Googling

There are, I must first admit, some positive things to say about Googling, or to ‘go ogling’ as my somewhat elderly spellchecker always insists may be what I really want to say – and, let’s face it, that’s probably not a bad description of what a high proportion of Googlers are intent on doing anyway. I had been considering writing something on Freemasonry, and I was taken back to the ‘secret signs’ we often had as children, for such vital and practical purposes as ensuring that the people we met every day really remained themselves and had not been replaced by alien doppelgangers. There was a children’s TV programme at the time which taught its adherents a ‘secret sign’ which they should use whenever they met another viewer of the show. The word ‘secret’ in this context was probably rather stretched in two respects. Firstly the programme was publicly broadcast every week to an audience which, given that there were only two TV channels, cannot have consisted of much less than 50% of British children. Secondly the nature of the signing was hardly inconspicuous. The first person was required to perform the normal, everyday action of rubbing their right palm, hand held vertically, vigourously up and down on their right cheek. The covert response required was to hold the right hand horizontally, palm down, and rub the edge of the forefinger back and forth in a sawing action in the valley formed between lower lip and chin. I had every intention of writing the following: “The programme was presented by Jeremy Sandford, son of the comedian Sandy Powell.” I was confident in my memory of this, but as a safeguard decided to Google it anyway. The following facts emerged in less than ten minutes. 1. Jeremy Sandford was a script writer famous for the semi-documentary TV plays Cathy Come Home and Edna the Inebriate Woman. 2. Sandy Powell had only one son, Peter, who had not worked in television. 3. There was an actor, singer and DJ called Chris Sandford (one of whose 45s I had owned at the time). 4. Chris Sandford was the son of the comedian Sandy Sandford. 5. Sandy Sandford was the presenter of the programme. Short of attributing it to Sandie Shaw, it is difficult to know how I could have got it more wrong; but it is even more difficult to know how, without Google, I could have even begun the task of tracking down the correct version. (To be fair, I should of course say, “without an Internet search engine”, since I am confident that Jeeves could have produced the same answer just as quickly had I overcome my dislike of Wodehouse’s politics enough to Ask him instead.) I am not even going to whinge at the fact that it was unable to come up with the name of the programme, though given all the other information, that is both surprising and mildly irritating. Goggle is a marvellous device for getting back half forgotten memories, checking dimly recalled facts, filling out incomplete quotations. But the memories, the facts, the quotations have to be there in your head to start with. If all you do is Google, “Please give me a moving quotation about Armistice Day”, you will get the same quote as everyone else who puts in the same key words. If you Google, “Secret signs on children’s television” you will get nothing; except that it will not say ‘nothing’; it will offer 15,300,000 answers which just happen to contain one or more of the key words. This is the mistake made by a whole generation which is growing up to believe that Knowledge is what it says in Google. You have to know something to get a sensible answer out. If I know nothing, all I get is a summary from Wikipedia. From there I can surf, but am I surfing shorewards or seawards? None of this is per se the fault of Google, but then this is not a whinge about Google, only about the act of Googling. The fault lies with the people not the engine. We fail to appreciate how much of the sum of human knowledge is not on the Internet. The fact is often hidden from us by the sheer volume of what is there. There are on the Net some tediously detailed facts about forgeries of telegraph stamps from 19th Century Kashmir. I know because at someone else’s request I was daft enough to put them there. Since I have no convenient way of getting them off (i.e. the owner of the site died a while ago, but the site appears immortal) they will probably still be there mocking my nerdishness when no one remembers not only what a telegraph was, but even what a stamp was. Twenty other stamp related articles I would be much prouder to be remembered for, and which would be much more useful to the albeit small stamp collecting community, are to be found only between the covers of magazines. There they will remain unless either I become so famous that a member of my fan site is willing to type every one of them onto the Web in my memory, or I become so bored and conceited that that I decide to do the job myself. I do not seriously anticipate either. Why is the quality of what I wrote for magazines so much better than what I wrote for the Net? Because the magazines have editors who read articles first, and reject the rubbish, or at least send it back to be upgraded from Rubbish to Tolerable. Most of the sites on the Net have no standards whatsoever, no editorial judgement, no warning message that what you are about to read may be entirely inaccurate or terminally boring. Nor does a pop-up pop up to tell you to get a life and go and read something printed on paper. All that happens is that the Net continues to accumulate more and more information. They once decided to ask a computer the question, “Is there a God?” They received the reply, “Insufficient information.” So they fed into it all the sacred texts of all the world’s religions and the complete works of the major humanists and atheists. Again they asked the question and received the same response. So they fed in all the major works of science, philosophy, theology, and psychical research. Still in answer to their question they received only “Insufficient information.” Finally they began an enormous thousand year project to feed into it the whole sum of human knowledge, from the beginning of printing to the most recent ephemeral publications. At the end, they asked, “Is there a God?” The reply came, “There is, now.”

