"Idk, Google It"

In today’s networked world information is at our finger tips. If we have any questions at all we can easily “google it”. The term google itself has even become a verb and frequently when we do not know something we say, “Hold on, I’ll google it”. I have used google on my smart phone more times than I can count. The dog’s acting weird, google it. Don’t know how long to bake a chicken, google it. Forgot what time or channel the big game is on, google it.

I honestly do not know what life was like before google. How did my parents write research papers? How did you look up new recipes? How did you remember the order of the US presidents? As you can tell, we have rapidly evolved from using a library bard catalog and having a home set of encyclopedias.

Networked information is all around as discussed in Networked by Raines and Wellman, and has only been propelled forward by the triple revolution. We have information easily available at all times through google or sites such as Wikipedia. We stumble upon information that we didn’t even know we needed or weren’t even looking for, such as articles or recipe videos shared on Facebook.

News is even more readily available. No longer do we have to wait to for the 6 o’clock news or read the daily newspaper to learn about the most current events. We can log onto news sites or download apps from CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, etc, or use other networking apps such as Nuzzle. With these apps on our mobile devices we can receive push notifications about the latest headlines.

I have heard the older generation complain that this immediate information is making society dumb, but whatever the case, I’m grateful to be able to google information because it has often come in handy.