“I’ve researched a couple of stories online, Dunkirk being the most obvious example, and you start to recognize the language that’s been cut and pasted from one source to another. You just hit a wall. Google are not as powerful as people think in terms of information collation. They’re more powerful than people realize in all kinds of areas, such as collecting data on your movements. They’re very good at that. But in a data search, the outcome is always limited. An interesting experiment would be to walk into a library, and go to a book, open the book at a random page, find a fact or piece of information, write it down. Do that ten times, and then go online and see how many of those ten you can find. Our feeling is that 90 percent of the information is online. I have a suspicion the real answer is 0.9 percent.
It would be interesting to see what averaged out if you did a larger sample, without spending your whole life doing it. I don’t think ten times is probably enough. Of course, the other aspect of that is you can look at that book, look at the bar code, see who published it, when they published it. Get some sense of their agenda. When you find facts online, it can be harder to figure out the attribution…
Maybe I’m the only one who cares about this, but we’re being controlled. Not in the archetypal paranoid way; it’s not deliberate control. It’s just another way the business model evolved; we are being fed… If you google some person, some famous person, and you get four million results, how many of those results could you access? A fraction of the advertised amount.”
— Christopher Nolan (via The Nolan Variations)