literal, and you can imagine the rest). The salesman hadn’t noticed this strange coincidence. To him it was internet noise, an unrelated search result or another reason why my company needed his services. To me, it was a hint that Google is creating an information tapestry quite outside the reach of advertising budgets.
Two: My Mom, the Model
Earlier this year my appendix decided it had had enough. It grumbled for a month, masquerading as gas pain, until an ultrasound revealed it to be swollen and hard. I went under the knife and came back to our half-moved into home doped up and unable to bend over. My mother, bless her heart, immediately leapt upon a plane to aid in my recovery. When my girlfriend (now wife) asked me for pictures so that she could identify her in the crowded airport, I came up short—they were packed away. I figured that my mother’s picture must be somewhere online, perhaps in a photo album of her Contradance group. Google, find my mother! I commanded.
To my surprise, her name, which is fairly uncommon unless you are Portuguese, turned up a surfeit of hits. Her own site, in fact. I clicked. Mom has never looked hotter! Or more like a charming 21 year old lingerie model! Fortunately, the connection was made despite Mom’s lack of search engine ranking. But the model had, for all intents and purposes to the outside world, taken sole possession of my mother’s name.
Three: Mainstream Media is Where It’s At
I am a skeptic. I know that mainstream media outlets are merely holdings of multinational corporations who subsist on revenue streams in any form. Yet I read them as much as I read the independent news outlets, whose reporting tends to be much more reliable. Why bother?
The MSM provide the surface read of events that the average citizen uses to suss out the contents of the jungle. With their ties to corporate entities, they can never take major risks on news stories that could jeopardize their masters’ tithes. A story bubbles up through the independent media and blogosphere, an informal vetting process, until enough sources are discussing it that it can pass for mainstream news. A recent example was the National Enquirer’s scoop on John Edwards’ affair. Half the story was the fact that it was the smutty National Enquirer that beat out legitimate news outlets on a major political scandal. Har har!
Sarah Palin fascinates me. She’s like a tourist shoved into the lion cage at the zoo by cynical zookeepers. Charismatic at first, her lack of experience or knowledge has turned her into a fascinating trainwreck. Independent media outlets were pointing fingers immediately at the spectacle, but it isn’t truly a mess until it hits the public consciousness as dictated by mainstream news. In other words, it isn’t news until it’s news. Have a look at the titles on a recent CNN story aggregation page about her:
Not such a sunny outlook for McCain’s “Hail Mary” VP pick. Nothing positive (unless you count the fact that she’s irresistible to Pakistani officials), some veiled criticism (a “rare Q&A” with a political candidate is a bad sign), and a lot of information on her failings. If we were serious researchers, we might read each story to develop our own opinion about Mrs. Palin, but in fact the vast majority of the voting public has neither the time nor the will to go in depth. They use the tea leaf approach, which, judging by this “randomly generated” aggregation page on CNN, isn’t predicting a bright future for our VP hopeful.
The Executive Summary
To take the exploration further, we could check the story aggregators on Fox, MSNBC, NYT, and then give a glance at Google’s Top Stories, which scrapes the international press. It’s a picture that changes by the minute, thousands of pages of overlapping information, but the important thing is that most readers will take an executive summary (“She’s incompetent and mean”) away from such a search. Whether the executive summary has actual value is debatable — the term is often used derisively in reference to incompetent leadership — but people do employ it.
Why is the executive summary, tea leaf glance at events so pervasive in our country? At the showroom that shares the building with the administrative offices at my employer, there is a wall of flat screen televisions for sale. Sometimes they run programming from a promotional DVD, in sync, all twenty televisions; other times, a customer fiddles with the channels and creates a montage of moving images. In the past, such a collection of information devices has been a shortcut to suggesting that a nefarious supervillain monitors all events in the world at once. It’s de rigueur now for the garden variety supervillain to invest in plasma tvs and a bevy of cable theft boxes, but what are they watching? Do Oprah, Sally Jesse and the View all include secret tips to the safe combination in their shows? Or does our supervillain merely hope to be their own tea reading oracle?
