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

How bad is your googling habit? Mine's up to about 50 googles a day, on average. Google is something like the Wizard of Oz: Oh, Great Google, what is the current human population of the world? Or, oh, great Google, what do you know about figerglass blisters? Or, oh, great Google, what did Bob Dylan mean by "blowin' in the wind"? Or, Oh, great Google, has anyone ever wondered if tsetse-fly genes jump into their victims? Great Google will always come through with answers, no matter how far-fetched or stupid my question might be. And even if I can't spell, Google will help me out. Google is patient and kind. Google is Lord.If I cared to take the trouble I might be able to make an argument, using Google, of course, that Google is something of quantum-mechanical monster. Google could even be the new threat to our free will and self-determination. Too early to tell. But I can tell you one thing: If Google had been around when I was in school or during my profession career, life would have been very different for me and everyone else. It's hard for us to see it, but the powers of information-gathering in human affairs are growing very fast. Maybe we are becomming Homo sapiens googleease.So my coffee-house questions are these: Could you live without Google (or any of its peers)? Is googling good or bad for humanity? Is it going to change us. Is Google a potentially mind-controlling monster? Or is just a better librarian?”HM

Amen, brother.

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We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined).

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I can see now more easiliy that this notion of Google Is Lord is not new. Still, the quantum-mechanical aspects of it are interesting. I think I see versions of actions-at-a-distance, or entanglements, very large number of participants, and collapsing wave functions. Could be the closest thing we have to a quantized human consciousness.”HM

So you think Google is just a better librarian?”HM

I've googled a lot of stuff you can't find in any encyclopedia. Besides, didn't Diderot fuel a revolution when he wrote the Encyclopedia? Your trouble here is that you're too young to see the fuller sweep of history. You need to consult with older people more often.”HM

bluescat48, have you every asked yourself "Am I googleable?" The world is now divided into two subspecies of virtual humans, those who are googleable and those who are not.”HMEdited by Hoot Mon, : Subtitle added

You boys need to keep in mind that we older people are closer to history than you are. Therefore we know more. Can you tell me, without consulting Lord Google Almighty, what you know about the Zuit Suit Riots or how the Silent Generation got its name? They explain everything from post-war pop fashion to roots of twentieth-century social rebellion.”HM

Gosh, you're right about the name. I don't know where I came up with "Zuit" instead of "Zoot." I shouldda googled it. But I think it took place in LA in the mid 40s. I equate it with the first wave of juvenile delinquency, which was setting into an incipient youth culture while all our fathers where away at war. By the time they got home the worms were out of the can, and even I, a corny Midwestern kid, was wearing peg pants by the late 40s.”HM

History is like Chinese Whispers. The closer you are to the source the more accurate the reporting.”HM

We didn't have onions, but we had skinny, leather belts to hold up our pegged pants. My GI father and I had wars over it.”HM

Back to my point precisely!”HMEdited by Hoot Mon, : No reason given.

Pegged pants were a very big deal for the style-conscious teen of the late 40s and early 50s. Here's a boy who got away with wearing a zoot suit with pegged pants (narrow cuffs). The cuff circumference of your trousers meant everything to your social status back then. If your pants were uncuffed and straight-legged you were very uncool, probably lived in a devoutly religious home. You were at high risk of being accused of wearing "bell-bottoms." Yuk! But if your pants were pegged like those in the picture you were very cool and probably came from a broken home. Coolness was measured by degree between the two extremes. My father, a strict conservative, allowed me to get my pants pegged just a little. But I was not allowed to look in any way like a Zoot Suiter.This is where the divide began, I think, that put teenagers on a troubled track leading to rebelleous things like rock 'n' roll and Beatniks. Hence America morphed from infantile paralysis to juvenile delinquency. Ever watch the movie "Blackboard Jungle"?”HM

You're probably right. But I am drawing on my person experience to analyze post-war history, which is of course dubiously anecdotal. What I find strange about the zoot-suit craze is how anti-GI it was; they had fought and died for our American freedom and won the great war, but in very short order their kids were emulating the gangster elements of Mexicans instead of true-blue American values.Something was going south in America that the GIs couldn't stop.”HM

This is true. The Zoot Suit Riots of LA lodged in my memory and probably biased my thinking. The pegged-pants fad that reached my home town, Toledo, was the first such youth craze after the war (that I can remember). It seemed to me to be a fulminating event to me.”HM

After the war was over America's attention shifted to its youth and its pop culture, attempting to grapple with problems like polio and juvenile deliquency. The youth had become progressively more troublesome while their fathers were away at war. In a surprisingly sudden way the cultures of minorities were being adopted by school children. When pegged pants hit Toledo it was a big deal, and it was taken by GIs everywhere as a sign of serious trouble. Even though zoot suits had been around for while, the Zoot Suit Riots of LA during the war marked a shift in the direction toward youth rebellion. At least that's how I experienced it. My GI father thought pegged pants meant anarchy. And this was a relatively tame opinion compared to what he thought about Chuch Berry, Little Richard, and the Beatniks.”HM

We need something better than humans to interpret history. We're all too bias to report anything accurately. This is where Google comes in. Lord Google will work with Lords Wiki and Yahoo to remove human bias cybernetically, something like a digitally remastered recording of Billie Holiday.”HM