The most-searched term the day before that was “India vs West Indies” and a week before “Bear Gryllis”, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of Google trends data.

These replaced the usually most-searched terms by Indians such as ”exam results”, “news” and “Whatsapp status”.

The analysis confirms academic studies (here, here and here) that indicate how the media set the agenda for online searches. Since these are often determined by government actions, this implies that government moves can drive or divert national attention online.

On August 5, five of the top 10 or half of the most searched terms were related to Kashmir, according to the data, which means the abrogation of special status for Kashmir diverted attention from other issues. The passage of 10 other bills by the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house, over the week following August 5 received no attention in the search trends.

If a topic receives more media attention, there are likely to be more searches related to it, predicted a 2010 paper by University of Minnesota researchers Brian Weeks and Brian Southwell.

Some events may not be driven by government action but by others’, but result in diversion of online attention. For instance, in February 2019, after more than 40 paramilitary troopers died in a car-bomb attack on a Kashmir highway, the word “Pulwama” replaced “Rafale”, which referred to a controversial Indian government arms deal.

Source: Google trends

The rupee also fell to its lowest value (Rs 71.2218) against the dollar this year in February 2019, a 3.6% fall compared to its value in July 2018, but this development was overshadowed by the interest in Pulwama.

Interest in Kashmir increased 257% between February 10 and February 17, 2019.

Our analysis also indicates that search interest can change almost immediately after a news break and flip back again when interest dies down.
From “Article 370”, back to “India vs West Indies”

“India vs West Indies”, a reference to the cricket match between India and the West Indies, was the most searched term between August 1 and August 4, 2019, after which it was replaced by “Article 370” on August 5.

Source: Google trends

The trend was reversed a day later, when senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former minister for external affairs Sushma Swaraj died on the night of August 5. “India vs West Indies” was back at the top spot by August 7, with more than a million searches.

In the first week of August 2019, as India’s jobs crisis grew and the economy slowed down, Indians online searched for exam results, cricket and entertainment, our analysis showed.

This is because many results were declared for exams in universities in north India, entrance tests to Andhra Pradesh’s engineering and medical colleges, the Railway Recruitment Board and the Jaipur Vidyut Vitran Nigam Limited, a state electricity company.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) reduced the repo rate, the rate at which the Central Bank lends to commercial banks, by 35 basis points on August 7, its fourth successive rate cut, and lowered its GDP growth prediction, according to this RBI press release. The rupee depreciated, inflation fell, but except for “repo rate”, no search string related to the economy featured in the trends list, which continued to be dominated by results of sporting events and entertainment.

Kuldeep Sengar, a suspended BJP state legislator facing rape charges, did not make it to the trends list that week, nor did Unnao, the Uttar Pradesh city that is home to him and the victim.

Google trends indicate where public attention lies

Academic research backs the trajectory of online search trends.

Google trends provide a score measuring the popularity of a search term and its movement over time. This score is calculated by dividing the number of queries related to a search term by the number of queries received from a region during a time frame, explained University of California-Berkeley economist Hal Varian in a December 2011 paper.

The more attention the media provide to a topic, the more the audience is likely to consider it important, researchers Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw wrote in a 1972 paper on the media’s agenda-setting role.

When news consumers need to know more about a topic, they try to get more information on it, from Google search and other sources, according to Weeks and Southwell.

(Iqbal, an MA in economics from the Madras School of Economics, is an IndiaSpend intern.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Make no mistake about it, this is a seismic shift in human psychology, probably the biggest we have ever had to cope with, and one that is occurring with breathtaking rapidity – Google, after all, is just 20 years old, this month. But although this shift has some good consequences, there are some deeply troubling issues we urgently need to address.

Much of my research spans issues to do with personal identity, mind, neuroscience, and ethics. And in my view, as we gobble up Google’s AI driven “personalised” features, we cede ever more of our personal cognitive space to Google, and so both mental privacy and the ability to think freely are eroded. What’s more, evidence is starting to emerge that there may be a link between technology use and mental health problems. In other words, it is not clear that our minds can take the strain of the virtual stretch. Perhaps we are even close to the snapping point.
 

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?

This was the question posed in 1998 (coincidentally the same year Google was launched) by two philosophers and cognitive scientists, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, in a now famous journal article, The Extended Mind. Before their work, the standard answer among scientists was to say that the mind stopped at the boundaries of skin and skull (roughly, the boundaries of the brain and nervous system).

But Clark and Chalmers proposed a more radical answer. They argued that when we integrate things from the external environment into our thinking processes, those external things play the same cognitive role as our brains do. As a result, they are just as much a part of our minds as neurons and synapses. Clark and Chalmers’ argument produced debate, but many other experts on the mind have since agreed.
 

Our minds are linked with Google

Clark and Chalmers were writing before the advent of smartphones and 4G internet, and their illustrative examples were somewhat fanciful. They involved, for instance, a man who integrated a notebook into his everyday life that served as an external memory. But as recent work has made clear, the extended mind thesis bears directly on our obsession with smartphones and other devices connected to the web.

Growing numbers of us are now locked into our smartphones from morning until night. Using Google’s services (search engine, calendar, maps, documents, photo assistant and so on) has become second nature. Our cognitive integration with Google is a reality. Our minds literally lie partly on Google’s servers.

Extra memory. Shutterstock

But does this matter? It does, for two major reasons.

First, Google is not a mere passive cognitive tool. Google’s latest upgrades, powered by AI and machine learning, are all about suggestions. Google Maps not only tells us how to get where we want to go (on foot, by car or by public transport), but now gives us personalised location suggestions that it thinks will interest us.

Google Assistant, always just two words away (“Hey Google”), now not only provides us with quick information, but can even book appointments for us and make restaurant reservations.

Gmail now makes suggestions about what we want to type. And Google News now pushes stories that it thinks are relevant to us, personally. But all of this removes the very need to think and make decisions for ourselves. Google – again I stress, literally – fills gaps in our cognitive processes, and so fills gaps in our minds. And so mental privacy and the ability to think freely are both eroded.
 

Addiction or integration?

Second, it doesn’t seem to be good for our minds to be spread across the internet. A growing cause for concern is so-called “smartphone addiction”, no longer an uncommon problem. According to recent reports, the average UK smartphone user checks his phone every 12 minutes. There are a whole host of bad psychological effects this could have that we are only just beginning to appreciate, depression and anxiety being the two most prominent.

But the word “addiction” here, in my view, is just another word for the integration I mentioned above. The reason why so many of us find it so hard to put our smartphones down, it seems to me, is that we have integrated their use into our everyday cognitive processes. We literally think by using them, and so it is no wonder it is hard to stop using them. To have one’s smartphone suddenly taken away is akin to having a lobotomy. Instead, to break the addiction/integration and regain our mental health, we must learn to think differently, and to reclaim our minds.

Benjamin Curtis, Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics, Nottingham Trent University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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