# The Information Triumverate

> Nicholas Carr (of “Does IT Matter?” fame) wrote a post a couple of days ago entitled “All hail the information triumvirate!”Here is his argument in a nutshell:what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the…
> URL: https://www.smartdatacollective.com/16013/
> Last modified: 2009-01-24T22:03:00+00:00

[Nicholas Carr](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Carr) (of “Does IT Matter?” fame) wrote a post a couple of days ago entitled “[All hail the information triumvirate!](http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.php)”

Here is his argument in a nutshell:

what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia – and I admit there’s much to adore – you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

Carr discloses that he is on the Encyclopedia Britannica’s board of editorial advisors, but I don’t think he’s writing this as a hit piece against Wikipedia. Nor does he recycle the usual pablum about Wikipedia’s inaccuracies; he has surely read the research that [Wikipedia is just as accurate as Britannica](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm).

		
							
					
*
				
					
		
I agree with Carr that our current use of Google and Wikipedia impoverishes our experience of the information that the web has to offer. In fact, that was a major subtext of my recent presentation on [reconsidering relevance](http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/08/google-tech-talk-reconsidering-relevance/). I’m not sure that the dominance of the web is itself a problem, but that’s because I assume that the web is relentlessly assimilating all of the world’s information.

			
				
#### More Read

				
							
					
						
					[](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/infographic-employee-future/)
				
						
					[The Employee of the Future [INFOGRAPHIC]](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/infographic-employee-future/)
				
				
		*		[Schema on Read vs Schema on Write and Why Shakespeare Hates Me](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/schema-read-vs-schema-write-and-why-shakespeare-hates-me/)
				
				
		**		[Program Language with Agile Syntax to Achieve Better Efficiency and Performance](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/program-language-agile-syntax-achieve-better-efficiency-and-performance/)
				
				
		**		[Who tells who what to do?  Project Mangement Work Puzzle.](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/26175/)
				
				
		**		[Geek of the Week: René Lacerte](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/geek-week-ren-lacerte/)
				
						
			
		
But Carr’s advice isn’t constructive, nor are most of the comments in response to it. Indeed, people wrongly focus their ire on Wikipedia rather than Google. It’s Google that promotes a winner-take-all information economy through its relevance-centric paradigm; if anything, Wikipedia mediates this effect because its results are collaboratively edited.

I think that, if we constrain ourselves to a relevance-centric information seeking system, our current Google + Wikipedia model is close to optimal. To do better, we need web-scale tools that support [exploratory search](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_search). Long live the [HCIR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Computer_Information_Retrieval) revolution!