How bad is your googling habit and what does it mean?

Try it. You're in the great reservoir of googleability.”HM

Yes, and more. What does it mean when something becomes so all powerful?”HM

Here's my take on it.The late 40s and early 50s were about youth taking a keener interest in their self identity. The breakthrough was pegged pants and zooty styles adopted for youth clothes and mannerisms around 1950. Revolting! Prosperity and mobility were on the rise. Gradually, more teens had cars. R&B was on the radio. And pretty soon your parents caught you singing “Annie, please don’t cheat. Give me all my meat” in the shower and your weekend privileges were revoked. That sort of thing happened in the early 50s, before rock ”n’ roll came along. We didn't want Sinatra. What was wrong with us? Then came Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.” He was the real king of rock ”n’ roll, not Elvis. Add to that Little Richard, who was no Pat Boone: “Good golly Miss Molly, you sure like to ball.” To my parents that was much worse than pegged pants, but pegged pants was where it started. So now it's the mid-50s, when the Bohemians gathered in Greenwich Village conspicuously enough to be called the Beat Generation. Jazz, you know, daddeo. They became Beatniks later because of Sputnik, in 1957, scared America half shitless and we needed to blame the Beats for being communists to make us feel better.If we had done what our GI parents wanted us to do, we would have been good little American boys and girls right on through the 1950s and there would have been no need for the hippies in 60s. America could have fought is little war in Vietnam to a splendid conclusion. Nixon would never have gotten into trouble and Spiro Agnew would have been the next great American president...if it hadn't been for those Zoot Suit Riots of the early 1940s.There it is in a nutshell.”HM

I'll refer you to Omnivorous' post in Message 49. It's not different in any way except in magnitude of information-gathering powers. Do you think there could be something more powerful than Google in that regard?”HM

Couldn't agree with you more. And Edie Adams singing the Murial cigar commercial in Mae West style was probably the sexest thing I ever saw. Did you see any Jerry Lester shows with Huntz Hall and Dagmar?”HM

Why not? I was there. Were you?”HM

You mean I have to support my anecdotal experiences with emprirical evidence to make them valid? What am I, chopped liver? Can't my personal anecdotes be valid on their own merits?

That's entirely possible. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. My dad certainly did not play any blues or jazz on his record player. We had to discover them on our own. Radio stations out of Detroit were helpful in that regard. Don't know where you grew up, but Toledo was your standard cornbelt town. All the things I reported really happened. The cause-effect relationships are disputable, of coursed.”HM

You mean I have to google up someone who agrees with me to make my assertions valid. Why can't I have valid assertions based on my own anecdotal experiences? Your evidentiary standards seem set a little too high to me. But, OK, don't take anything I say as valid. They're only personal observations and analyses.Please tell me your analysis of cause-effect relationships that explain the rebellion of the 50s and 60s.”HM

Too bad you missed it. It was a hoot!”HM

Buz, I appreciate your kind words. (Most of the trouble I get into here is of my own making.) Where did you live from 1935 to 1960? Regionality might affect one's interpretation of history. I may be bias about what those changes meant from having too much of a Midwestern exposure.”HM

Wikipedia reminds me of the "Human Clock" at a folk-rock festival I attended once in the early 70s. It was a large clock with a face made of cardboard and crayoned numbers and broomsticks for hands. It had no other working parts, but it always told the correct time, plus or minus a minute or two. How do you suppose that clock worked 24 hours a day for three consecutive days?My point here is that some new kind of awareness, some new sort of collective consciousness replaced an older one in our brave new post-war world. From Human Clocks to Wikipedia, from the Encyclopedia Britanica to Google and so forth, life changed in dramatic ways that suggest to me that new powers had emerged to alter the course of mankind....or maybe carboard clocks and digital librarians are nothing more than fancified tools that have always emerged in the course of human history. Nothin' very special at all. Just novelty stuff with no modern meaning whatsoever. Maybe I had better go ask Google if that's true, for the sake of great historians like jar.”HM

I don't know. Could there be a recursive, mastermind effect that comes back to haunt us? Take security cams in public places, for example. New York's Mayor Bloomberg said recently that everyone on New York's streets and in its parks are now being watched and recorded by security cameras. This also seems true now for many of NY's private places. You can't even pick your nose anymore without MasterCam taking a live-action picture of it. And you can't make a credible argument on Internet forums anymore without consulting MasterGoogle. Oh, this must be what Orwell was taking about!”HM

NJ, what's your take on the so-called Singularity?”HM

I'll be examining your posts carefully from now on for any evidence of googleism.”HM