• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, February 25, 2025

You can get information from anywhere. But the meaning of that information can come from only one place: you. Everything we take in from the vast ecosystem of information that surrounds us goes through the same singular lens -- one crafted by a lifetime of collected beliefs and experiences.

Finding meaning has always been an essentially human activity. Meaning motivates us -- it is our operating system. And the ability to create shared meaning can create or crumble societies. We are seeing the consequences of shared meaning play out right now in real time.

The importance of influencing meaning creates an interesting confluence between technology and human behavior. For much of the past two decades, technology has been focusing on filtering and organizing information. But we are now in an era where technology will start curating our information for us -- and that’s a very different animal.

What does it mean to “curate” an answer, rather than simply present it to you? Curation means to put that information in a context, adding a possible meaning. This crosses the line from just disseminating information to attempting to influence the people getting that information.

Not surprisingly, the roots of curation lie -- in part -- with religion. The word comes from the Latin “curare,” meaning “to take care of.” In medieval times, curates were priests who cared for souls by providing a meaning that lay beyond the realms of our corporal lives. If you really think about religion, it is one massive juxtaposition of a prepackaged meaning on the world as we perceive it.

In the future, as we access our world through technology platforms, we will rely on technology to mediate meaning. For example, searches on Google now include an “AI Overview” at the top of the search results. That’s  Google’s AI  urating an answer for you.

It could be argued that this is just another step to make search more useful -- something I’ve been asking for a decade and a half now. In 2010, I said that “search providers have to replace relevancy with usefulness. Relevancy is a great measure if we’re judging information, but not so great if we’re measuring usefulness.”

If AI could begin to provide actionable answers with a high degree of reliability, that would be a major step forward. There are many that say such curated answers could make search obsolete. But we have to ask: Is this curation something we can trust?

With Google, this will probably start as unintentional curation --giving information meaning through a process of elimination. Given how people scan search listings (something I know a fair bit about) it’s reasonable to assume that many searchers will scan no further than the AI Overview, which is at the top of the results page.

In that case, users will be spoon-fed whatever meaning happens to be the product of the AI compilation without bothering to qualify it. This conveyed meaning may well be unintentional, a distillation of the context from whatever sources provided the information. But given that we are lazy information foragers and will only expend enough effort to get an answer that seems reasonable, we will become trained to accept anything that is presented to us “top of page” at face value.

From there, it’s not that big a step to intentional curation -- presenting information to support a predetermined meaning. Given that pretty much every tech company folded like a cheap suit the minute Trump assumed office, slashing DEI initiatives and aligning their ethics -- or lack of them -- to those of the White House, is it far-fetched to assume that they could start wrapping the information they provide in a “Trump Approved” context, providing us with messaged meaning that supports specific political beliefs?

One would hate to think so, but based on Facebook’s recent firing of its fact checkers, I’m not sure it’s wise to trust Big Tech to be the arbitrators of meaning.

It certainly doesn’t have a great track record.