Ah, our trusty search engines. What would we do without them? Admittedly, I’m on The Google (to quote Pres. Bush ;) everyday. I appreciate the shortcuts it allows me, especially when I need information quickly. I also appreciate the advanced features that make searching more precise. However, I do have reservations about The Google as it makes privacy almost laughable. Anonymity seems like a thing of the past.
According to most researchers, I’m a baby boomer (born in 1964). This means that there was no Google or Yahoo or any of the other search engines when I was growing up. For my generation, television transformed our world more than any other medium. While I wasn’t allowed to sit in front of the TV for too many hours at a time (as I was an avid reader) I did have my favorite line up of shows – some including Land of the Giants, Tom Jones, Hawaii 5-o, and the Saturday horror movie line up, etc). Television would also capture the movements in the 60s and other significant events.
Today’s Net generation is too busy multitasking to be slouching in front of the television. Their very distinct relationship with technology has them going to the Internet (or, the Net) for their information. They’re all over The Google, which gives them their information immediately and they tend to watch less television and are more apt to use RSS feeds to their favorite sources.
But what effect is Google having on our mental faculties? I like to read, but notice that my attention span is shorter online. And I’m not alone. According to one study about online users, highlighted in Nicholas Carr's, article, 'Is Google Making Us Stupid’ :
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
If Google’s goal is to become the perfect search engine that “understands exactly what we mean and gives us back exactly what we want” is there something more unsettling taking place? According to Carr,
“In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed…The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.”
Like Carr, maybe I’m a worrywart, but I hope we’re not sacrificing introspection for efficiency. I like Google and other search engines and I can only hope that we’re not becoming, as playwright Richard Foreman wrote, “‘pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
