I encountered an interesting concept today in reading “The New Librarianship Field Guide” by R. David Lankes. In Chapter 4, “Knowledge Creation”, he discusses the nature of the conversations people have when asking for and receiving information. According to him, there are two types of language classifications when people are seeking to gain knowledge. He calls them “L0” and “L1.” By his definition, L0 is an interaction where one party knows about the subject and the other does not. For instance, I’m in a library and have no idea how to find a book, so I ask the librarian, who is very knowledgeable. He defines L1 as an interaction between two people who are familiar with and have a high level of knowledge about a subject. For instance, I say something to a friend, and he responds with an inside joke, and we then discuss where we might have heard it first.
Now, I am doing some paraphrasing here, but the fundamentals of the argument are then placed in an interesting way, which I will follow up upon with my own thoughts. Lankes shares the following metaphor: when we interact with a search engine like Google, we’re missing knowledge and fundamentally it’s a L0 interaction. Google, however, tries to add context and additional answers by guessing all the other things we might’ve been talking about, or what we might be interested in knowing, based on our search history. Google is trying to make this a L1 conversation.
Here ends my paraphrasing because I think there is more to this than Lanke’s description of intent. In this scenario, there is a power dynamic. In L0 conversations, the asker needs something and is at a disadvantage for not knowing it. The person who has been asked is in control, and odds are the asker is going to believe the answer they get, for not knowing any better. In trying to be familiar, Google is lulling us into a false sense of equality AND security. It’s making us think that in this transactional exercise, we are known, and therefore we’re equals. This leads to the willingness to give even more data to Google because it fundamentally benefits us. It falsely makes the asker feel as if they have some semblance of control.
Now we do have control, we have the ability to say Google is full of crap and dismiss the results that we get. But it’s something that has to be consciously decided and goes against what we’ve done in the past. For a very long time Google was largely unquestioned, especially by people who are not in the technology field. Remember the “I’m feeling lucky” button? It’s only that we’ve hit some tipping point that folks have realised that Google is not our trusted friend, with whom we’re having an inside conversation. It’s a false L1.
References:
Lankes, D. R. (2016). The New Librarianship Field Guide. MIT Press.