The Importance of Being Google

by G. Kim Blank (September 2009)
 

How easefully we have come to embrace that seemingly innocuous, pixilated portal to all things arcane and ordinary. Google killed the encyclopedia business and probably wounded the reference librarian; and, as it raised its ambitions, it has certainly bruised the book industry and busied its copyright lawyers. It may also have changed not just how we find things, but how we know them.

Google’s search engine was something impossible that we seemed, nonetheless, to be waiting for, as if it were our pod-given right. And now? It’s just always there—like the air. Well, air composed of infinite ones and zeroes, air that you capture and turn into copy-and-paste information almost as fast as your hands can type and your cursor can click and drag. That a “googol” is, as a mathematical term, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, makes the point: it’s a number impossible to imagine, like the power of the search engine that, only ten years ago, had its creators ingeniously misspell the term and go on to emphatically win and continue to dominate the lucrative search engine war.

These characteristics make the on-line search a largely assumptive experience. Why learn something—connect with it, grapple with it, internalize it, or even make hand-written notes—when you can easily find it again? The activity is just glib enough to feed into our collective postmodern attention deficit, which is also fed by a webpandemic of other micro-blogging, twittering behaviors that equally compromise the need for Pause or Deep Thought. In short, we don’t need, at best, to follow through, and, at worst, to know or remember anything. We just have to be able to find it again. Fourth, and finally, Google is portable: inexpensive, ever-shrinking, increasingly diverse and wireless devices through which you have Internet access allow—in fact encourage—you to search and share anywhere and all the time.

As we google away, we may think we are digging for something hidden. More ambitiously, we may see ourselves as doggedly piecing together and compiling discrete clues that lead us to some overwhelming question and answer; or we may conceive of the Web as a well in which some deep truth lurks at the bottom, so that if we look hard and steadily, what we seek will come to us. Such romancing of the Web’s depth and mystery-revealing power is fine—old metaphors die hard—but more properly the search engine works along a speed-oriented, seemingly infinite, interconnected surface, what it sometimes called “the topography of the Web.” Kelly, I think, is mistaken when, in referring to the hyperlinked structure of Google books, he calls it “a deep structuring of knowledge.” The depth model may be an illusion, and this is apparent in the cavalier way we use it. Reading has become raiding.

G. Kim Blank is a writer, media consultant, and professor of English at the University of Victoria. He has published on a wide range of subjects, including English Romanticism, conflict theory, and popular culture.

 

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