When in doubt, JGI of course

Do you JGI?
 

I’ll bet you do, probably multiple times a day. It’s the first choice when facts are needed, whether it be some odd piece of data or a critical piece of information. Get into a dispute with friends, and someone (perhaps everyone) will do it to bolster their side or settle the argument. Ask a dumb question – on-line or even in person – a question that you should be able to find out for yourself, and you’ll be told (not always politely) to JGI: Just Google It.

It’s Indisputably great to have all the worlds’ information (at least that’s what it feels like) at your command at all times. Having a smartphone in your pocket, with links to Google (and Wikipedia), and perhaps even a human language interface like Siri, was the stuff of science fiction not long ago. We should be slow to shed the wow factor, because it is still a wow.

We use it for so many purposes, both material and trivial. This week I JGIed (I’m declaring that a word) “vision statements” to help during a strategic planning session for the West Chester Public Library. Just a few hours later, I JGIed “sylvester stallone age” after seeing a trailer for his latest action movie (yes he’s a little old for this role, Google confirmed). More than once a resort to JGI has soothed a dispute between me and my wife, that might have deteriorated into bickering. Contrary to what you may think, I haven’t always been proved right.

But witnessing JGI in action so frequently now, I’m becoming concerned we may be pulling the JGI trigger too quickly and too often. It’s nice to settle arguments (although not every resort to Google does), but some friendly disputes should be argued out, your best points vs. mine. There’s something to be said for making your case the old fashioned way, with what you know and how you can best express it, and then really listening to the other side. Of course when a plain fact is in dispute, certainly JGI can help, but even then I think it’s not always better that we press a button and the fact appears. Einstein is supposed to have said that he never committed anything to memory that he could look up. With Google always in reach, will we ever have to remember anything?

It’s also a mistake to confuse facts with knowledge. Google can pull up a million hits on every subject, but turning that into knowledge and understanding is something that still takes a human mind.

The always fascinating technology writer Nicholas Carr (you remember “Does IT Matter?”) wrote a recent book called “The Shallows”, based on an article in the Atlantic more pointedly titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It opens with the monolog by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey as he plaintively tells Dave that “my mind is going” as the astronaut relentlessly disconnects the components of his brain. Carr can feel his mind going too, as he recounts his early days as a thinker, writer and researcher who used to dive deep, like a scuba diver, for information and knowledge; now, he says, he’s like a guy on a jet ski, skimming across the surface. Access to an ocean of facts all at once can do that to you.

Carr’s argument is not that Google is making us stupid necessarily, but that it’s certainly making us intellectually lazy. Though many have disputed his thesis, I find it hard not to agree.

Like everything it seems Google is a double-edged sword. An incomparable tool for accessing facts at all times and in all places, but containing within it an intellectual sedative that can make us dull, lazy and addicted to someone else’s data, rather than reliant on our own memories and knowledge. We should JGI sparingly, and wisely.