This is hardly an original thought, so my apologies if it has been discussed previously and I missed it. We seem to live in the age of the triumph of "good enough". We have traded the five nines reliability of the landline for the unreliable but convenient cellphone, the certainty of asking an expert for the roulette of Google, and the accuracy of print for the messiness of Wikipedia.

Is this process, and thus the emergence of Wikipedia, technologically determined? Modern technology favors speed over all else. It's often easier to find the answers quickly and be wrong a few times before hitting on a solution than it is to get things right the first time around. With current technology, we have the ability to deliver information far more quickly than we can check it or use it. Does this inevitably lead to a situation in which we simply go with what is "good enough?"

I wasted 3 hours and half a tank of gas today going to a business address in another city that Google Maps gave me. I reached the specified locus and circled the red map-pin with my pinging blue-dot for half an hour before asking the folks at a nearby business where the heck it was. They said it had moved a year and a half ago and sent me to a second location across town. When I got there and couldn't find any sign of it, I asked the folks in a neighboring store where the heck it was. They said that the company, after renovating the site for $1.5 million, shut it down, absorbing the functions back into an 800 number at the home office.

Don't talk to me about “good enuff”, okay?

Jon Awbrey

Agree, but without prejudice as to Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery.

Yeah, it's technologically determined, in an economic sense, but I don't think it's inevitable. When there were few sources of info and communication, and the tech was relatively expensive, everyone shared the same conduits and nobody had good alternatives. We read the same newspapers, talked on the same phones, consulted the same encyclopedias etc as everyone else, and we paid for the inconvenience. "Good enough" had to be good enough for most people, including smart demanding people, who set a higher relative bar. Now the tech is cheap and conduits plentiful, and the "market" is fragmented. Most of us will use cel phones and wikipedia, because they seem good enough for our purposes; if not, we can pay for something better. So the bar's gotten a hell of a lot lower for the great gob of folks who were pretty much along for the ride in days of yore.

I mean, we all used to eat "organic" food in the ol' days too, and you still can, it's just freakin expensive, and most of us don't think it's worth it. But in either case, if you could just educate the palate of the average consumer, you could make the market respond and everyone would be better off. But "if" is a bigger word than it looks.

And the moral of that story? Never trust anyone online. Phone before you leave.

And make sure you know their real name. You can't just ask someone on the street where to find Killer Chihuahua or Ottava Rima.

It's not the technology per se.
In a consumer society convenience is king, trumping all else...including accuracy, quality and even speed in some cases.

It is the reason why Jonny MapQuest above spent half an hour of his life riding around instead of simply asking for directions. It is also why, when our electricity went out the other week, I was struggling to get my Crackberry to work, while Liz simply got a flashlight, looked up the number in the Yellowpages™ and reported the outage.

Granted maybe these examples may have more to do with the Y chromosome, but the point is still valid. Much like the electricity that powers our wonder gadgets, we follow the path of least resistance...even if that path is not always a straight line.

As my parental units used to try and tell me (usually in vain) the easiest way is not always the best way. In fact certain tasks, such as...oh say...creating an accurate and reliable reference work, MUST be done the hard way. They understood this...afterall they survived a great depression, fought (and won) the greatest war in human history, then worked to ensure that I would have it a helluva lot easier than themselves. In fact they prided themselves on doing things the hard way. What I once saw as stubborn stoicism I now appreciate as hard-won wisdom.

We have come to measuring our daily accomplishments by how many, mostly meaningless, interactions we have with others across the ether of the infobahn. By how many real-life, real-time interactions we manage to avoid. Perhaps this is the first stage in our evolution (or devolution) into Homo Cyberensis. If so, it promises to be an easy gig...at least until the power goes out.

Its the throw away culture. Fuse has blown no matter throw, the whole thing away and get a new one. Holding clip breaks, throw it away and get a new one. Total crap on a wikipage, throw it away and rewrite it. Oops that does work because no doubt you'll have to argue with some 20 yo know everything know nothing.

The PhD mathematicians I work with won't look at the wiki pages on maths because "I'll have to try hard to forget I read that, or I'll have to edit it, and I just can't be arsed with arguing with some undergrad".

Photographs of organisms get renamed from the right species to the wrong species. Write ups of historical events get plagiarized from C19 books and Civil War (event1480-1490) gets linked to ECW 1642, because the idiot doing the cut&paste know no different. Meanwhile you have academic institutions and museums castigated for COI because they edit pages (read correct) wikipedia pages describing the works they hold.

Funny thing, like Wikipedia, Google Maps is purportedly editable. There's a link that says "Edit this place" when you get to the detailed info on a landmark site or business.

Thing is, Google staff (I think) need to approve any radical changes, and it takes them forever and a day to actually implement things. I have a client in the heating oil business, and we worked to make their Google Maps listing an "Owner-verified listing". That was relatively easy. However, the fact that Google still insists on labeling this business with the category "Fence Supply Store" is maddening, when you consider I've contacted Google about this approximately four times over the past 12 months.

That was what we did in the old days — you naturally call 'em up and say, "Where are you located?", and the human being answering the phone tells you — so naturally I did that this time. To make an even longer story short —

Bugger Off !!!

Jon

I can see this topic is pregnant with many diverting issues, and I'm sorry if I fertilized one of the more tangential ones, even if I know in my heart that its intent was squarely rooted in the topic of the moment. I may sort the tangents out to another space when I get time.

But the Big Issue I see here is the same thing we are discussing on several other threads, to wit, the all too wide-pushed fallacy lately that The Product Justifies The Process.

Moron that, but later …

Jon Awbrey