Twenty-XXth Century Problems

The problem with the computerization of knowledge is that your access to it is only as good as your search engine. And search engines are notoriously difficult to program, meaning they’re often of doubtful quality. The wrong words, wrong word order, or wrong abbreviation can throw your results wildly off – if, in fact, if brings up any results at all.

(Written while silently swearing at a search engine that brings up 0 when I looked for juniper, when there are four varieties sitting on a counter. Oy….)

Janet Kagan put this to good use in her Mirabile stories, hinting first that they’d lost some of the colony ships’ database info, then some of the index (“No, searching for insectivores did not bring up bats”), then a reveal that an answer to a long-standing problem had been hiding in plain sight until someone went through all the science article archives by hand…. And even then, the searchers had to know what timeframe they were looking for.

And that was a case where hand-searching the archive was even possible. If everything was completely up to computers, down to which texts to pull up to “better fit” some algorithm of what users were “supposed” to be interested in-

We’d have a lot of information loss, even if it was technically still in the archive. If you can’t find it, it might as well not be there.

This is why I am and always will be in favor of hardcopy books and backups of, well, everything. It gives you the option of a brute force search, as good as your eyes and attention can manage. And it allows for the serendipity of having the right book land on your head (or your toes, ow), while you’re looking for something else entirely.

Writing fiction, in particular, is an exercise in putting together facts and speculations that normally never come within nodding distance of each other. A nonfiction writer may be able to narrow their focus to the recent history of herb-gathering in the Appalachians, and those are worthy and interesting books. But fiction is about people, and so has to include at least a stripped-down approximation of the messiness of human lives. The facts you need can jump from local herbs to local folk medicine to folk medicine in other countries that use ginseng to the fact that folk medicine also includes incantations against haints and oni… and that’s just for starters.

(Forget the sirens singing of sex to lure sailors overboard. If they changed their tune to “unlimited inter-library loans” – they’d likely get me, is all I’m saying.)

Scientific advancement also often relies on juxtaposing things a regular search engine might never put together. As one researcher put it, the real advances don’t come from “Eureka!” but from “Say, that’s funny….”

And don’t forget one of the most useful plot twists in Attack of the Clones – planets made to disappear from the Jedi Archives. Your characters might theoretically have the galaxy’s best scientific research at their fingertips, but can they access it?

So the next time someone laughs at a quiet crewman for lugging his microfiche library from starport to starship and back – one of the first things a successful enemy attack does is cut communication lines. Like, say, access to the space Internet.

There may come a time when the laugh’s on them!