More rambling thoughts

It is the saver of time, it is the waster of time. To paraphrase Dickens. It is also the best and the worst. It is the internet. What a wonderful and terrible thing it is. Like all time saving devices and inventions it seems to suck up time and give us less time for anything.

Once upon a time, as all fairy stories begin, if you wanted to know something you find someone who knew and asked. Finding someone might take a long time, and then you got that one opinion. Then, there were libraries. Public libraries thanks to Mr. Franklin. You could find out anything there if you could successfully navigate the card catalog, and sometimes you found a book with what you wanted to know, somewhere, between those covers.

Now there is the source of all knowledge, the oracle, the great man of Oz, the hive over-mind, the internet! Anything you could possibly want to know, yes, even unanswerable questions, can be satisfied on the internet. Yes, anything you want to know. You can get lots of answers. Some of them are even right, if only you could figure out which ones.

You pick a search engine, that Google, Bing, Yahoo thing. You start to type in your question and before you get past the first word the great universal brain is trying to guess what you want. Can you imagine (you might not even have to imagine) trying to ask someone a question who keeps interrupting and guessing what your question is going to be? At least you could walk away or get in a satisfying punch in the face.

So, eventually you get your query typed and up comes thousands of possible places to get information on - wait - most of these are not even close to what I wanted. Now you scroll though the endless lists or just pick the first one, which is usually a paid ad. Most people stop at the first answer. The first satisfying answer. Unfortunately, most of the search engines decide for you what you want to know. You might never be exposed to the alternate information. This can be good or bad. If the first stop you make is good, reliable information, you’re good. If not, your quest for knowledge has been compromised. This happens more often than not. There is, unfortunately, more bad information available than good information. We support that. We tend to go to information that supports what we want to believe rather than look at all sides and try to come to a rational conclusion. But, who has time for that?

Maybe you are only looking for recipes. Cookbooks are no longer needed. Hundreds of them are published every year in defiance anyway. Enter the ingredients, or a type of dish, any number of possible searches and many recipes appear. What a time saver, right? So, you start looking through recipes, this one looks good, but maybe there is a better one. Maybe this one. I don’t have all of those ingredients. What is that ingredient? I had better look that up.

Oh, look. That is a special spice from South Africa. I wonder if I can get that? Here’s a place to buy it. Oh, they have some nice cooking utensils. I wonder what that is for? Oh, that’s interesting. That is used to do this in that country. I don’t know much about that country. Here’s a link. Ahh, interesting.

It’s 3 hours later. Too late to make dinner. Better order out. I’ll look up who delivers. Oh, I’ve never tried that place. Wow, what a long menu! That looks good. I don’t know what that is. Here’s another good one.

Eventually you find something to order. Might as well surf around while you wait for the delivery. Another 45 minutes. The door bell rings. Dinner is here! If only you could get up. Your back hurts, your legs ache, you can’t focus on anything more than 18 inches away. You’re in a daze. You feel like you have wasted the whole day. Guess what? You did! Feel better now?

All that free time we now have and it just flies away. When I think back, days used to go on forever. But now the weeks fly by. It is all slipping away. At least it seems that way and I don’t know if it is a consequence of getting older or if the space-time continuum has shifted. I’m going with space-time continuum. I don’t want to think about the other. I should go Google that....