Technology is Ruining Humanity.

I like to read and write about personal development, self-improvement, and leadership. But if you do a Google search for those topics you will notice, like I did, that it all looks like the same stuff repackaged from different people.

How many times can I read a “new” article on Entrepreneur, Success, or Fast Company about the 5 leadership attitudes every leader needs. I mean, I even wrote one of those myself called just that — The 5 Attitudes You Need For Success — not because I don’t believe in having those attitudes but because I thought that’s what everyone is doing to get eyeballs on their stuff. My God, there must be a hundred thousand articles out there about the top 20 qualities of a leader. How many qualities can a leader have?

The Content Dilemma

Part of this dilemma (my opinion here — it may not be a dilemma for you or anyone else for that matter) has to do with our “content” rich digital culture. Read Neil Patel, Jeff Bullas, or any digital marketing guru and you’ll hear something about the constant need for more niche specific, keyword optimized content.

You will also find how Google’s algorithm (the technology god to which all content creators must bow down and pay homage) has evolved out of the old days of keyword stuffed content into a program that favors long-form “human directed” content. So, if the answer to the question is “more content,” we must oblige.

The second aspect with a more all-encompassing media, we must continually feed the beast. Prior to the advent of cable television, there were three primary TV networks and the same amount of nightly news programs. CNN went all in on news in 1980 and became the first 24/7 news network.

A seemingly good idea. The only problem? What the heck do you put on TV to keep people interested for 24 hours of news? The answer came with the Gulf war in 1991 which gave CNN a constant feed of “interesting” content they happily broadcast to an growing audience who began to realize what they were apparently missing prior to CNN.

Fast forward to today and CNN is no longer alone (nor at the top) in cable news. Add in all the internet media companies, blogs, podcasts, vlogs and whatever else and you can see how much competition there is for a more discerning audience. After all, if you don’t have an audience, you don’t get any ratings, you can’t sell any ads and your company is in the toilet (and your blog for that matter).

Beyond the constant need for more and more interesting content in order to entice and keep an audience, the transformation in our media environment created another problem — too much information. Media critic Neil Postman called this “information glut.”

With more media comes more and more content to the point where it overwhelms us. How do we make any sense of it? When multiple scientific studies come out telling us eggs are good for us and others telling us eggs are bad for us, which one do we believe.

If you’re like me, you’ve been on and off of eggs, salt, coffee, gluten, omega three oils, and tons of other stuff because there’s always another study that contradicts the one before it. (I have a podcast on this called The Limits of Science that addresses how much we can trust science if you care for more on this)

Additionally, how do we find what we’re looking for in an overwhelming avalanche of information? We’re not talking about a needle in a haystack here. That would be easy.

nice picture needed for higher ranking

The Information Glut Solution

Enter the search engine. Google recognized the problem and created a computer program — a machine that would do the sorting for us. We key in what we’re looking for, the machine beeps and boops, and spits out a list of the top most related pieces of information that it thinks match up with our request. Problem solved. Information glut becomes more easily manageable.

However, as with the introduction of any new technology, in attempting to solve one problem, other problems are created. In order for the algorithm to work as best and most efficiently as it can, content must be structured in specific ways. The machine isn’t a human and it’s interpretive powers are bound by the limitations of ones and zeros.

A human being can understand sarcasm, even in writing (heavy doses of which appear in this article). A machine recognizes only the words used and their particular structure and order within a sentence. Machines have difficulty interpreting the meta-messages — the messages beyond the words — in our communication.

Add to this the monopoly that Google has over the information we seek. As any blogger knows, if you can’t rank, your stuff pretty much doesn’t even exist. If you’re not on page one, heck if you’re not in the top 6, you might as well forget it. Almighty Google says what gets seen and what gets buried under the avalanche.

Slaves to the Algorithm

What must content creators do? Bow down and offer the sacrifices of course. Participate in the sacraments of keyword analysis, meta tags, alt tags, and all the rest (God forbid you don’t add an image, by the way, because nobody looks at posts without a nice picture — please note I put up one on this post that has no relevance other than it’s one of the most searched pictures on Google).

The machine also tells us how our content needs to be packaged. Keep your average grade level in Hemingway app below the ninth grade level (this post is at grade 8 — check ;)). Make sure you don’t write in long paragraphs because long and dense paragraphs turn away readers and are the death of content. Let’s move to a new paragraph here.

Make sure your headline scores above a 70 on the headline analyzer app(another machine that tells us the most efficient and best way to get readers to read your content. Side note, my original headline — What the Heck has Google Done To Us?? only scored a 63 and it says I should add more power and emotional words. So I changed it and this once hits 78!! My highest yet.)

Make sure you add a number in there (I fail on this one) and break up your content with some keyword rich H2 subheadings. Let’s hit that one now.

I’m doing it again

The Evil of Google

Google’s original mission statement was “don’t be evil” and for whatever reason, they have since removed that. The sheer power that Google holds over the world isn’t difficult to comprehend: they hold the keys of information, and as we all know, information is power.

In the medieval age, power resided with the priests and the church had incredible authority. Why? Because they alone had the knowledge of literacy. They alone could read, understand, interpret and communicate the Words of God. They held the monopoly on the most important information out there — what God said. If the priest said it, God said it. If the priest didn’t say it, it didn’t exist.

Well the technology of the printing press dismantled that authority because it created a situation where everyone could read and interpret the scriptures for themselves. The printing press ushered in the Protestant revolution and the Catholic church never recovered it’s power.

We find ourselves in a similar situation today. Google decides what is and what isn’t information. What is and what isn’t relevant. As with the medieval church, if Google’s algorithm — the machine — doesn’t think it’s important or relevant, for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist.

There’s a great danger when one corporation holds that kind of power particularly when it concerns what we see in the algorithm when we are looking for information. Anyone who understands persuasion, propaganda, and human psychology knows how powerful the control of information is.

You might protest and say that information has always been controlled and edited by news or media sources and I would agree. Editorial control has always been a part of our information dispersion. The difference today is the small monopoly of the control.

In the past editors could determine what was published and what wasn’t but there were a multitude of human publishers with their own audiences and a greater variety and diversity of perspectives. Today, those editors still exist, Google still holds sway over the content that those editors publish. They, just like the smaller blogger, must bow to the algorithm god as well.

We might naively believe that Google would never censor or even bury content because its message wasn’t deemed appropriate. That they would never prevent content from being seen because it communicated from a particular political perspective. Well, we’ve already seen that happen with the other major media player — Facebook.

Let’s not be so stupid. Let’s remember that the computer is subject to it’s programmers. That programmers can alter algorithms based on their values. Let’s remember that values — even the values of the machine — influence us and seep into our perspectives of the world.

Rather than subjecting ourselves to the values of human editors, we have submitted ourselves to the values of the machine, where the technicians can choose what’s important and what’s not.

Conclusion

What’s the solution? I don’t know that there is one. Decades ago, social critic Jacques Ellul lamented about our Technological Society and that if something wasn’t done, culture would move toward technological determinism. While our technological gurus debate the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, I fear we are on that path already and there’s no turning back.