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The Impatience of the Google Generation
profBill writes "As a fifty-something professor who teaches introductory computer science, I am very aware that the twenty-somethings in my class are much more at ease with computers than any other generation. However, does that mean they are more adept at using those computers? Apparently not, according to the researchers at University College London. Their research indicates that while more adept at conducting searches, younger users also show 'impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs'. Moreover, these traits 'are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors'. The panel makes two conclusions: That libraries (and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway) will have to adapt, and that the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking. Why are those skills lacking and, if they are, what can be done about it?"
It doesn't make sense to compare libraries to computer searches because the two haven't been around for the same amount of time. Computer searches as a skill has only had maybe a decade or two to develop while the concept of a library has had generations to develop. Kids these days simply give up thinking the result isn't there if the search query they entered wasn't giving the result they expected. This is a very obvious scenario when you realize most people (including the 90's generation) doesn't really know correct search syntax. Western education has also not cought-up with a correct method of teaching this vital skill either. This is the result. It will fix itself with time.
One of the major problems here is that students are used to being able to Google "mitigating factors in murder" and get a nice website with clean design which provides them with the history and current state of the topic, all in a single easy-to-use package.
In contrast, academic articles are usually much narrower in scope than your average webpage and require much more reading and time before an understanding of the subject can be cultivated. Of course, the benefit of using academic articles is that after having read a dozen of them, a student will have a much better and more balanced understanding of a subject than they would have if they'd just gone to Crazy Bob's Information Hut.
When I peer-review papers (I'm currently in law school), it's very obvious which students started their research with academic sources, and which started on Google. The problem can be quickly solved by professors taking the approach seen at my institution: students failing to have in-depth research on the topic get poor marks.
Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.
I don't feel myself to be a part of whatever generation the journalists want to refer to this week. I use Google, but I also read books. I use Facebook, but I also meet up with friends.
Can't we just use the technology available to us, without being branded with the [Insert Keyword] Generation tag?
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
One of the biggest problems of being able to type in a question and have an answer (or sorts) fired back seconds later is that you become very used to dealing facts but are in danger of lacking understanding.
Back when we relied more on books, you'd often go through several books and many pages looking for something and along the way see all manner of peripheral information on the subject which over time builds in to a much broader grasp of the subject and a better basis for joining the dots and developing understanding.
I suspect that in the unlikely event that the web disappeared overnight, we'd have a whole generation or two of apparantly 'smart' people floundering badly.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Kids may be much more at ease with computers than their parents, simply because they grew up with them, but they certainly aren't any more competent when it comes to using them. Most of my younger brother's friends (19-21 age range) struggle to do anything more than use email, Word, IM and MySpace/Facebook with a computer.
They like using computers, they're certainly not afraid of computers (like some people are), but they don't have any desire to learn how to use a computer beyond simple tasks (and they certainly don't have the patience to most of the time).
Blogs, google-bombing advertisers, dead sites taken over by domain squatters, broken links, inaccurate wiki's... It's becoming increasingly more difficult to find good information online. Perhaps this is why the tolerance for delay and reliance on search engines is increasing across the board. (not just in them whipper-snappers!) With a lower signal to noise ratio you have to churn through more material to get what you want. That means investing less time in avenues that don't pay off fast and using search engines to avoid tedious mucking about with links that are broken as often as not. The evolution of search engines is about the only thing that is helping to combat the decreasing SNR of the web. Try searching for something specific and imagine what it would be like if you had to go back to using Lycos circa 1998!
That being said, ease of searching is just one of the many reasons why libraries should be digitizing their collections. How many times have you found a book that looked absolutely perfect for what you're doing, only to find that it's loaned out, damaged or defaced, returned but not reshelved, lost, etc.. Also, it's just plain more convenient to be able to pull up some text from the comfort of your couch rather than trekking into the library. That convenience adds up if it's something you access regularly. e.g. Who goes to the library to read paper journals these days?
and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway
Probably they will change into (back into) the original model provided by the great library of Alexandria. That institution held books (ok, scrolls), but was primarily a place of teaching, effectively its role was what we now see as the role of a university.
