I got a report on farm conditions in Minnesota the other day, which no longer surprises me very much.
I have been getting reports on Minnesota weather conditions for weeks now, as well as the outlook for crop markets next summer from the state’s farm bureau. None of which I wanted, and all of which just popped up as soon as I called up Google on my old search engine.
I started it, of course. About a month ago, I was interested in a Minnesota Vikings game, and - naturally - I Googled the team, read a couple of articles in the local newspaper and on a sports magazine site, and thought that was the end of it.
No, it was just the beginning.
I search for a lot of different things on Google, often to avoid embarrassing myself, sometimes just to check the spelling of an odd name, or even something simple like, say, Mississippi.
Now those search choices rarely come back to me for more than a day or two. After all, when I type Ser... I could be looking for lots of different things, but if my last search was for Serbia, well then my computer remembers - or more likely something else someplace else remembers - and up pops what I looked for the last time. Quick, efficient, simple and often welcome. After all, it saves me 20 or 30 seconds of typing, or even more if the spelling is long and difficult.
I had to look up Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov the other day. See what I mean?
Now I started noticing the same thing happening on my phone when I search one of the news sites. It offers a helpful hint, telling me that I would probably be interested in these other interesting stories.
It’s just as helpful in suggesting things I might want to buy. Storm windows seem to be high on the list, so is cat litter and protein drinks. And you can’t believe just how many prizes I have won, and all I have to do is just click on a link to claim them. Who says this isn’t a great country? If I actually did that, I would doubtless have more than enough money to pay for new storm windows, and think about them while I am warm and comfortable on some beach in the tropics, courtesy of one of those great prizes I have won.
So, Here's The Catch
So, what’s bad? Other than the annoyance of losing 20 or 30 seconds to those dumb pop-up ads, especially the ones that I have to force quit to get rid of. Hey, add that to the wasted time that I spend on people who call trying to sell me solar panels - some of them hang up on me when, after a few minutes, I ask if I have to take down the panels I already have to enjoy their offer - it comes to maybe 10 or 15 minutes a day. Maybe two hours a week. Maybe 100 hours a year - two days of my life wasted every year. It adds up.
But more to the point, those suggestions of stories I want to see have turned my computer and my phone into editors, sifting through a universe of stories and deciding what I - an audience of one - really want to see and hear. And know.
Now a real live editor has a lot of duties. In the good old days, newspaper editors had to fight every day for space - who gets how much space for straight news, for business, for sports. National news fought with local news, business page editors cherished their best story, and only reluctantly saw it drift up to the front page and off the business pages.
And they worried about balance. Not getting every opinion in every story, of course, but - over a week or a month - making sure that every valid side of every valid dispute was presented to their readers.
They worried about facts, too. There were copy desk people who checked facts in every story, librarians who provided more data than anyone could want on necessary background, and lots of files of previous stories and photographs to give the reporter a better sense of what they were writing about.
And they would worry about stories covering things I never heard of, or never would have thought to look up. The impact of over-production of oil on the delicate balance between Saudi Arabia and Israel, for example, or the possible impact of a new fundamentalism sweeping through India. Should I care? Certainly. Would I have thought to look it up? Probably not.
But, No Longer
Today my editor is some kind of computer program which looks at what I last saw and assumes I want to see more of the same. Which, sometimes, I do. But, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes, I want to know how other people see things. And, with all the junk sites that come up with every click, it gets harder and harder to find a valid opinion from the people who don’t agree with me.
Grandstanding politicians don’t help here. Repeating the same thing over and over doesn’t help much, either. On the other hand, how else do you say that maybe it’s time to bring the troops home from one place or another without repeating how long they have been there?
Well, that’s the job of a real editor. Not to tell me what the weather is going to be like in two weeks in Minnesota.
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