Immediate access to information via the internet is a fantastic thing. I honestly don't know how we used to get along beforehand, for instance how could someone plan a trip to Seattle, to take a ferry to Whidbey island prior to the internet? Now, we just click a couple links, book a couple things online, find out the schedule and head to Seattle... Before the internet/www how did we even know that specific ferry existed?
The larger point is "how did we ever know anything" before yahoo (ok, I'm dating myself here but before google was a verb, the best search engine imho was yahoo (what else did you have, altavista? webcrawler?)). In grad school we used to play games where we would ask random "consultant" type interview questions like: "How many weddings take place in Mexico City every year?" The reason we did this was simple: in physics (the discipline I did my graduate school in) it was crucial to know what to expect from a calculation before you did the actual calculation. Otherwise how would you know if you were right?
But now, if you were asked that same question you'd just google it (ah, there I go, using it as a verb.... as Calvin (of Calvin&Hobbes) said "verbing weirds languages.) This fact -- that we can just google things -- really diminishes the role of trivia in our culture. I remember when it I was young, reading books called "The Straight Dope" where people would write questions about random topics and the author (an authority on random trivia) would respond. We can't even begin to think about that delay! Could you imagine submitting a google request and waiting not only for a person to read your query, but for them to draft a response, and then compile about a hundred or so similar queries and then publish a book compiling the results?!? On the one hand it seem ludicrous in today's standards, but on the other it means...
There is no more trivia. I personally think this is sad. How many times have you sat around and the conversation deteriorated to "ok lets just google it"? That statement is as empowering as it is sad. As we embrace the new information age, we should be cognizant of what we're leaving behind.
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A few points, some relevant...
ReplyDelete1) Since you like trivia so much: Yahoo was never a search engine back in the day, it was a web index. It only searched its own database of sites submitted by the general public. It oursourced the web-crawling, traditional search stuff to AltaVista. (Which WAS the pre-Google gold standard)
2) There was an article in the Atlantic last year called "Is Google Making Us Stupid" (Google it). It may or may not be relevant to the points I make below. I haven't read it in a year, and I have "google brain" so I can't remember.
3) You state that the death of trivia makes you sad, but you don't state why. First of all, a glance around the web proves that trivia is alive and healthier than ever. It's in the left hand menu bar of iMDB! Wikipedia is 99% trivia! Virtually nothing is unknowable now. All that has changed is that trivia has been democratized and freed from the brains of trivia geeks, fact hounds, and Cecil Adamses. Your sad feeling implies that something of value has been lost, and this is where the real answer is. In economics, the value of something is linked to its scarcity, and as the nuggets of trivia themselves multiply in number and are given away freely, the value of the trivia approaches zero. So the (extrinsic) social cachet or (intrinsic) feeling of superiority of knowing the trivial that has been lost or diminished along with it. Our portfolios, built over a lifetime, are now worth zero. Hence the sadness.
4) Perhaps this goes beyond just the trivial and extends to useful, practical knowledge as well. I don't know how to fix a leaky faucet, but I'm sure WikiHow does. I'm sure the ability to retain information is linked to the difficulty in acquiring it, and we are reaching the frictionless ideal of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other.
5) If knowledge retention is ranked on a scale from all-knowing (god-like) to know-nothing (robot-like), I know which end of the scale I'd like to be on. I'm just saying. And of course Google and the ubiquity of information is pushing us to the latter end of the scale. But knee-jerk reactions aside, is that a bad thing? It essentially means we know 999% less without web access. We are nothing without our machines. But how is this transition different from the industrial revolution? Meaning, how is someone lamenting the death of "knowledge" different from an 18th century strongman looking skeptically at the machines that will take his job? He's also thinking "you're nothing without your machines". In fact we're probably 999% less strong, but we were able to build a knowledge economy based on knowledge workers. We're adaptable. Now that knowledge is dead, perhaps we can focus on our emotions. Or our senses of smell.
6) As a coda, I have to mention that I dread the day my son asks me about the color of the sky, the constellations, the migratory patterns of birds, or which way the water spirals down the drain in Brazil. Knowing that, by then, the answer to all of the above will be "Wikipedia" is the saddest thing of all.
Dave
I agree Tom (and probably with Dave too except that your post is too long to read (another internet side effect?). I am particularly annoyed by the number of iphones while out to dinner or drinking at the bar. Can't we all talk about it, maybe reason something out, without googling it for once?
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