Libraries only became dull(yes, dull) with the advent of the new breed of privately funded library in the eighteenth century (I omit centuries of Islamic libraries, I know little of them, other then they were active and very full). Certainly this was the case in England, and I'm pretty sure the US has its share of privately initiated libraries. Those libraries were focused heavily on the collection of knowledge, and did indeed help many people learn new things, but the visitor was expected to remain solemnly quiet, to absorb the information and depart, not disturbing others engaged in the ritual of learning.
Pretty boring stuff for a great proportion of the population (not me, I like libraries, but I'm not talking about myself). Information does not do well sat in books, it needs to be experienced, talked about, it should 'live'. That was Micheal Faraday's idea, and he gave weekly science lectures as well as doing science, inspiring many to seek further knowledge. The Internet brings us some measure of liveness for our information as well, which stimulates interest, but for the most part its short term. You find what you want, or don't, and move on fast.
A library should include the Internet, and books, but also staff who teach, providing some means of focusing people on the knowledge that they have become however fleetingly interested in. Without that you're unlikely to have a library that does anything but collect dust and books.
There is an entirely different method to conducting research that many people are taught in schools these days, It's all about trying to use time as efficiently as possible although there is a definite trade off when it comes to quality and reliability of information.
Find your chosen subject in wikipedia, open all of the sources and briefly scan them while following links to their sources. Within minutes you have a plethora of information at your fingertips. For many students this is enough to provide all they need on their chosen topic. For the more dedicated few it will provide references to books which they will go to the library to browse.
The benefit of this is that assignments take much less time and a wider range of information is available, however there are many disadvantages. Patience is a valuable skill which is being eroded and much less is learned by just searching through a page for relevant words. When having to trawl through books or interviewing people there is much deeper context that it is almost impossible to ignore.
When someone can easily write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of in one night and still get an A, there is a big problem.
To be honest, the elitism of knowledge is falling apart.
/Of course/ this will draw a lot of trash from people who've spent their whole lives learning and studying the "old way".
Old profs that have taken a long degree, where half the time it wasn't really the understanding of the subject that made it hard - but simply gathering the information in the first place and then processing it; aren't too keen about all of it suddenly being as common knowledge as anything else.
A lot of people love (as an example) wikipedia. A lot of profs love wikipedia. Quite a few hate the fact that it's making knowledge less restricted, and less potentially "streamlined" into one 'channel' that everyone has to go through to get it.
It isn't really an issue.
People aren't learning less, they're learning more. They're not anymore impatient about it than any other generation that was faced with unecessarily increased "downtime" of any sort.
This, what we're seeing now, is essentially an evolutionary step in knowledge, learning and sharing.
The new generation simply isn't stuck with the same crap the elder generations were, and they're gonna be damned if they'll be forced to "slow down" when there is no need to.
Kids today, growing up, can learn pretty much anything about everything without ever having to expend a resource other than their time and their minds attention.
The first obvious note to make is that this is an article about how the behavior of students doing academic research, which is why the reference to google, besides being trendy, might be a little off the mark. I think a good deal of google searches are for simple pieces of data (the phone number of the nearest Chinese restaurant), not for serious research purpose. Even wikipedia is generally consulted for simple facts (what is the population of Montreal?) rather than research as such.
The main point is, I think that students naturally become impatient when dealing with data, because there is so much out there. I certainly do. But there is a big difference between how data and knowledge are gained. If I am dealing, say, with a glossy pdf full of buzzwords and generalities, I will gloss over it impatiently. If I find something that is full of actual knowledge, and concepts that aren't described in bullet points, I can be very patient while reading it.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
If I'm wrong, please correct me ; learning is better than being right.
I guess these social scientist types derive their funding from trying to map distinctions upon each generation.
The next generation is still people, at least until the biochemists succeed in making substantial tweaks to the DNA.
OK, they're impatient. OK, they have some motor skill advantage from years of video games. Whoopee. Reality will temper the new generation far more than the generation tempers reality.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
1) Young people have always been impatient.
2) The acceptable delay depends on expectations, which again depends on what the norm is.
