Google signs shown inside Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Monday, Oct. 27, 2008. AP Photo/Paul Sakuma
Lately, I feel as if I lack "ordinary quickness and keenness of mind.” Could it be a head cold? Lead paint? "Deal or No Deal”?
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I know. I’ll Google it. OK, there it is. I’m stupid.
Wonder what’s making me stupid. I’ll Google it. OK, there it is. Google is making me stupid.
Apparently, my brain is being replaced by a series of tubes. Instead of thinking, I just Google. And there it is. According to a smart guy who wrote a long article in the Atlantic magazine that I didn’t finish because it was too long, we’re all getting stupid because we don’t read long things anymore. We just Google and skim along the surface of information like surfer dudes and lose the ability to focus and think deeply, and did you see that video of the cat on the Roomba? Pretty stupid, huh. Gotta love YouTube.
OK, so maybe we’re becoming, as brainiac book-huggers say, just "decoders of information.” Think of all the information we’re able to decode — current weather in Namibia (93 degrees, clear, wind north at 7); dog blog photos of pets tied up on city streets; math jokes (What is the first derivative of a cow? Prime rib.) And MySpace and eBay and Netflix and mirrorproject.com, a collection of mirror photos I found by clicking on the "randomlink” at randomwebsite.com.
Because of Google, we don’t have to bother remembering or figuring or spelling or wearing socks. And we have so many more facts and so much information literally at our fingertips, maybe we’re smarter than we used to be. I mean, it’s worth something to know how juice companies reconstitute juice and that a googol is a number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeroes and that J.Lo is both a celebrity nickname and a slang stock term.
And it’s still possible to reach deep inside and generate our own original thoughts. Fortunately, we don’t have to.
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Sparky, thanks. I've always wondered how much my ex makes "working" for the state. She complains about being "underpaid" only to find she's making no less than 4 times her worth, twice the best I ever made and to think I had to send her child support each month for 18 years to support her lifestyle.
Google can plain stupid or raw brilliance. It is a scientific calculator, spell checker, term checker, and sometimes a search engine. I'm not sure what the criteria is, but sometimes you get highly irrelevant returns. You can search a term and it spits back about 5 highlighted web pages at the top that have nothing to do with your term. One example (totally rhetorical) would be to search for a power supply for a Radiac 9000 power saw. I will often get returns like American Supply Company, the headquarters for Raciac 9000 Power Saw Power supplies. So I get excited and when I get to that site, I find that American Supply Company is nothing but flowers and gifts. I was hijacked by a Google advertiser. Or worse yet, the site they directed me to is another search engine which places me in the "loop to web page dark lords."
The bad side is when there is no site for the term for which I am looking but so many sites extract my search term just to get me to visit them for whatever reason. They are pathetic about it.
But when Google works, it saves time and money. Here's a recent google term that's great. Do you want to know the salary of any state worker in this state by name or department? This is the best Google return I've found, ever!
http://www.tulsaworld.com/webextra/itemsofinterest/statepayroll/statepayroll.aspx
Sparky (Mark), Oklahoma City - Dec 4, 2008 at 1:03 pm
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