The Google Generation

I must admit, Google is my friend. It’s a source of information and happiness that has made the hard internet lifestyle a bit bearable. Even though I sometimes miss the good old days where Altavista’s, Astalavista’s and Mamma’s reigned suppreme I welcome and embrace Google’s megalomanic embrace of the world wide web. I’m not part of the group of people thinking they are out for world domination, the world will always be dominated by some kind of superpower whether in corporate or other form. But world domination means nothing if you do not have the people at your side, and this, my friends, is where Google seems to be gaining ground. And maybe that is, a little bit, scary.

Do you remember 10-15 years ago? When you still went to a thing called ‘the library’ to get your books, when the only porn you had was from your dad’s hidden stash or some sleazy kid who had his own black market of old playboys? Where you got all your information from a 30 minute broadcast on television? It was an innocent time, where we still didn’t know the meaning of scat and we all depended on our elders to show us the right path.
Internet changed all that drastically and when now have more faith in the written voice of millions then the few people standing next to us.

Maybe I’m still old-fashioned but I do like the reallife interactions between people. They’re more obvious and faster, you don’t have to derive whatever slang they use and translate it into something cohesive. There are no minutes of waiting cause the other person is busy jerking off to porn or talking to 15 other buddies. And you know when a person is fucking with you cause you can see him/her, his body language, his posture, whether he’s there or not, if she is really an 18-year old applebottom-assed vixen with a DD and a phd in theoretical science up her sleeve.

But people don’t know everything and people are often wrong. How many times have you asked directions only to end up somewhere completely different cause the helpful person forgot that there was a  ‘third light after the lights”? Googlemaps would have told you that shit.

In theory you don’t have to ask anyone anything anymore. It’s all out there. From fixing hte kitchen sink to detailed instructions for facial reconstruction. It’s out there, and it can be found. And we all know this, deep down.
It’s strange however that I experience mroe and more times where I, physically, ask a person something in a educational environment and they say “Google it”. Or worse that you ask a silmilar question, that the person comes over, sits next to you and… starts Googling for the answer.
It defeats the whole purpose of asking someone something no? I am aware google exists, I am aware it can know everything, I am aware they know it’s out there but it takes more time to sift through the 15.000 forums where the first 7548 posts are from people who say they don’t know it or ask what kind of configuration your pc has when all you ask is how to bake a strawberry cake, then to ask a person who should know. I can still bother to wade through the ads and threads after they told me they don’t know it right?

Like all discussions and conversations it’s all nitpicking but seeing how certain trends are easily imprinted on minds is it unplausible to think that this might get out of hand? Will a kindergarten teacher tell her kids to Google how to make an apple tree out of toiletpaper? Are you gonna get mechanics who will Google how to fix your car? Are we gonna check to see how our own bodies work cause we were never told?

In a way we all did, but this isn’t from people, this is from a collective. A borgian-hive so to speak, one world, one nation, one people, one search-engine. Exagerations aside we still do have the essence in us that makes us what we are (“Free will” – some people could do well to Google this) but us humans have a way of taking things a little bit too far without even realising it. Whether that’s a good or bad thing will be known in the future… I’ll google the answer in the meantime.

PS I didn’t forget Bing.

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