sapientia ex machina

Google is transforming the way we watch a political debate.  This Google Blog post demonstrates how viewers of the VP debate earlier this month made Google searches like “clean coal” and “define:maverick” spike as candidates spoke.  Without question, these viewers are experiencing something much richer than what would have been possible fifteen years ago.

But why stop there?  Why not a service that analyzes this kind of real-time, viewer-supplied data, selects the most interesting bits, and then displays it?  It would function both as a real-time fact-checker and a window into audience’s reactions.

Lots of people already live-blog these things; it would be easy to get several thousand people to submit their questions and search results to a server, using a standardized interface.  The software then just aggregates, organizes, and presents the results.  Volunteers who try to game the system would be shut out with Digg-style, community-driven user ratings.  If Google would make its real-time query data available, that’d be added, too, significantly broadening the sample’s relevance.

The exciting part comes when this user-created input—both information about facts and people’s more general reaction to what they’re hearing—is presented to the the debate audience and the debaters themselves in real time (via a big display in the venue, for instance.)  For one thing,  the audience and debaters would immediately know of factual errors or half-truths, and have easy access to cited sources.  This would work for relatively picky things, like the pronunciation of someone’s name, but also for more substantive problems in responses; imagine how much answers would improve if the debaters knew they might have to stand next to an 8-foot-high rendering of, “40 million Americans think you just dodged the question.”

But also, the tool could act in more positive ways.  The candidates would immediately know the reactions of a national audience had about what they say–what the audience was interested in, confused about, or skeptical about.  If 80% of people want to hear more about the differences in candidates’ economic plan, they probably will.  You would have a truly participatory, interactive town-hall meeting of sixty million people.   Techniques like this are already beginning to surface in education, with tools like classroom clickers and “google jockying.”  Could they raise the level and relevancy of national politics?

Note: oops, accidentally published this sans links.  fixed now.