Information, Information, Information

After a recent blog post and possibly the Tweet or Retweet from The Pumped Librarian I have been thinking a lot about how we interact with information. Is it better or worse to have this much media flowing into our phones, computers and for some televisions? I have thus far refused to use del.icio.us because I already cannot handle the amount of information coming to me through various forms of social media and standard web surfing. I would have a complete mental breakdown if I had a running list of articles bookmarked that I had meant to read but hadn't found the time to.

One of the articles I did receive and read was MSNBC's Search questions often both wacky and weird which discusses how search engines have changed our lives and how Google (and other companies) auto-fill search predictors offer an amusing insight into the world's searches.

I first noted the hilarity when typing in the phrase, "which is worse" when trying to compare high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners. What I saw was this:



I found it funny that marijuana use is listed twice but not using it's hard to spell term, but rather weed. You would think that a browser's auto-spell check would help out with this, but perhaps it is a bunch 12 year olds sitting around trying to figure out what to try first. It's not surprising, to me, that health concerns dominate the list, considering how unhealthy we Americans tend to be.

Of course, seeing this and then reading the above mentioned article I decided to test out a few other phrases to see how entertaining this could be. I tried "who is" next:



Here we find someone looking for a question posed in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, among other things. I am most struck by the last one asking who the antichrist is. Seriously? Is this just a group of scared christian children using the web to get all the answers they couldn't find in the good book? But seriously if there was an antichrist who came to town and there was an epic battle between heaven and hell I am pretty sure this would be common knowledge to all of humankind.

Next up "Should I...":



"Should I get a divorce"

"Should I call him?"

There can't really be people sitting at their computers thinking that the internet has the answers of these extremely personal questions, right? Please tell me I am right.

I am pretty sure "should I shave my pubic hair" wins this round. I think google should respond to this one with questions of its own.

"Do you have crabs?"

"Is it uncomfortable?"

"Does your boyfriend or girlfriend call your nether regions The Black Forest?"

"Is your Boyfriend or Girlfriend having a hard time locating the desired parts?"

Two other great phrases are "last night I" and "could I"





Hopefully we have all learned something about how Google has practically become everything to everyone, a confidant and a friend. What does this say about us? About the age of information? And about where we are headed as a culture?