In my last post, I talked about how I wanted to look at how “the market” influenced reading and writing. That use of phrasing was mostly a deliberate set-up, to justify spending my time here talking about the 2014 work, “The Evolution of Google's Search Results Pages & Effects on User Behaviour” by Meditative, a digital Marketing company (you can see the source in the original post).
By itself, the document is an absolutely fascinating piece of text. Published on Mediative’s own website, it is freely available to any inquisitive souls, simply requiring a name, email address, and “purpose” of acquisition.
Under the standards of traditional academic rigor, the document is also rather problematic. There are no references to any works outside their own, rigor is somewhat lax, and advertisements are featured in the tail-end of the document. It is, for all its decorations and flair and research, a work of adverting. Considering the nature of the discussion, I figure it is also important to note that the article also comes as part of a larger conversation, something of a response to the results obtained by Nielsen and other researchers in the mid-2000’s.
Moving forward from those issues, the implications of such a work are rather intriguing. As I discussed previously, I have my suspicions that humans are exceptionally clever when it comes to devising methods of being lazy. Though, perhaps “lazy” is something of an ungenerous term. What I am trying to describe is the way that humans will attempt to avoid unnecessary work through a balance of metacognitive awareness and social maneuvering. In this case, advertisers figured out which Google links were most likely to be clicked on. Originally, this largely mirror the way that people would read a traditional book or newspaper, and links in the upper left hand corner were given a higher degree of attentive priority. When advertisers figured this out, they proceeded to inundate that area of the Google search page with targeted advertising. However, what this research by Meditative indicates is that rather than simply accept and read the advertisements they are presented with, humans develop new patterns of reading. It seems that the majority of users had developed a new reading heuristic system, in which priority of attention had shifted from the upper left corner of their reading space towards the upper-middle-left, almost an exact bypassing of the standard advertising space on the Google webpage.
Unfortunately, one problem with delving into this topic is that there isn’t much money in researching general reading patterns. Although it is established that Google is read in this style, it appears that marketing researchers (aka: the ones funding and propagating this work) don’t have much interest in decoding processes that are profit-free. Despite this, I believe that Google occupies such a position of influence on reading and discourse that we can probably carry over some of the influences and lessons from this work. On a personal level, I certainly have felt these effects on myself. I have recently noticed that I have begun instinctively skipping my reading process down a few inches (or even lower) for most texts, and only returning to the top of the page once a text has justified looking up. The implications for this are confusing and frustrating, and I guess my next efforts should be to explore what effects this has on comprehension.
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