Anxiety alleviation rituals are not knowledge production
Short reflection after reading: For my son, I’ve ceased to be the font of all useful knowledge from the Grauniad.
Do some research
The term 'research' is always misused as to refer to 'the collection of information to make or inform a decision or action'. When I am asked to put together a business case for a new tool at work, or decide where we ought to go for dinner next Tuesday, I suggest that "I do some research on the subject". Of course this is not what research is; Research is the systematised work that aims to contribute to the stock of human knowledge.
When we say "The stock of human knowledge", we certainly don't mean the bits of it you or I have experiential access to, we mean holistically and totally, totting up the knowledge that anybody and everybody has access too. If somebody knows about it already, then you are not doing research to find that information, you are just retrieving that information and making it known to yourself - further to the 'research' that produced it as knowledge.
Research is the process for a system of knowledge production, not the mechanism by which we make knowledge that exists available to ourselves. The use of the term research interchangeably with the action of information retrieval is symptomatic of a society that has a mostly individualised and individualising relationship with their information systems, where you equate what is known and knowable with what you (as an individual) know and can know.
Digitalising how to know, providing what to know
The constant mix up on the term research is an insight into the lack of clear demarcation of research and information-retrieval in what we could consider the 'common sense'. In truth, the processes of research and the scientific method are our socio-cultural machine for 'How to know' something, with the resultant information produced being 'What to know'.
Consumer electronics such as our kitchen-listener friend Alexa invite us to hand over our ownership of access to that mechanism of 'How to know' something to the Amazon Web Service; "Doing your own research" is now the act of submitting an information request to one of any number of monopolists who aggregate and present data (selectively and in order of what is best for their advertising partners), and presenting that process as the effective mechanism for 'How to know something'.
Further still the AI 'revolution' changes the landscape for users, with AI-powered summaries now ingesting multiple sources to produce an approximate summary of results (Google's new Generative AI search results and Notebook LLM as relevant examples). What remnants there may have been of the behaviour to investigate and fully explore various sites or perspectives (Which is still not a true research method, but is designed to approximate one) is disincentivised - with your review of resources now automated, you get the information you need and a list of "sources" to the right. 'How to know' is obsolete, all praise 'What to know'.
The true mechanism of critical engagement and integrity of due process melt away into an anxious state of being for any participant of this new way of being and knowing; where knowing is not a habit of reflection or commitment to a process, but instead the perceived ability to - at any time, dip into the resource bank and access the offered information. Equally, to not know - is now simply to not be able to check your understanding of things against the relevant tool - a phone, a smart speaker, a search engine. Behaviourally, this leaves us with access to what we want to know, but no sense of authorship over the process that produced our understanding. Our relationship to this type of knowledge is an anxious one, where we defer from our faculties for learning and understanding, and foster a faith-based relationship to information.
These are the digital information systems that people will use by default if subjected to broken-by-design devices that work to commodify knowledge and it's access as data. It is profitable for providers to produce a relationship to knowledge that is owned and tended to by the devices they market as the true mechanism for how to know something.
The jettison of the need to have an explanatory, critical relationship with information is underway. It is systematised as normal and efficient to prioritise finding out "What you need to know", with any process obsolete and time-consuming. Is it surprising that in this new world, a curious six year old may decide that it's easier to skip the back-and-forth questioning with Dad, and simply get what he "needs to know" from the apparently superior source and digital childminder - Amazon.com Inc?