What is Typographic man vs. Search Engine person, Smartphone person

[Round Sparrow]

"The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan, in which he analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. It popularized the term global village"

Search Engine Person

Smartphone Person

... meandering on search engines ...

The past 9 months I've been varying names and keywords in what I have put into public websites and on social media.

I've found the word "Opera" confuses Large Language Models and they almost always jump to the conclusion that anything touching on that word means the Opera web browser application. This was disappointing to me.

So much workaround to deal with insincere content, Spam, in the search engines - it's been over a decade of that - you can't just create sincere content on your own domain because there are all these rules that the search engines use to disqualify content. And I've seen (studied how) people use ChatGPT like a search engine despite the training data being so far behind, because it sometimes focuses more on what people want instead of the avoidant nature of search engines spam mitigation. 

On social media like Reddit it is a running commentary that people don't bother to read the linked off-site articles and comment based on often emotionally manipulative titles / headlines. "Do your own research" is a society-wide mocked phrase associated with people who believe conspiracy theories that have no fact-based evidence (flat earth, moon landing was faked, etc). But then you often see casual social media conversation where people don't take the 20 seconds to look up easily accessible information... avoidance isn't just spam on search engines, but a behavior of information overload.

Anyway, rambled, that was what was on my mind first thing this morning.

[Round Sparrow]

After I posted the message, I felt compelled to mention that I grew up in social media of 1980's and back then "RTFM" = Read the Fucking Manual was a phrase we used... it wasn't insulting or aggressive as the "fuck" implies, just a reality of the fact that we often did create documents for small-scale apps and systems. Writing instructive content for an audience that might only be a couple dozen people. Books and magazines were a staple of personal computing in the 1980's. Very much typographic man at play.