Recently in public, I overheard a woman casually remark, in the middle of her conversation, that “Google is our best friend now.”
In the sense that Google has become so widely used by everyone, it has indeed become our best friend, available 365 days a year, seven days a week, every hour of the day, every second of the day. We are told that, by using Google, we can find “a wealth of knowledge with just a few keystrokes.”[i] Google is visited 89.3 billion times every month. There are over 8.9 billion Google searches per day.[ii]
Yes, Google has branched out into countless aspects of our lives. We Google this, and we Google that. Here a click, there a click, and we can find the answers to almost any question online. At our service is Dr. Google, Chef Google, Google the Farmer, Google the Gardener, Google the Everything.
If we need to know the definition of a word, say syzygy for instance, our first instinct has become to type it into our phone’s search bar. No one wants to dig out a dictionary, thumb through it, and rely on his own spelling to find the word.
Suppose we don’t know where Timbuktu is; we type that into Google Maps and watch the map whoosh to its destination. We dismiss the old-fashioned idea of trying to find the place ourselves on a globe or in an atlas. (An atlas? What’s an atlas?)
Books and magazines used to be our Google. Besides the fact that they allow us to use our own brains, books are a more satisfying source of high-quality information. Unlike content on the internet, books never change. We can refer to them whenever we need to—without a dozen ads popping up, without having to scroll through endless websites trying to find that certain article again.
Google is a part of progress. It has become an accepted part of our lives. It must be confessed that the internet is useful, and can even be helpful in many situations.
But Google doesn’t have a soul or a brain; it is a programmed thing. Thankfully we humans are not programmed, but created by our Creator. We are marvelously designed and intricately formed. God gave us our brains for a reason. We can’t let the internet cancel out our wits.
Speaking plainly, we rely too much on the internet. Perhaps. . . perhaps we should use it less.
[i] https://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/#topicOverview
[ii] https://www.oberlo.com/blog/google-search-statistics
