My boss said something quite stunning the other day: Google has ruined conversation.
Mildly intrigued and perplexed, I looked up from my smart phone, on which I had been Googling something irrelevant, and prompted him for an explanation.
He described a quite whimsical childhood characterized by nightly family dinners full of actual civil conversation; words spoken out loud to each other instead of poorly typed and misspelled in a cryptic message.
That was his first point. His second point was more profound, and I pursued him for the details.
Well, his older sister might proclaim over her plate of tuna casserole that grizzly bears are the largest bears in the world. This would then cause a raucous debate full of guffaws and looks of astonishment as dueling siblings and maybe even mom and dad weighed in on why grizzly bears either were or were not the largest bears in the world.
Over the next few days, the conversation would extend from the dinner table to the back yard to the school yard to the park and to the library as family members diligently researched which bear was the planet's most formidable. Teachers were badgered, libraries were visited and encyclopedias were consulted until someone settled the debate once and for all.
My boss even tells of the days when he and his sister called a living, breathing librarian for information.
As long as their question didn't have anything to do with a school project, the librarian would find the answer and call them back, usually within 24 hours. (Customers in the Fraser Valley Regional Library system can still ask a librarian a question, but it's done online via webchat.) Of course, the objective of this whole exercise was not the noble pursuit of knowledge but rather to prove wrong the poor kid whose incorrect utterings about ursus arctos initiated the discussion. However, the benefits of interpersonal communication were realized just the same. Everyone would learn a whole lot about bears and each other while picking up some handy research skills before eventually
arriving at the fact that polar bears (ursus maritimus) are actually the largest bears on Earth. I came to the same conclusion after a 10-second Google search that also yielded the bears' Latin names (impressively inserted above).
So, yes, I grudgingly agree with my boss that Google has ruined/ended a lot of potentially worthwhile conversations, and probably even impeded our learning. And, adding insult to inquiry, I would even go so far as to suggest Google has stunted our research skills with its predictive search algorithm. That's the dropdown menu that comes up after you type a few letters into the search box; the list represents the most popular queries based on the words entered.
This feature is so effective that in some cases you don't even need to know how to spell something beyond the first few letters for Google's intuition to kick in, spell the word correctly in the dropdown, and probably offer you the exact query you wanted anyway.
Google performs more than five billion searches daily - up from 1.7 billion in 2008 and 60 million in 2000.
I wonder how many conversations it killed in the process. I guess I'll have to Google that to find out.
