GOOGLE LOOP

Some of us giggled ruefully over the recent Dilbert comic strip in which the “Topper,” who always exaggerates to a ridiculous degree in order to top everyone else, made an impossible brag and advised skeptics to wait ten minutes, then check Wikipedia. Topper had discovered how to use the hollow backside of a wiki, namely that it is at the mercy of whoever cares to post. Misinformation doesn’t work very well on topics everyone visits -- someone is sure to recognize the post as a fabrication and correct it. But if it’s in a rather obscure corner, it will be overlooked.

Worse, if someone wants to use the website maliciously, they can create a “Google Loop.” This is when a hostile post, supposedly based on some citation which no one ever checks as to validity, gets picked up by the Google search crawler, put on the list about the subject so that it’s visited by someone else who accepts that information uncritically (thinking, “Oh, it’s in print-- must be right”) and cites it on their blog or in an article. Whereupon the Google crawler picks it up again and adds it to the list until one hostile post has been expanded by repetition to what seems like dozens of new posts.

In the professions (doctors, lawyers, ministers, professors) one is required to demonstrate somehow one’s qualifications, how one has mastered a body of knowledge. Exams, certification, boards of review, mentors, and institutions all play their part, but one of the important sources of authority is the citation. We recognize them as footnotes or endnotes, often supplemented by bibliography. The idea is that the person proposing an idea shows on what previous body of thought their argument rests -- how it is validated by what has gone before and how the present contribution builds on that body of thought. Which authorities one cites is a way of situating a writer in the great family tree of knowledge. And if the citations are misquoted or just wrong, that shows the person is not qualified. But someone has to recognize the names and sources.

I met this notion at seminary and was rather offended by it. Being forty instead of twenty, I valued experience in real life far beyond reading, esp. since ministry is presumably about real life people. But the religious studies program at the U of Chicago is meant to prepare professors of religious studies rather than ministers, and so I was over-ruled to the point of near-failing. Theology is about reasoning one’s way through a body of knowledge. (I’m told there is now a growing new discipline of philosophy called “x-philosophy.” (Check out http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/) It seems to be rather like fMRI brain studies as it tries to get past our assumptions to something more, well, REAL.

By now there is so much knowledge and so much of it is specialized, that most of us only register that there are a lot of citations that look important. How can an ordinary mortal tell which matters? Or even a well-educated professional whose basic introduction is now outdated by the enormous shifts in so many fields? To the rescue came the idea of a journal, like the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA or a host of specialty journals. But their efficacy could only be guaranteed by the diligence and morality of the journal writers and editors and the loopholes began to appear.

One little scam loop has been uncovered by Bob Grant writing in The Scientist, May 7, 2009.

“Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

“Elsevier is conducting an "internal review" of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the "journal" was corporate sponsored.”

Determined corporate forces are like junior high school students, always feeling around for devious ways to beat the system instead of devoting their energies to straightforward achievement. Innocent but suspicious persons wishing confirmation of salesmens' promotions would find that in these journals, neatly leaping over any necessity for testing. Then new journals quote the phony ones, and the loop completes.

But this doesn’t just happen in the professions, unless you think of publishing as a profession. Publishers have managed to figure out how to convert authors’ efforts into the publishers’ salaries and rent while merely feigning publishing. By constantly requiring more from authors desperate to be published (their desperation is another blog): pay for your own research, provide all illustrations, pay for someone to do the indexing, prepare a detailed advertising plan, secure blurbs from other authors, and so on -- and then deducting all the publisher’s expenses (lunch, haircuts?) from any money earned by the book (noting all the time that the cost of actually printing a book is going up), refusing to offer advances, charging “handling fees” for royalties, and delaying any payment until all copies are gone (“sell through”) -- publishing has become the next thing to a Ponzi scheme.

It becomes a Google loop when critics are persuaded to say either good things about a book (great if you can arrange for it to win a prize) or bad things about a rival publisher’s book. Then that’s cited in a host of theoretically individual judgments of the book from overwhelmed reviewers. It’s best if you can smuggle the book into the news by using some kind of purported sociological tendency, supported by citations in articles, which soon appear in Google, then in footnotes, and then as another round of articles. Properly done, this can cause the ouster of the President of Harvard University. You could Google it. Outraged women whose thinking had been captured by a Google loop, managed to achieve it.

It worked for George Bush when he wanted to invade Iraq. Say something (remember uranium yellow cake?), get someone to quote it, cite that person, put it in an article, an editorial, a blog, and PRESTO! It’s on Google. Pretty soon it’s in Wikipedia.

More discussion here (tip of the hat to Dave Lull):
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/05/wikipedia-hoax-reveals-limits-of-journalists-research.ars