I was at a car dealership with a friend last summer and the car salesman was scrolling through a huge list of car ads on a webpage trying to find the car my friend wanted to test drive. He was getting exasperated that he could not find the car and was openly lamenting how this was always such a problem for them.
I showed him how to use Ctrl F to search for the VIN number (which my friend had) and the car salesman seemed amazed. As we were leaving, he told me that he wrote that 'trick' down and plans to show it to all the others as it will save them a lot of time scrolling through pages of results. Granted, this was an older salesman (50s to 60s) but I was somewhat surprised that no one had ever taught him that or that he had never tried to figure out a better way.
As technologists, we make assumptions that don't always hold. Before this, I just assumed that everyone knew how to quickly search a webpage for text.
Tldr: Mr. Caulfield is upset that seemingly not enough people use control-F (or command-F on Macs) to quickly check whether a webpage actually says what another person linking to it claims it does.
He claims that 90% to 96% of people don’t know what control-F does; his estimate of 90% is based on the results of a survey done nearly ten years ago (one of those terrible annoying Google surveys that everyone clicks through as quickly as possible with random answers to unlock access to the webpage or video they are actually trying to view), and his estimate of 96% is based on assumptions from looking over the shoulders of his students to witness how they behave, although maybe they’re just nervous because he’s watching them and they want to look like they’re taking the material more seriously so they start reading more intently instead of “cheating” with control-F.
Regardless of whether people actually know about using control-F on websites or not, I think reliance on it for fact-checking will actually start to cause serious problems. All of these terrible Web 4.0 page scrolling hypermanagers that completely remove DOM content located outside of the current scroll view often make control-F fail to find content that is actually on the page. Reddit does this now; you need to use old.reddit.com for control-F to actually work. Twitter does this now; good luck using control-F to scroll back up to that specific tweet in a 300 tweet chain which you only remember a few words from, you can’t do it anymore. A lot of news sites do this now.
This guy has great intentions, but he himself admits that the reason that inflammatory stuff gets spread is because low-effort readers retweet or share things without clicking through and reading the actual articles. And using Ctrl+F is less effort than reading an entire article, but it's still much, much more effort than just hitting retweet. Especially if the thing you're retweeting is something that you want to boost because it reinforces your preconceptions. Why would you want to fact-check something like that?
Ctrl+F is nice, but it's definitely not gonna solve the problem he's pointing to.
I showed him how to use Ctrl F to search for the VIN number (which my friend had) and the car salesman seemed amazed. As we were leaving, he told me that he wrote that 'trick' down and plans to show it to all the others as it will save them a lot of time scrolling through pages of results. Granted, this was an older salesman (50s to 60s) but I was somewhat surprised that no one had ever taught him that or that he had never tried to figure out a better way.
As technologists, we make assumptions that don't always hold. Before this, I just assumed that everyone knew how to quickly search a webpage for text.