The Google age

What do you do if you want to know the birth date of Abraham Lincoln? You most likely “google” it. A few seconds later you know the answer and a lot more about the president. But a mere fifteen years ago, we probably looked it up at a library or in a dusty encyclopedia book.

It has been said that the years pass faster the older you get. On the other hand, there are so many things to do these days. As Douglas Coupland wrote 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. During these 30 years we’ve seen the coming of the computer games, cable TV, VHS, CD, DVD, cell phones… And of course the greatest time killer of them all: Internet.

Google is arguably the most visited web site ever made. Every minute there are 700 000 search queries being made on Google (or so they say). Suddenly we have a society of abundance, featuring a multitasking lifestyle filled with distractions. How is this affecting us?

I believe it can impair our ability to create sophisticated thoughts and ideas, as well as shorten our attention span. Last year Douglas Coupland wrote 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”. The social media scrolling mindset is definitely here to stay, even after platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have perished.

I read a great article a few years ago called Is Google Making Us Stupid. It’s quite long but well worth it. It describes the changes many of us are feeling regarding our reading process.

“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)

I suspect that the dopamine-fueled nature of social media, together with an ever increasing urge to increase multitasking, will impair our ability to read, form and understand longer tests as well as deliver big ideas.

Regardless of all this, I’m still convinced that this is a golden age of discoveries and wonder, and I feel privileged to live in these exciting times.