I remember being a kid in public school, I don’t know, elementary or middle school, and we had to go to the library to do little research projects. Back and forth to and from the card catalog, into the reference section, and through the nonfiction aisles of books. All we had to do was find at least three or five sources that we could reference and cite for some given research project. The librarians were a great help, sometimes. But librarians can’t be expected to know every word in every book in the entire library. No one could!
But these days somebody does, and its name is Google.
I was chatting with my brother a day or so ago, and we were discussing how damn good we are at using Google. Since we spend so much time online working and playing, we’ve pretty much mastered the search engine.
No more are the days of fiddling through old encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, and others. Now, I can generally find an answer within 10 or 20 seconds. Sometimes an answer takes five minutes. Five minutes of google research is an age, an era. It means that that piece of information was seriously buried somewhere, left to die, to never again be read or heard.
Another example, a friend swore to Tom that he wouldn’t be able to find the lyrics of a song online. This is an old traditional mountain bluegrass song, and it’s not the most popular. She swore, swore, swore that no way would he be able to find it. The result: Tom found it within 45 seconds. No trouble. No problem.
I guess my point is that our entire lives have been changed by the internets and googles. It’s just nice sometimes to actually sit back and reflect on this fact every once in a while, if for nothing more than a bit of humbling.
Loni
2008.11.13
Good article. So true. I wonder – how have the teaching techniques for research changed in public schools since Google has taken over? We can find answers to anything in mere moments! I remember in college, they taught us to use the internet only if the site was a .gov, .org, or some other bs AND how to qualify the site based on finding out who wrote the content. I wonder if the schools take time to teach kids how to effectively use Google? How to sort through the massive piles of info and crap? Probably not – since most kids are way more internet savy than their teachers. Thoughts?
Steve
2008.11.13
They probably don’t help students learn how to effectively use search engines. I’m sure they probably hint at operators like AND, OR, and NOT, but I’d be very surprised if students actually leave a course having gained an intimate understanding of how to appropriately and effectively use them.
They were big on relying only on .gov, .edu, or .org sites, but I don’t think it necessarily applies in all cases. I know when I read something from the internet, I have to rely much, much more on my natural skeptical tendencies than some TLD like .com or .org. Hopefully future generations will inherently just ‘have’ an understanding of information, what to trust, when to trust it, and so on.