Research and Algorithms

Sometimes I feel like technology reads my mind.

Last week I was thinking about the relationship between humans and trees and suddenly I heard two podcast episodes that mentioned the benefits of hugging trees.

One woman mentioned hugging tree at the rainforest garden in Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida (I forgot who and which podcast this was on). The other podcast was an exerpt of an interview with the performance artist Marina Abramović shared on The Jealous Curator. In passing she mentioned her hug a tree project that started in November of 2020 in England (learn more here).

In fact, I had been thinking about trees but I hadn’t typed in trees to any search engine. It seems that many people have been thinking about trees. For those two recent podcasts to exist both of those two individuals took action with trees in the relative distant past.

I was reminded that at any one time, there are generally more than one person thinking about a topic. It is good to find others who share an interest in our field of interest. Yet as the search engine algorithms focus on monetizing our attention I’ve found that it can be more difficult to find those connections through search alone.

Expand Your Field of Vision

Last week I was in bed with Covid. I had time to slow down and stumble upon work I’m surprised I hadn’t seen before. I found a podcast focused on empathy. In this process I discovered more books to read.

Sometimes I find that the algorithms share only a narrow slice of a subject based on previous search inquiries rather than expanding the range of possible ideas on a subject.

This speaks to the practice of searching for a variety of terms. I found myself using the search terms dignity and validation. These two terms opened up a whole new avenue of research that I didn’t encounter six months ago when searching for information on empathy.

With current search technology I’ve found many situations where I had to find creative ways to find the information I was searching for, from changing my language to finding new keywords. To expand our field of vision we may need to input a variety of related and tangental terms.

Building New Connections

In How to Be Curious, I speak about the ability humans have to create new neural pathways. To do this we need to feed our brains new information.

Technology is not reading our minds. We need to get creative to get what we need from technology.