Negotiating truth

Search engines used to help us find what to believe. Now they tell us.

There was a time (not so long ago…) when researching something meant sitting down and figuring it out.

You’d open a few tabs, compare headlines and try to piece together what seemed credible.

It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. You weren’t just searching for information, you were learning how to judge it.

Now the answer shows up at the top.

We don’t navigate information anymore.
We negotiate truth.

And like any negotiation, the outcome doesn’t just depend on what is said. It also depends on how it’s delivered.

I’m Nate Sowder, and this is unquoted, installment 9. It’s on Harold Innis and how his forgotten idea about media bias can help us understand why search has become a negotiation for truth.

How delivery shapes belief

In the mid-1900s, Harold Innis was studying why some forms of knowledge last a long time and others disappear quickly. His answer: the way information is delivered carries a bias.

What he called media bias wasn’t what you would think of as being political. Instead, this was structural. Every medium (or delivery method) tilts truth in a particular direction. Innis divided this communication into two types:

• Time-biased media like stone tablets, clay, and oral tradition: durable, slow to produce, hard to distribute. Designed to preserve memory across generations.
  They were costly to create, so what made it into stone was meant to last.
• Space-biased media like paper, newspapers and radio: fast, scalable, and easy to spread. Great for moving information across distance. The tradeoff is that the information is easy to forget.

Each method has different consequences if you’re wrong. You definitely don’t want to carve a mistake in stone. But you’ll toss an opinion on the radio without much hesitation.

Innis believed civilizations leans one way or the other. The problem is when they lean too far, things start to crack. For instance, the more a culture chases speed, the more it sacrifices memory.

That worried him, because when speed becomes the goal, friction disappears. And when friction disappears, belief forms too easily.

When that happens, people start believing things without remembering why. Information flies everywhere, and everyone believes a little bit of everything, but nothing deeply enough to sustain conviction, trust, or memory.

Which brings us to the delivery method shaping a lot of decisions today: the answer engine.

The frictionless answer

Innis taught that every medium tilts truth by setting the cost of being wrong (back to the idea that stone carried a level of permanence).

Answer engines flipped that equation. They’re fast, free, available and project absolute confidence… while carrying almost zero accountability.

That’s the bias of the delivery system we live with now: it produces answers that look like truth but are endlessly changeable.

Uh-oh.

That mismatch matters. It’s not just a technology problem, and it’s deeply philosophical.

Truth as a system

Truth has always carried signals about how seriously to take it. I think about how headlines hint at urgency or a broadcast voice carries authority. Even a blog post tells you something about the author behind it.

Answer engines strip that information away. What’s left is a paragraph that’s floating above information that is constantly shifting around.

That’s why I think negotiation is the right metaphor. We aren’t testing competing claims anymore. We’re reacting to how the system delivers them. If it looks fine, we believe it.

Innis understood that the way information is delivered is more important than the content. It sets the probability of belief.

When answers are this easy to generate, its the delivery method that convinces us, not the accuracy of the information. Over time, we stop asking whether something is true and start assuming it must be… because it looked complete when it showed up.

The context problem

So we arrive at the issue brands are actually facing.

Brands assume the challenge is volume. Publish more, post more… rank more. But the challenge isn’t content. It’s context.

Most brands are still playing an old game… chasing backlinks, tweaking keywords, and pumping out pages to satisfy algorithms that ranked links instead of resolving questions.

That used to work… when brands controlled the narrative. When it paid to write carefully sanitized copy that sounded official, without saying anything useful. When brands do that now, they don’t look like they’re being careful. They look evasive.

But now that same content gets torn apart, summarized, and served out of context.

This is an answer-first world. You can be right and still not be trusted.

That’s another paradox: trust now lives even further downstream from your content. It’s perceived by the reader only after they’ve read what the answer engine tore apart.

What we build from here

If search is now a negotiation, brands can’t keep showing up the old way.

Publishing more just to publish more doesn’t make brands more believable. (You can look at stats on your content if you don’t believe me.)

Instead, I think brands need to work on understanding customer friction, offering context, and helping people weigh what to believe… even when the answer isn’t perfect. That’s how you build trust with your customer.

Take financial services (where I spend my time).

Most banks write content to align with their own products and services. But answer engines aren’t asking what helps the brand. They’re asking what helps the reader.

So if you’re writing a piece called “What should Gen Z do with their tax return?”, and every answer just funnels them toward your checking account, you’ve already lost. Not because your product is bad… but because your answer wasn’t complete.

I think this will be the difference. Some will try to control the story and shape the narrative, while the winners will help people understand their options — even if one of them doesn’t benefit them directly.

Harold Innis warned us: When speed becomes the goal, memory becomes a casualty. Answer engines are fast, but if they erase the process of belief-building, trust doesn’t scale with them.

The organizations that adapt will realize that truth isn’t something you publish once and forget. It’s something you shape, over and over, in the ways your words and products survive being summarized.

In the long run, what people believe isn’t decided by what ranked. It’s decided by what held up.

Negotiating truth was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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