The Google Craze #31

 I absolutely loved browsing through encyclopedias and dictionaries when I was a kid. Sometimes I just wanted to know something cool that started with S or Y or D. It was an adventure. The crack of the binding when you first opened it, the smell of the ink, the crispness of the pages with maps and pictures versus the softer paper of the descriptions and explanations. I had a set of both Britannica and World Book. I would go to the Britannica for more detailed descriptions and to World Book for more concise explanations and more full page, color illustrations. I absolutely loved them.

Browsing is a difficult task nowadays - it is as simple as " just google it." Type in a word and voila' there it is options, so many options. But if you type give me a list of things beginning with S. Its a bit more challenging. What things? Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? Books, Records or Movies? You have to be specific enough to get what you want exactly and thus the browsing component has been hijacked. I miss browsing encyclopedias. We can browse for clothes and anything we can imagine on EBay or Amazon but again you can't browse for everything that starts with S.

Its a different world now. You need to know what you're looking for before you can browse. That adventure of not knowing something and opening a heavy, hard back behemoth of a text is long gone and I can say...

I miss it.

I am definitely old school. Digits over digital, ink versus code. I am a hard copy, book person. Pen to paper person. I ran across a set of encyclopedias the other day and it dawned on me- we had 26 volumes of pure joy as children- we had to ability to page by page peruse and acquire new thoughts and ideas. We had to spend time absorbing and assimilating. We had to spend time thinking about what we might what to know next. We had to look it up, know how to spell it and then read. The beauty was it would suggest - go to this page for more information- and you could get caught up in a loop of learning for days.

Now... its a simple "Siri, Who was the father of Genetics?" or A quick type into Google, What is Heredity? But if it were the encyclopedia era, we could have discovered both of these through investigation and the frenzy of curiosity. My children will never know the Dewey Decimal System. They will never know cassette tapes and answering machines. Antiquated as those are, they remind me of my youth and a time when nothing was handed to us in split second gigabytes- instead we gathered by flipping pages and compiling many resources.

We didn't have spell check- we had to learn how to spell. We didn't have grammar check- we had to learn how to form a complete sentence, in various ways. Google has made life easier, maybe. But, in my mind, it has dismantled the beauty of investigation. It eliminates getting lost as we find our way to the library. It has taken away the burden of many things but to me it has also taken away our much needed skill of patience, pause, reason, proceed. Google will do this for us. But next time you hear anyone say "Let me Google that," get them to be patient, pause, reason and find an encyclopedia this just may get them to think about things in a different way.