It has been missing for a few weeks now. Usually the nice grey jacket that protects me from the non-blistering California winds that split through me has gone missing. Searching everywhere and thinking about places that I might have worn it and placed it last gave me no help.
As I continued to think, I found comfort on my desk chair where I saw my laptop open and Google set as my home page. I thought to myself, if my jacket were some bit of information that I can find on the web, I could just google it.
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Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
goo·gle
Pronunciation:
\ˈgü-gəl\
Function:
transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):
goo·gled; goo·gling Listen to the pronunciation of googling \-g(É™-)liÅ‹\
Usage:
often capitalized
Etymology:
Google, trademark for a search engine
Date:
2001
: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web
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Unfortunately, my addiction to technology has not only forced me to take constant sabbaticals from my twitter, facebook, gmail, blog, and all the RSS feeds from multiple news sources but also Google (my number one source of knowledge for anytime I may have a question).
As smart phones become ’smarter’, people are not paying for minutes or texts. Rather, they are paying to have the entire world in the palm of their hands. For me, Google (and now maybe Cuil ) has become one of the gateways that has provided me access to all this useful/useless information. Unfortunately, I have begun to notice that my habit of Googling people, dates, reports, journals, news articles, etc…has made my memory a bit weak. As my research professor, Dr. Leonard Sender , would call it Google Assisted Memory (GAM). I just thank God I am starting school again in the fall.
Has my memory begun to fade at age 22? Nicolas Carr from The Atlantic wrote a great article on this particular topic: What the internet is doing to our brains.
You can read it here: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
In an interview with NPR, Carr says that while the Internet allows us to get lots of information very quickly, it also encourages us not to look at it very thoughtfully. In fact, Carr argues, when we give in to the natural impulses to click and skim, rather than to read and think, the Internet may actually be doing us a disservice: It shortens our attention spans and even inhibits our ability to read longer books and articles.
Carr says it best, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”-the perfect algorithm-to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Well, I am definitely not off to read neither War and Peace nor Anna Karenina . What I am going to do is look for my North Face Jacket hoping that I can find it somehow before Google figures it out before me.
| if I knew all the words I would write myself out of here. |
I’m blogging from a new Internet browser today!
It seems like everyone and his dog has some sort of loyalty scheme nowadays. You can collect points when you shop in your local supermarket, when you take a trip in a plane and now, even when you Microsoft’s Live Search. It’s a scheme called SearchPerks and is designed to allow web surfers to collect tickets (”points”) that they can redeem for various prizes. This technique worked for Tesco, so why shouldn’t it work for Microsoft?