When access to information becomes faster, people also expect access to information to be faster (duh!), and are thus less tolerant of delays, even if the delays are within what used to be the norm.
These changing norms affects younger people faster than older people, as younger people have less mental baggage to carry around.
Oh, and bonus point:
3) Books are technically obsolete for looking stuff up. They are still excellent for a more in depth study of a subject.
Well, I'm just doing my master, but for my work (International Relations), they both have their value. Let's say that you are writing about the Nixon's establishment of diplomatic relations with China. You can use google and wikipedia to get an overview of opinions on the subject in the initial stages of your research, and then for fact checking later (when did the Ping-Pong team return to the States again?). Indeed, the skill to do this kind of searching is wide both spread and indispensable in modern academia.
However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries (or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries) are essential. If you want to understand why things happened instead of establishing a simple chronology, you have to read Kissinger's books and memoirs, you have to read public records, you have to read contemporary journalism. It is also very helpful to read other scholars' interpretations, both in their books and journals.
Obviously, there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet, but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem here.
The problem this professor is pointing out is that people lack the ability to do this second part and go beyond the superficial because the nature of those works means that interpreting them is long and tedious and requires an attention span longer than 3 seconds. Even if digitized, you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
So, the GP is right, IMHO, we need both theses skill sets.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
In other words, Google searches are more efficient that looking it up in a book. Better targeting is a good thing. If you want general information about a topic, you look it up on Wikipedia, if you want specific information about a very precise topic, you Google it (using Google Scholar if appropriate). Books have their purposes, but finding an answer to a question isn't one of them - the net is much better for that.
You're being ignorant or silly. It's not possible to find "all of the available" information on any topic, and much less to be -certain- that you've found it all. Not even for tiny, specialised subjects. For larger more complex subjects, you can easily find enough information that you'd spend 10 lifetimes just reading trough it once, nevermind critically assess and synthesise anything whatsoever. Then what ?
There are areas where you can get a reasonable overview -- namely those areas where we know next to nothing or that interest nobody (or both!), but that is by nessecity niche.
You can't collect, read, assess and synthesise "all available information" on Computer-Science, so you migth go more narrow and do Cryptography, but that's equally impossible. So you might go more narrow and do Diffie-Hellman. Even then you could only be certain you've found the most well-known articles and research on it, there's always going to be a risk that some student in India (say) has published a paper that includes information not found anywhere else. There's no way to tell.
Processing information has become a lost art... People don't process anymore. I see it so often with analysts, and "documentaries." They just say things and assume it is correct.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
You're wrong about that. The academic indexes are good enough that you can be certain enough not to have missed anything important. If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed. I'm not saying it's easy, and it can take months to do right. I know the model for publication in Computer Science is different to all other academic subjects so maybe it wouldn't work there, I don't really know.
There are areas where you can get a reasonable overview -- namely those areas where we know next to nothing or that interest nobody (or both!), but that is by nessecity niche.Well obviously. You only need to do this where there is a significant conflict of evidence and opinion (so you can identify where the conflicts arise), or where there isn't much evidence and it's never been collated. Otherwise Googling will work just fine.
Of course you can't review 'computer science' or 'medicine'. You have to be very specific about the question you are trying to answer. For example, you might look for information on the pattern of occurrence of a particular disease, or the effect of a particular social intervention on crime rates, or the most efficient implemenation of some algorithm. You'd maybe have to read the titles of 10000 articles, the abstracts of 1000, and the text of a hundred just to get to the four or five that will provide the important information.
You have a good point in that searching through books can help you to learn all sorts of new and slightly related things on the way to your endpoint. However, society is progressing to the point where precise targetting is far preferred to generalization. We've got entire fields that require 4+ years of intense focus on just one or two small spheres of knowledge.
If you're looking to learn all encompassingly about a subject then a book is a great way to do so. However if instead you're looking to research just one particular topic within a subject or get a refresher a book is rather inefficient. Targetting allows very quick knowledge acquisition which allows us to become more efficient to focus on other tasks. Researching being faster just means you can get more work done, in essence.
> Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library
> and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
> I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my
> research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
"Doing your PhD" is still school, which is an artificially protected environment for the student in some ways. In school, the problems you are asked to solve in your classes are almost always problems someone else has solved, and you can -research- the solution.
In the larger scope of the working world, many people find themselves tasked with solving real problems, that -no one has ever solved before-. You find yourself dealing with frustrating unknowns that cannot be dealt with using search engines in 10 minutes, or -ever-. The solutions are not there to find.
Many of us in the working world deal with people who -can't- do anything other than "look it up on Google". Junior programmers, especially, who can't solve a problem unless they can swipe a code snippet from the web. Some of these eventually learn to poke randomly at the code till they find something that "sorta works".
But they lack the patience and the mental disciplines needed to sit down and really work out a problem. And this isn't just in the computer tech fields. It's at all levels of business, management, and science.
I've spoken to nurses and doctors who say the same things about some younger medical professionals; many of them lack the mential disciplines to diagnose problems. They're reduced to trying to look things up on Google and Wikipedia, and eventually give drugs randomly to trusting human patients.
> I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.
Fine; but what do you do when the information -needs- to be found; not by searching musty stacks of books, but by dissection of the problem and analysis of the elements that compose it?
Who knew?
Let me get my permanent marker. I have to right that one down for posterity.
I bet, if enough research was done, we'd find out they're horny, too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
By that standard, then we should also throw out the card catalog, because it might be too efficient at helping me find what I'm looking for. Let's go back to the old system I call "throw all the books on the floor and pick one at random". I bet you find all kinds of interesting information you don't need.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat it: there's a difference between the skill of searching and the search medium. Google (or another more field-apropriate search engine), used well, is a starting point - it will be much better than non-online searches. Once you find something promising, following references in the article you're reading will probably be more fruitful. Just like in the old times.
If the cranky old farts who are complaining had bothered to ask younger but somewhat accomplished researchers how they work, I bet that would be the usual system. It's what I do. I'm 30 and am in the age group that spanned the digitization of search - I'm familiar with traditional search methods. For the most part, they suck. I also have pretty good Google-fu skills, and I know that playing keyword soup all day only gets you so far. I use search engines to find a useful paper, and then use its references to find others. This method did just fine for my Ph.D. research, and now it's working for me as a professional.
Don't forget that many google searches lead to a book.
What needs to be taught is good research skills. Google is a good first step in well-researching something, and dependent upon someone's needs it may be the only step required.
In some ways google makes things harder to teach good research skills because google really is that good. Thus a teacher wanting to make a student do hard research must give that student a more difficult assignment to make them go off of google.
Exactly. Throw some curveballs that require deeper research than just a precursory Google search, and maybe we'll get somewhere. This is a wonderful time to be training a young researcher -- because of the wealth of information out there, and how quickly so much of it can be acquired, the bar can be raised higher than ever before. Weren't computers supposed to be making us smarter, anyway? For me, at least, most of my college papers could be written with Google Scholar, except for one particular professor I had, who made his assignments so damn hard I actually had to Google and (GASP!) read some books. For that, I'm eternally grateful.
Also, I'm mad as hell someone already took my "tldr" line.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I feel like I'm more capable of absorbing large amounts of information from diverse sources than the last generation. I grew up with Google, though. Wikipedia has been around since I was about 15. Then there's IRC, Usenet, all of the forums filled with would-be experts and complete logs of conversations about more or less anything you can imagine...
;)
As a 34 year old, I feel like you're attention span has been affected by the availability of large amounts of information from diverse sources. This is driven mostly by the ability to absorb all information instead of putting the effort into filtering it for just the important stuff. It has the end effect of making you knowledgeable but not wise; there is almost no context to your knowledge that gives you a focused way of applying it.
That doesn't mean you're not smart or capable, but it makes it a challenge for my generation to communicate about very specific things with your generation. You may think I'm limited... I may think you're scatter-brained.
What we REALLY need to do, however, is find a way to join forces and topple the 50+ year olds who own all the CXO jobs.
