3. Influence is not what most of us think it is.
The defining feature (as I understand it) of Google’s offering, and the reason that both of the above things are true, could be described as their redefinition of influence.
It’s probably more complicated than this, but I’ve heard it explained as follows. When you typed a word into an old-style search engine, the sites that would appear at the top of the list would be the ones that had the most links on the internet. So, if you were linked to 1,000 times, you would appear above a site that was linked to 20 times.
Sounds logical—but the sheer volume of mundane material out there, and the incentive for companies to fiddle the system, meant that you never found what you wanted. Google changed all that by thinking about influence differently.
In their algorithm, it mattered less that you were linked to by lots of pages, and more that you were linked to by pages that were linked to by lots of pages. Some sites carry far more weight than others, so if you were linked to by 20 sites, but one of them was the BBC, you would appear higher in the list than someone linked to by 1,000 random blogs and small company homepages.
In other words, the way influence really works—through cultural gatekeepers and arbiters of credibility, rather than through a democratic popularity contest—was taken into account in the way the search engine functioned. Which is why, these days, you almost always find what you’re looking for.
This is a really important idea, because it breaks the link between popularity and influence. Justin Bieber has 42 million (mostly teenage) followers on Twitter, but he may have far less influence on the culture as a whole than someone whom almost nobody has heard of with 10,000 followers, depending on who those 10,000 are.
The same is true, of course, of theology; a book published by Brill that sells 1,000 copies may well wield more influence, when considered a decade later, than a book published by Authentic that sells a million. It’s true of the resources we produce as churches (one academic paper or national newspaper article will be more influential than a raft of widely distributed paperback books and MP3 recordings).
And it should also affect our evangelistic activity: God can save anyone, anywhere, but it is undeniably harder to for an individual to believe the gospel if the gatekeepers and arbiters of credibility in their culture—academics, high-end journalists, scriptwriters, highbrow comedians, feature writers—think it is incoherent. So, engaging in apologetics and evangelism at the higher academic end, as well as at a more popular level, is vital in making it easier for everyone in the culture to respond to Jesus. (An important explanation of what responding to this might look like, from William Lane Craig, can be found here. This profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education is also worth a look, since it shows how Craig is evidently practicing what he is preaching.)
So, I think Google, whether you love them for their search engine or hate them for shutting Google Reader, has a few things to teach us about intelligence, branding and influence.
Any thoughts?
