What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [124]
More than names, identity will be about accomplishments and creations, things you are known for that narrow your Google search. I am the blogger Jeff Jarvis who writes about Google and media, not Jeff Jarvis the jazz trumpeter, Jeff Jarvis who ran Segway tours in Thailand (drat—I think I’d like to be him), Jeff Jarvis who heads a mobile field service software provider (whatever that is), and certainly not Jeff Jarvis the high school athlete (sadly, I’m too old and too clumsy). I am the No. 1 Jeff Jarvis. In Google wars, it’s every Jeff for himself.
This brings us to another argument against public identity: It turns us into egotistical exhibitionists. We share everything, down to the most intimate and mundane. Who cares what I had for breakfast? Why share it? London blogger Leisa Reichelt found that this “ambient intimacy”—reporting small signposts of life, sharing what we’re doing, who we’re with, when we get a new haircut or a new car—allows us to “keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” Ambient intimacy is good for friendship. “It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.” And on a practical level, Reichelt said, “It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catch up with these people in real life!”
The internet and Google are causing no end of small behavioral changes whose impact is, again, difficult to weigh quite yet. Some may be short-lived fads; others may have a long-term influence on societal norms. Here are a few:
Ever since I started working with computers, I’ve found it terribly seductive that there is always a solution to a problem involving machines and software. You just have to find it. If only life were so symmetrical and complete. I fear young people today could become more disappointed with the harsh, illogical, and incomplete reality of life than my generation was. Then again, we were flower children.
I wonder, too, whether Google’s slavish devotion to data, its belief that numbers tell truth, could have us miss the qualitative, counterintuitive, human view of life: the eureka moments that come from the illogical. Would we still discover the accidental gift of bread mold, penicillin?
Then again, perhaps all this will hone our analytic skills. Employees at Google are not permitted to rely on intuition, hunches, wishes, beliefs, and the way things have always been—easy answers and accepted wisdom. Perhaps our employees, bosses, politicians, and educators would better serve us if they were held to such an empirical standard.
I would be delighted if education put less emphasis on rote memorization of that which we can easily look up, but I wonder whether Google’s instant access to every imaginable fact will atrophy our memory cells. Or perhaps that’s just my fear of age.
In a 2008 article in The Atlantic, internet curmudgeon Nicholas Carr, a sometimes sparring partner of mine in the blogosphere, fretted about these changes in our habits, brains, and society in an article entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He confessed to reading less and differently—as I have. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds,” Carr argued. “In the quiet