Ambient anxiety: meme spreadage and social search

Search engines like Google and Bing are racing to include real-time, “social” search results in their products. This means when you search for something, results connected to your friends will be displayed along with the kind of results you’re used to. The idea is you might find the opinions and resources of your friends more pertinent, or equally interesting, at least, as results from around the general web.

This will probably prove to be pretty neat, ultimately connecting us to our networks a little bit more. You’ll find out who among your friends is a good photographer, or writer, or really opinionated online and maybe where to get good coffee or the scoop on a shoe sale. On a local level that could be quite useful. It’s natural for people to trust peer recommendations – PR giant Edelman determined that “trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today”. Customer experience may adjust upwards accordingly, because word-of-mouth will be even more quickly and widely disseminated. Social proof—what “everybody’s” doing or saying—is awfully influential stuff, as marketers know.

What I’m wondering about is the quality of the information that we will pay the most attention to if we begin to rely on people we know for our search results. Nervousness about this situation is the subject of The Cult of the Amateur, a book I recently read half of. The author lost me somewhere around his two chapter tirade against music piracy, but the upshot is that user generated content (UGC) is supplanting quality, authoritative, well-researched, information such as might be produced by the trained journalists at a newspaper. A shiny new social search capability seems poised, to me, to accelerate the influence of UGC in our decision making processes.

Social marketer Dan Zarella recently posited that bad memes spread faster in this era of wired social networks. The current glut of misinformation about the H1N1 vaccine is a great example. There is an ambient uncertainty generated by constant “I’m not sure about the vaccine” status updates that begin to gnaw at the consciousness, however baseless the uncertainty is. Nobody knows what they’re worried about, but gee, everyone sure seems worried. Fear spreads through the herd and unseats the facts with potentially dangerous consequences, and that indeed is the quick spread of a bad meme.

Truth can also spread rapidly through social networks. CNN was given a hard time, on my social network at least, for being “slow” to report the untimely kicking it of Michael Jackson. TMZ, a mere blog, broke the news and Twitter spread it centuries before CNN felt comfortable confirming it. The holdup on CNN’s end was an old-media idea called “journalistic integrity” that rather inconveniently requires them to site sources and check facts before they go saying something happened.

I’ve noticed news on our local CBC site with the full story fleshed out in the comments by readers wondering why CBC can only provide a few facts, not realizing that was all that could be verified. News organizations interested in maintaining their credibility have a duty to accuracy at the cost of speed.

In a future of search results peppered with UGC, how will we ensure that the news we receive is accurate? Do we need a system, a code word, a special colour we only use for verified information online? A way to demark amateur bystander accounts (that may in fact have detail not included in the professional reporting)? Accurate information is too important—almost verging on human-rightsy—to lose in a slew of opinionated status updates. When I search “H1N1 vaccine safety”, am I benefiting from a cloud of worried friends retweeting panic? The onus is on each of us to dig for the truth when researching, of course, but the path of least resistance is to absorb the mood of the herd and repeat opinions instead of facts. It might become hard not to as our social networks tighten through technological advance.