I Looked Up God On The Internet, And It Said He's Dead

By Darryl Mason

Opinonist Miranda Devine is worried about becoming as intellectually irrelevant in her children's lives as she is in the lives of her fading Sydney Morning Herald readers :

...my generation will be the last to remember life without a search engine to instantly satiate curiosity, we are the only ones left to contemplate a downside.

My sons' generation have never known a world without Google. If they have a question, whether about the Super Bowl or Frost/Nixon or penguins, they search for the answer online instantly. Why bother to explore the imperfect memory banks of parents and teachers when Wikipedia and imdb.com are at their fingertips.

Well yeah, why indeed? Why should kids waste their time asking their parents for information that is faster, more thorough, and more easily accessible online?

If they are betting each other about something, they immediately resolve the question online, leaving little room to develop the bush lawyer skills of browbeating an opponent and prosecuting your case....

Google is apparently stopping kids from learning how to "browbeat" others into accepting a false truth. It stops children from learning to stubbornly argue their own beliefs like highly opionated ignorants, locked into a belief system that locks in place an acceptable reality.

Google may be the cranial equivalent of those motorised scooters ridden by obese Americans at Disneyland. Initially a prop for a lazy brain, it soon becomes essential.

What apparently concerns Miranda Devine most is that the very act of going to Google, instead of just asking mum or seeking out answers through non-internet means, is actually transforming the presumably God-delivered architecture of our brains, and consciousness :

The way we use our brain actually changes its physical structure over time. It is a "lifetime work in progress" that retains plasticity - the capacity for change - as long as we live.

"Our brain's organisation will undergo greater changes during the next few decades than at any time in our history … This technologically-driven change in the brain is the biggest modification in the last 200,000 years …"

....if we always are to sate our curiosity with an answer provided by someone else, where is the room for original thought? Rather than taxing our brain, we only plunder the store of what the world already knows.

Google, like other search engines, gives easy access to the greatest collection of human history, opinion, events, art, design, obscure details and general information our species has ever collected, sorted, compiled. And it's nearly all free to read, to soak up, to wonder over, to then argue and debate. And correct, if necessary.

There were a few people in the mid-1800s who, while not knowing what bacteria was, realised that surgeons washing their hands before and after operations dramatically cut down on the spread of deadly infections in their patients. This essential truth was subject to much heated and career-destroying debate, for decades, and plenty of angry exchanges with those who refused to believe the truth. Surgeons continued to operate without washing their hands first well in the early 1900s. Hundreds of thousands of people died unecessarily because this essential truth was denied to the masses, was halted from becoming an essential common Truth.

A revolutionary, world-changing, life-saving discovery, such as the above, would now be dispersed across the wired world within minutes, and it would be all but impossible to ignore such a truth because everyone around you, from the receptionist to your patients, would be telling you you're an idiot because you still refuse to believe it.

I can't see how Google is essentially any different from the arrival of encyclopedia in homes more than a century ago, or the establishment of libraries in schools.

Wasn't having a Big Book Of Facts, a copy of the Guiness Book Of World Records and a couple of world history books kicking around somewhere in the house pretty much the same thing as basic Googling? Regardless of the technology involved?

Maybe the real pain is having your children listen to you explain how something works, or how an historic event unfolded, and then a few minutes and a few Google key word searches later hearing your offspring declare, "You're so wrong on that, you weren't even close."

Kids Online Before Training Wheels Come Off Bikes

It's going to be very interesting to see how children who learned to use the internet before they could read at even a primary school level will change our society in the coming decades :

Almost one in five children began using the internet...at the age of five or younger.

The same story reveals that government approved internet content filtering is mostly a very expensive bust, that two-thirds of pre-teen children have some level of parental supervision when they're online and that Australian children now spend more time in social networking sites than in chat rooms.

I can't see such high usage of the net by young children as anything other than positive. Look at the all the reading, writing, typing, thinking, required to navigate the net and use social networking sites. The exposure, from such an early age, to a world of information, and opinion, beyond the local or high school library, or the city newspaper and evening news, can only work wonders in the shaping of a more curious, more questioning, less gullible generation. This generation of under-5s on the net will never be conned so easily by government and corporate media lies and spin as the Baby Boomers or even GenXers were.

Best of all, if you can learn to steer clear of weirdos, perverts and fuckwits by the age of 5 online, you're life as an adult will be far less harassed by those who seek to do you harm or rip you off.

I've watched my nephew, barely five years old at the time, whipping through internet sites looking for free games to play at extraordinary speeds. He could soak up all the information he needed to know about the site he'd hit in what seemed like one or two seconds. I would have needed a nap and a strong coffee to process information that fast, and doubt that I could do it at all.

The web, and computers generally, are no big deal to kids whatsoever. They're born into hospitals crowded with them, ride home in cars equipped with them, live surrounded by toys and households filled with them, and learn to use remote controls and DVD players before they even get colours sorted out.

While minor computer geeks closing in on 40, like me, think the reality of a touch screen home computer is pretty wild, most kids you ask would say "Why's it taking so long?"

I still vividly remember my first real exposure to computers. My high school was one of the first, if not the first, non-private schools in Australia to have a row of glowing green screen Apple computers installed in a classroom. Teachers organised raffles to pay for the computers, but I think Apple basically took a loss to get them in our school. It's still vivid in my mind how utterly awed we were to learn that we could type in (lots of) lines of code and make our own Space Invaders game. An early introduction to programming and piracy.

By the time these online under-5s reach high school, they won't be using keyboards anymore and computer code will seem hilariously prehistoric. Even voice-recognition control will be outdated. They won't have the same horrified resistance as us to having GoogleBrain installed via a small implant.

The question then would not be : How young is too young to go online?

The question will be : I don't want my child to be left behind, but is wi-fi-ing my baby while he's still in the womb as safe as everybody says it is?