Own Your Own Words - The New York Times
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Thirty years ago, the British cultural critic Raymond Williams
published a book called “Keywords,” a collection of mini-essays on a
hundred or so words — “bourgeois,” “unconscious,” “genetic,”
“imperialism” — whose shifting meanings had been intimately bound to
the social and political changes of the preceding centuries. Williams
wrote not as a conventional lexicographer trying to establish a fixed
set of definitions, but as an engaged public intellectual who
recognized that the cultural meanings of these words were up for grabs,
and that change often happens, as Williams put it, “within language.”
His list of key words, he wrote, was intended not as “a tradition to be
learned,” but “a vocabulary to use, to find our own ways in, to change
as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own
language and history.”
Williams’s essential point about the social and political stakes in
simple words and phrases is as true today as it was in the 1970’s:
think of the many battles that have erupted around terms like
“liberal,” “torture,” “pro-life” or “intelligent design.” And today, no
less than in Williams’s time, the public intellectual’s place is on the
front lines of those skirmishes, reclaiming or challenging or
championing the meanings of words that matter most to our vision of the
world. For the public intellectual, those skirmishes cannot take place
exclusively in ivory towers, as semantic disputes among academics.
Instead, he has to direct his work toward the general public for the
struggle to be meaningful.
But one immense change separates us from the semantic battles of the
mid-70’s, a change visible in the term “key word” itself, which is now
most commonly used to describe computerized search requests. In
Williams’s time, if one was seeking the real-world associations or
usage of a given term — to see a specific word in its native habitat,
and not the caged environs of Roget’s Thesaurus or the Oxford English
Dictionary — the options were limited. Today, however, we type our key
word into Google and instantly get an entire field guide to its present
usage: in op-ed columns, advertising blurbs, blog posts, MySpace pages,
diaries, scholarly publications, wherever.
Those search results, as everyone knows, are ranked, in large part
according to the number of other sites that link to the page in
question. And as Google — and other search engines — become
increasingly dominant arbiters of a word’s meaning and usage, the pages
that rank highly for a given key word will have a disproportionate
impact on the popular understanding of what those words mean. Not
merely in the dictionary-definition sense of the word, but in the more
engaged, real-world sense that Williams explored in “Keywords.” Does
“liberal,” for instance, evoke a big-government, tax-and-spend
worldview that never met a bureaucrat it didn’t like? Or is it a
tradition of egalitarian open-mindedness? Is “intelligent design” a
legitimate scientific discipline, or a Trojan horse for anti-science
religious values? These are the kinds of on-the-ground disputes that
public intellectuals are regularly engaged in, and they’re disputes
that have real consequences, even if they are never entirely resolved.
It is precisely this kind of real-world usage that Google lets you see
in a single click, which creates a fascinating opportunity for anyone
with a vested interest in shaping the popular meaning of words. Let’s
say you’re a law professor who is trying to build a reputation as an
expert on affirmative action. In the past, you’d build that reputation
by publishing articles in various high-profile publications, or
journals with scholarly credentials. Many of those articles would show
up in a Google search using the key words “affirmative action,” of
course, but they’d be scattered all over the results. Because Google
considers links to be a kind of vote endorsing the content of a given
page, if you created a specific page called “affirmative action” —
where your various articles and thoughts were collected — and
encouraged others to link to that page, you could very quickly “own”
affirmative action in Google. (Right now, none of the top results are
associated with an individual, and most are intended as neutral,
dictionary-style definitions and discussions. But that needn’t be the
case.) And of course, once your page made it to the Top 10, positive
feedback would be likely to propel your page higher in the rankings, as
more people linked to the page, having found it originally via Google.
The approach works as well for proper names as it does for abstract
concepts. A few months ago, I posted a short assessment of Raymond
Williams’s career on my blog. I deliberately titled the page “Raymond
Williams” to persuade Google to rank the page highly for people
searching using the key words “Raymond Williams.” After it went online,
a few other bloggers linked to the page. Within two weeks, if you
searched Google using the key word “Raymond Williams,” my little riff
showed up as the No. 6 result, behind a Wikipedia entry, a museum bio
and a few scholarly papers.
My Raymond Williams post was probably read by several thousand people
when it first appeared on my site, people who, most likely, had no
particular interest in Raymond Williams, and who, most likely, forgot
about Raymond Williams the second they moved on from my site. But the
post lives on, thanks to Google. Each day, I average somewhere between
5 to 10 visitors arriving at my Raymond Williams page via Google.
Assuming it remains on my site for a few years, and stays high in
Google’s rankings, that could easily amount to 10,000 people reading my
assessment of why Raymond Williams matters.
What’s powerful about this strategy is not the sheer number of readers,
but the kind of readers I’m attracting. By writing a little blog post
and seeding it in such a way that it attracts Google searches, I
attract thousands of people who by definition are interested in the
question of what Raymond Williams means. By positioning my work so that
it will align itself with Google’s vast “database of intentions” — to
borrow the memorable phrase coined by the technology writer John
Battelle — I get my meaning in front of the very people who are
actively seeking it out.
This strategy happens to be old news to the bottom-feeders of the
digital world: the spam artists who have long hacked the Google
database to ensure that their sites rank highly when people search for
“sex” and “blackjack” and “cheap Canadian meds.” But just because the
spammers got there first doesn’t mean that Google-centric positioning
cheapens the work of intellectuals. The Nation and Harper’s exploit the
very same postal system that the junk mail impresarios use, after all.
My item on Raymond Williams happens to be a short blog entry, but it
could just as easily be an extended essay, or an e-book, or a
documentary film, or a bibliography. For example, Ralph Frerichs, an
epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, maintains
a vast digital archive on the life and work of John Snow, the
19th-century scientist and public health pioneer who is most famous for
proving that cholera was transmitted by contaminated water supplies. It
is as comprehensive and thorough as any offline university library
archive. It is also, as of this writing, the No. 1 result for “John
Snow” on Google — higher, in fact, than anything related to the former
Treasury secretary John Snow. There are dozens of books that discuss
Snow’s life and work, but in Google’s ranking, Frerichs is the
gatekeeper for the phrase “John Snow.” Where the general public is
concerned, Frerichs’s archival portrait of Snow’s life is likely to be
the most influential, thanks to its prominence in Google.
If key words truly do matter the way Williams believed them to, then I
think it’s inevitable that intellectuals who are interested in speaking
to a wider audience will orient their work around Google’s rising
influence. That doesn’t mean scholarly publications are irrelevant in
this new world: the physicists don’t stop talking to one another simply
because most people have a watered down version ofrelativity in their
heads. It just means that for the mainstream understanding of complex
issues, Google (and Wikipedia, whose entries often rank near the top of
Google searches) are quickly becoming central authorities. So the
question is whether intellectuals are going to mope about this shift —
or whether they’ll see it as an opportunity to shape popular
opinion.And if they make that shift, they’ll take their cues from the
spammers and charlatans, the drug pushers and the pornographers.
They’ll realize that it’s not just the marketplace of ideas they should
be worried about. It’s also the database.
Steven Johnson’s most recent book is “The Ghost Map: The Story of
London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities
and the Modern World.”
See here for the original article.
