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such vital and practical purposes as ensuring that the people we met every day really remained themselves and had not been replaced by alien doppelgangers.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.”