The problem with this approach is that you can't predict the future. You don't know if some piece of your education could come in handy in the future, and by the time realization hits it could be far too late. Having a narrow understanding of the topics you're interested in makes you 1) very reliant on your source of information, 2) unable to solve permutations of problems that you've solved before. The good side of this is that you're able to pick up new things quickly.
That 1% of the time when you *do* need to know? That's when natural selection really kicks in. That 40 year old guy that you make fun of for writing checks instead of using a debit card? He's going to outperform you 10 to 1 in an unpredictable environment, because he's self reliant. He'll get paid more, have better sex, and survive more tough situations because he can adapt to what life throws at him.
I feel like I'm more capable of absorbing large amounts of information from diverse sources than the last generation.
That feeling comes from your inexperience. Your generation is no different than mine was when I was your age, and mine is no different from Ben Franklin's generation. The world has changed much, but people have changed little. Why did my grandfather's generation (he was born in 1896) call young folks "whippersnappers?" Because the young generation was always impatient. Back in the horse and buggy days, the way to get speed out of your transportation was to snap a whip, making the horse run faster.
Every generation of 21 year olds think its generation is different from the previous one. Every generation of 21 year olds is wrong.
-mcgrew
(PS- your generation is lousy in bed)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Then there is the cross-discipline problem. In a field such as cognitive psych, useful material can be squirreled away in pretty much any journal from the sciences or the humanities. How good is that index, really?
The more original your thesis, the less likely your useful sources are the top scoop in the peer review catalog system. The "peer review" bucket is a form of insularity, but somehow most scholars within the system manage to convince themselves that nothing from the barbarian sphere is much worthy of consideration.
This distinction would be much clearer if the world had adopted the practice that all peer review articles are published in Latin. And then when some stooped-backed doctoral acolyte pops his badly shaven head out of an ivory tower and proclaims (in Latin) that every road leads to Rome, it would be plainly evident what kind of world that person is living in.
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You are taking my statement out of context.
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You are using that misquote to build a straw man argument.
Allow me to explain:The words those three dots replace entirely change the meaning of that sentence. Look at what those three dots replace: or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries Clearly, I am not talking about the libraries per se, I am talking about the ability to read and understand complex and credible sources.
You then use that misquote to suggest that my argument is that all digital sources are superficial, which is obviously an untenable position (the straw man). That is not my argument, which is clear from the rest of the post. I mentioned later regarding digitizing information: there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet,but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem [is] here.
...you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it. To clarify, obviously whether you read on a screen or a dead tree is irrelevant beyond personal preference. Digitizing can in fact really help the diffusion of information. However, the ability to actually read the material is what is at stake here and that is the skill I am talking about. I still maintain that this is necessary to go beyond the superficial.
Anyway, have a good one.
-mat
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Isn't impatience and lack of appreciation something that EVERY generation attributes to the next?
Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving to where you can't find them.
There are 4 stages to understanding something:
If you're at stage 2-4, then it can be extremely frustring to run into someone at stage 1, because usually such people are like a cup that's completely full. No room for anything.
Do you really think a prof (probably at stage 2-4) is afraid that they'll be made redundent by google, or is more like they're annoyed by idiots at stage 1 who think they've got everything worked out already.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Let me get this straight. Imagine someone looking for specific documented information regarding their . They search google. They visit a site. They quickly scan the site. They don't see clues that specific information is located on that site (for right now, assume it is). The user leaves the site, goes back to google, and looks at the next promising linked site.
So explain to me why is this the fault of the user for abandoning the site? Sounds to me like the kids have it right on. Don't make excuses for websites. Not for their navigation, taxonomy, folksonomy, whatever. Especially so when there are millions of other sites trying to serve me that same content.