Doctors

Doctors

I recently watched a documentary about brain surgery. It opened with a surgeon cutting the crown off the patient’s skull, somewhat like removing the top of a soft boiled egg, and poking inside with a probe and scalpel, rather than bread soldiers. Up to this point it may not have been very aesthetic viewing, but it was not in any way worrying; this is after all what surgeons do. Then the surgeon turned to the person next to him and inquired, “Tell me, what is the problem we’re trying to sort out, exactly?” I have known teachers go out to face a class without having prepared a lesson, and it rarely works well; but at least it is unlikely to prove fatal, or massively debilitating.

I found this particularly disappointing since I have always exempted surgeons from my general antipathy to doctors. Doctors as a whole seem to me to operate mainly on the level of the shaman: ask a few questions and then wave Magic Pills over the patient until they admit that they are better, although there is now, presumably when the Drug Budget Event Horizon is looming, an increasing tendency to blame a virus which can’t be treated and advise just staying in bed. I never felt that this kind of treatment required a doctor; I could with the aid of a pharmaceutical handbook do it myself, were I allowed to. But of course any drug strong enough to have any actual effect now requires a prescription. I’m not old enough to remember the halcyon days when anyone wanting to feature on the last page of an Agatha Christie could go into a chemist’s, sign a false name in the poisons book and walk out with a pint and a half of arsenic and a bucket of strychnine “to get rid of moles in the lawn.” But I am sufficiently decrepit to be able to remember when chemists instead of meekly handing out triple-shrinkwrapped pills on a doctor’s order, spent much of their time making up ointments and potions from a collection of raw ingredients, to suit whatever symptoms the customer complained of.

I confess to not having too much luck with doctors. At University I took my splitting headache to visit the College doctor. He diagnosed dandruff in my ear. I was told afterwards that he was a total lunatic who continued to hold his position only because he was an alumnus of the College and consequently loved by the Dons, who probably took their own headaches and/or aural skin complaints to Harley Street. I eventually took mine to a dentist who became the first medical practitioner to cure dandruff pain by extracting a tooth. My next GP spent nearly a fortnight organizing tests to find out what was causing the crippling pain in my chest. When I turned up he refused to run the tests because I admitted the pain had stopped, and he said he was not going to waste time (and money?) looking for something that was clearly no longer there.

In fact the only real relief I got from a GP was when as a child one removed fully three kilos of wax by syringing my right ear with a jet spray which probably doubled for removing graffiti from the surgery wall. In fact the reason for so much coming out may have been that half of it had leapt from my left ear in sheer panic at the buffeting being passed through my skull. Years later, after another build up, I returned for a repeat dosage. The new and much younger doctor looked at me pityingly, and as if I had asked to have my blood let into a basin said, “We don’t do that any more.” Instead he gave me a prescription for a bottle of useless eardrop liquid, which was incapable of dissolving the sugar on a cheap biscuit.

But in spite of these experiences with the medical profession I had retained my faith in the efficacy of surgeons, though it was slightly tested by a friend of mine at University who was reading Surgery in the short intervals available to him between parties and Rugby matches. He got a Third. A veritably charming young man, he would have a perfect bedside manner, but I always felt that, whilst I could cope with the country being run by someone with a Third in Politics, if lying on the table awaiting an operation, I would prefer the surgeon to be not my old rugby playing friend, but the one I never saw because he always stayed in cramming for a First.

Not of course that that will happen, because surgeons don’t do operations any more; they perform procedures. I suppose this may be a prestige thing, as in schools where the teaching of kitchen skills in my lifetime has advanced from Cookery through Domestic Science to Home Economics, and was last seen trying to earn an honest penny as Food Technology. But I think it more likely that it is another attempt to fool what used to be known as patients, but now are known officially as NHS Service Users, at least until they die - which of course they don’t do, only pass on, leaving a slight ambiguity as to whether they have ceased respiration or merely been transferred to a bigger hospital in the next town. No doubt a few elderly NHSSUs, terrified of the prospect of an operation, can have their blood pressure kept down by being told they are merely to undergo a procedure, which sounds rather like they may be about to have their toenails clipped. Until they find themselves in the Procedure Theatre. And in walks the man with a Third in Procedury.