"Larry Sanger has made his living on the Internet. He co-founded Wikipedia, one of the world’s top 10 Web sites with more than 65 million visitors monthly, and he now leads two other ambitious online projects. So why does he fear what the Internet is doing to our minds and those of our children?" Inquiring minds want to know.
Google won't make you any more stupid than reading only Reader's Digest instead of the original, Bible commentaries instead of the Bible, or consulting a watch instead of figuring out the position of the sun and moon. It's a tool, and I love it. I actually know (or used to) some of the arcane rules for searching complex databases, but I "google" it instead. The difference is, I know not to trust everything I read and check several sources, look for not just two sides of a question, but four or five. I've even poked through that long list of e-mails from the Climategate whistleblower and read a number of scientists who don't agree there is a consensus on the cause of global warming.
Right now I'm reading "A faith and culture devotional" by Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington (Zondervan 2008). I just love it that Kelly and Lael sifted through the world of Christian intellectuals and selected the authors and the topics in art, literature, history, science, etc. and that they provide further reading suggestions and web sites if a particular topic interests me. From there I can google til my heart's content.
My Monday book group, and we all read and we know how and when to Google.
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2 comments:
My early childhood was a bit of a poor one and the Reader's Digest magazine was an indulgence. I well remember thinking my aunt was wealthy because she had the condensed books too... and I devoured them sitting in her hallway when I visited.
IIRC, it was the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade that my parents bought a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. Laying on my stomach in our living room reading one entry after another... sometimes closing my eyes and "randomly" picking another volume... that was my childhood "Google".
So many of the "originals" would never have been available to me, so I am quite fond of the condensed versions.
Yes, I remember that too. My mother bought "Book of Knowledge" and the bonus was "My Book House." Then in 1950, my grandmother gave us American People's Encyclopedia, and I used it even into the 1990s because it had some excellent articles no longer in the newer encyclopedias. Yes, we had google before the founders were born.
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