Note: Bonus points goes to people that understands that not making excuses for systems is the meta answer
I fail to see how this is a problem. Everyone decries the lack of attention span and impatience in the 'younger generation' but so what? My speech coach always said when making a speech you have to make your point quickly and succinctly or people will stop listening. This wasn't tragic - it was appropriate. Everyone's time is money and no one has the right to any more of it than they can justify. No one has the right to demand you listen to their useless words until they deign to get around to the point. This has been the case FOREVER, not just recently. With respect to finding information Google has spoiled us by DOING THINGS RIGHT. There is no reason nowadays that information should be hard to find - it signals laziness or stubbornness on the part of the person with access to the information. Look at realty. Your realtor does a lot of good things, but what he or she SHOULDN'T do is search databases endlessly for a house, trying minutely different queries and guessing what certain phrases mean and calling people to get the 'real' information. If the people selling a house want to put it in a database but then 'tweak' the listing so a professional has to read it to make any sense of it and fool people into thinking the house is better than it is, that's wrong. Plain and simple. The amount of information we deal with on a daily basis is quickly balooning out of human scope. We NEED computers to do the work for us and the technology is here. It is laziness to not implement these features with the TOOLS ALREADY AT HAND. Bottom line: Nowadays if information isn't indexed, searchable and quickly at hand then it's not right to fault the people whose time is wasted for being 'impatient' and 'demanding'. The technology is here: use it.
http://angryee.blogspot.com
Sorry. Your confidence in the academic indexes is too high.
True; they will contain everything that is -ALREADY- recognized as being important. But that doesn't help you much; that just tells you the stuff that the scientific community already agrees is important.
Much more interesting is the stuff that -IS- important, but which isn't recognized as such yet. That can be so for a multitude of reasons ranging from plain misunderstanding and to the work not yet being read by anyone with enough expertise to recognize the importance. Notice: *before* the importance is recognized, the experts have no reason to read the work, much less if reading it would require getting it translated first.
You'll get *most* of the important stuff *most* of the time.
But that's a VERY different statement from: Being *CERTAIN* that you've got *EVERYTHING* important.
Your opinions are based on an expertly demonstrated misunderstanding (or possibly outdated understanding) of the system as it current stands. I cannot sufficiently communicate how distressed I am that the public perception of the academic system is the way it is. My comments on here have generally been replied to by people with only a peripheral understanding of how academic publication works, and with a lot of hostility, possibly fuelled by a single unfortunate encounter with a journal editor at some point in the past. I don't know where the suspicion for academics comes from. We're not in it for the money, I could earn three times as much as I do working for a pharmaceutical company somewhere. Most of us never get any public recognition. Most of us do what we do because it's interesting, and we like finding out stuff, and sharing our findings with the world. The ultimate reward in my group is some kind of public dissemination of our findings, or a positive policy change that comes out of something we do.
The very fact that my comments, coming from a position of actual knowledge and experience can be refuted with, and I chose the word carefully, lies, and those lies be highly rated by people who want to believe them and don't know any better, confirms my view that a more rigorous system of arbitration needs to be in place in this world where anybody can post anything and the layman in his ignorance is expected to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I include myself as an ignorant layman when it comes to any area outside of my expertise. I want to be able to find information that has been vetted by people who know what's what, not stuff that's highly ranked because it's good emotive rhetoric (see the parent post - paedophile priests, good analogy), or is confirming somebody else's prejudices.
For example, despite all our efforts, and the mountain of evidence to the contrary, there are still people who write that MMR causes autism, or that smoking prevents AD (recently modded 5 informative on Slashdot no less). Neither of these things is true. But of course nobody listens to us, because we're boring, and are cautious not sensationalist.
Peer review has far more to do with the arbitration of career advancement than quality control over factual content. Much like the Vatican, which can't even toss out a pedophile from among the shepherdship, at least not until their coffers were crucified by rattus legalis.
Not when I do it, it isn't. I'm personally offended by that statement. I review a lot of things, and 90% of the time I don't know and cannot guess who has written them. I judge articles for quality and for relevance. Badly executed research I send back, badly written or badly interpreted research I try to help with.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
Your right, the system is crumbling - and we'll be much poorer for it. For example the vast amounts of unsupported gibberish being published by political groups in the UK and the US is leading to policy shifts in favour of screening for many diseases, despite a medical consensus that it is not needed and is potentially harmful. None of this crap has gone through peer review by epidemiologists or research clinicians, but the press love it, and the politicians see votes, and the mob demand it on radio phone in shows, so it is done. Research clinicians can only look on and weep as the carefully collected and controlled evidence is tossed aside in favour of some fervent blogger who dem