We don’t often give much attention to a lot of things that happen around us though we’re aware of them. And when we do, we overreact. A similar thing happened to me this morning.
It’s the weekend, and I’m with my writing partner, Phoka, brainstorming on a sci-fi concept about Artificial Intelligence altering our past. We’re discussing if Neuralink will rule our minds and big techs completely control our lives in the future; what if a radical left chief programmer/engineer — who’s upset with the facts about how humans evolved — decides to feed us a different past? After about an hour, after wasting time on bizarre speculations, we decided to refer to great stories from the past. So we Googled the books we know.
Surprise, surprise! You don’t find some books that easily.
Yes, some great, original books from the past don’t rank where they should on the search engine results page. Instead, their dull movie adaptations are everywhere. Why? Because the search engines know the movie adaptations better than the masterpieces they destroyed. I don’t think I need to mention the original stories and their movie adaptations here (you can Google if you wish), but from a broad perspective, how the digital world operates kind of concerned me. After all, we’re living in the digital age.
Books being less visible than their movie adaptations may not be a big deal, given that people who know the originals will find them anyways. But if you think beyond fiction and examine how the (digital) world operates, you’ll notice search engines don’t actually entertain the facts but the best-optimized content. And people can be misguided. Phoka and I, though we disagree politically, now agree that feeding our future generation with an altered past won’t be a big deal. Therefore, the idea (of the sci-fi short story) already seems dull.
Why am I sharing it, though? I’m sharing it because I love SEO. My professional life is incomplete without SEO and my colleagues, who work hard every day to help people grow through its power. Like I mentioned in the beginning, I overreacted to know that SEO can be an excellent tool for misinformation — something I kinda knew for a while but didn’t give much attention to. But it also acquainted me with the possibilities of this fantastic tool.
We often instantly notice the dark side of things and rush to vilify them. Shouldn’t we focus on the water in the glass instead of the empty space that offers nothing? If a terrible movie can make a strong presence in the digital world, your outstanding idea can definitely do. You only need to adapt to the trend. The digital world may operate differently in the future, but if we want to run it our way, we should evolve and be responsible for our actions. If we stop being poor creatures who blame others for everything that goes wrong with the world, the world will definitely work the way we want.
Michael Ghimire 