Searching for Valuable Input

By Adam Pugh

“When we really pay attention to a thing, we begin to love it, and then we care for it.” -Daniel Gumbiner, The Boatbuilder

Think back to the last time you had a question and opened a help system or scoured a printed manual. Was it in the last day, week, or month? It is more likely that you Googled the question instead of selecting that help icon.

Now consider what makes it so easy to just ‘Google it’ instead of opening the manual and scanning for the information. There are many sources of truth and people with experience and helpful videos. Yet, it is even more likely that you would rather ask another person about the problem you are attempting to solve instead of looking online. It turns out, we are much more social than we may want to admit. When my pipes are having issues at home and I need a plumber I do not trust the internet. I hit up a group of friends ‘anyone have a good plumber they recommend?’ I prefer to ask my uninformed and unskilled friends about their experiential recommendations than take my chances by picking out a random person from an online directory.

I believe that this behavior is influenced by three main causes:

We need an excuse to be social.
We suffer from the availability of too much information.
Information is cheap.

Cheap has two interesting ideas in its various definitions. One says that the item is low in price, but worth more than the cost. There is immediate value in this explanation. The other one I picked out states that something is inexpensive because of inferior quality. This is the one I want to focus on.

We believe many things have value because of the respect we have for the time and effort it took to be created in the first place. A meal at a Farm to Table restaurant will come with a backstory, take time to customize to your tastes, and you are happy to invest the time and money because you are made to feel that the process imparts quality.

On the other hand, we believe fast food should always be cheap because the process is fast, efficient, and repeatable. You can get it anywhere and if one place doesn’t have the right fries, you can choose another equally cheap establishment. We do the same thing when we compare Google, to Bing, and Yahoo (wait that still exists?).

When information is easy to obtain we devalue it then take it for granted. The same thing happens with social media and the 100s of friends you can accumulate. Friendship is a cheap commodity that loses meaning – so we seek out new personal interactions.

Many years ago, if you needed to do research for a school paper you would visit the library and cite physical book sources because you couldn’t check them out. They were also the only copies near your home. It took time and effort to plan out your day to get this information, turn pages, and make copies of the information you needed so you could refer to it later. We still have encyclopedias, but these days it is more likely you would check Wikipedia.com than Britannica.com. You can navigate through those sites – but it is so much easier to type in your question and return helpful results.

Over time we begin to devalue information because obtaining it takes so little effort. I believe we like to ask others their opinions and experiences because we truly value the time and effort they have spent learning the information we so earnestly seek. As we continue to navigate this always-connected life, we need ensure that we don’t take real people for granted in the process.

This was originally published in a department newsletter