Google is Dismantling our Epistemic Reliability

Google, and the relation to knowledge it promotes, is eroding the dependability of the pursuit of knowledge the world over. Google advances a pedagogy of surfaces by distributing effortlessly accessed and seemingly useful information. A cult of Googling is mounting an attack on culture and, more astonishingly, on concepts and the way we view them. Our very approach to knowledge is shifting toward a reductive extreme, namely that of "direct access to fact". This is a radical departure from the traditional center of inquiry characterized by method and fueled by reason.

Google has replaced critical inquiry with a pacific stasis, an ugly complacence, a dis-empowering passivity.

Knowledge can admittedly be sought in different ways. Poetry, for example, hardly obsesses over knowledge, but when it does it instructs in interstice. It is thus indirect and purposefully inefficient. Poetry's adversary, Google proclaims efficiency and follows through only because it has preconditioned its users to appreciate the result. Google teaches us to unitize information and then superficially link it to an obscene amount of other units. Google indexes information which it leverages toward advertising. Crass capitalism married to nifty marketing by specious claims to life improvement.

In the methamphetamine saturated culture we've inherited, it is no surprise that a Google approach to knowledge has mass appeal. Whether speed creates the problem or solves it badly, our attention span has crumpled to a traumatized and brittle few seconds. I confess: I rarely, if ever, travel beyond the first 10 hits that google retrieves. Skipping to another search is a reflex that google cherishes because it spells the inevitability of future searches.

Furthermore, memory has not only been neutralized--which would at least be tolerable--but actually replaced by a strong tendency to self-indexing. By this I mean that where an individual memory was once the property of a uniquely assembled (albeit transient) human brain, propriety has now been transferred to anyone who should happen to steal a cell phone or view web content. Instantaneous duplication of immediacy is home to a vile circularity that threatens all sorts of endeavors.

Online chatting, for instance, has encroached upon the solitude that people used to seek for repose. Reflection isn't a lost art, it has turned into Version 1.0 in the evolution of modern selfhood. Reflection and introspection used to confirm people to themselves by themselves. We have gradually substituted virtual confirmation by others for this fiercely defined personhood. Look at my photographs, listen to my narrative, and relate to my crisis, then remind me why I still matter. Where once we individuals mattered as individuals unto ourselves, today we only matter as voracious consumers of the attention of others.

Google, it seems, might not be the culprit but rather the altar, built hastily for self-love and not sacrifice.