The Google age

There was a time when finding out Abraham Lincoln’s birthday required actual effort. You’d walk into a library, hunt down an encyclopedia that smelled faintly of dust, flip through hundreds of pages until you found the answer.

Today, we “google” it. Before you’ve finished your coffee you not only know when Lincoln was born, but what he ate, who played him in movies, and what strangers on the internet think he would have tweeted.

People like to say that time speeds up as you get older. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe we’ve simply stuffed every waking hour with enough distractions to make the days blur together. Douglas Coupland joked back in 1995, “In the information dark ages, before 1976, relationships and television were the only forms of entertainment available”. Even 15 years later he’s got a point. In the span of a couple of decades we raced through video games, cable TV, VHS, CDs, DVDs, smartphones and, towering above them all like some benevolent digital deity, the Internet.

Google became the front door to almost all of it, arguably the most visited web site ever made. Every minute there are 700 000 search queries being made on Google (or so they say). Humanity suddenly found itself drowning in knowledge while somehow feeling increasingly short on wisdom. We have a society of knowledge abundance that is also promoting a multitasking lifestyle filled with distractions. How is this affecting us?

“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” – Abraham Lincoln

I can’t shake the suspicion that instant access to everything comes with a price. When every question has an answer a fraction of a second away, there’s less incentive to wrestle with ideas, follow long chains of thought or simply sit with uncertainty for a while. We’ve become experts at skimming, sampling and tab-hopping. Deep concentration starts to feel almost old-fashioned.

This will shorten our attention span and impair our ability to create complex ideas. Douglas Coupland returned to the subject last year in A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years. One of the points is “In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness”. William Gibson explored a similar idea long before social media existed, that once your mind has been enhanced, there’s no graceful way back. The social media scrolling mindset is definitely here to stay, even after platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have perished.

I remember an article from The Atlantic in 2008 called Is Google Making Us Stupid. It describes the changes many of us are feeling in regards to our reading process. Many of us can still devour hundreds of pages in a novel, but it often takes conscious effort to resist the itch to check a notification halfway through a paragraph.

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.” […] “I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.”
— Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic (2008)

Our brains are being trained by tiny rewards. Another swipe, another headline, another dopamine hit. It’s a wonderful system for consuming information, but perhaps not for producing original thought. Big ideas rarely arrive between notifications. They usually appear after long stretches of uninterrupted boredom, the very thing we’ve become so adept at eliminating. We need slow time for deep thought and real creativity.

And yet, for all my grumbling, I wouldn’t trade this era for any other. Never before has it been so easy to satisfy curiosity. You can fall into a rabbit hole about Byzantine architecture over breakfast, learn to repair a synthesizer after lunch, and book a flight to the other side of the world before dinner. The internet may be the greatest distraction machine ever invented, but it’s also the greatest engine of discovery humanity has built.

The trick, I suspect, is remembering that Google is an extraordinary compass, not the destination.