The unbreakable urge to Google
Or how it's actually okay to look at your phone sometimes.
You’re having a good chinwag, chatting away, maybe in a buzzing bar or in a park on a crisp day or at a friend’s house; maybe you’re sipping on a frosty beer or cradling an oat flat white — and then, it happens. A question. A gaping cavern of ignorance: “Has a British Prime minister even been assassinated?” The universal response is to pick up your phone and find out.
Well, I say universal, but some people absolutely despise this habit, see it as a faux pas, an insult to the very nature of conversation, a stain on the trouser fabric of society, and they’re right, but they’re also very very very wrong.
Googling is good. Googling is modern. Googling is part of our generation’s conversation.
Sidenote: I’m going to use “Googling” in this piece as a catch-all term for looking up something online. Sure, it’s not entirely accurate in this age of AI chatbots and TikTok and reading signs in the entrails of small animals, but I think we can all agree that “Googling” works as an umbrella term for searching the internet. Tell me if you disagree, but I’ll probably ignore it.
Certain things I experienced as a kid stuck with me, managing to worm their way into my brain and still hold an oversized slice of real estate there. Like my Dad’s old Britannica encyclopedias. They were pretty incomprehensible to a child — why, hello there, the Deutsche Mark — but they were also miraculous, giving me a glimpse into a world of information.
The problem was that using them wasn’t fun. “Have you looked it up in the encyclopedia?” was a common question my parents asked and one I continually had the same answer to: “No, I have not and I will not.”
Then Microsoft Encarta came along, which was much more my speed. This was a CD-ROM encyclopedia that had a lovely user interface and included pictures, audio, and video. Really, when I look back at it now, it’s like a proto-internet — but one seen through the lens of optimistic futurists. It’s a little like The Jetsons, a show that takes place in a 2062 that I can guarantee will be nothing like the actual 2062.
Anyway, Microsoft Encarta had all the trappings of the internet (you could click on things and shit moved!), but lacked breadth. There was multimedia, but a limited amount. Although, if you wanted to listen to a snippet of a Winston Churchill speech, by god, could you listen to a snippet of a Winston Churchill speech.
This is why the internet was such a revelation. Suddenly, I could get answers. Cool answers. Interesting answers. About things like tanks. Sure, there was a small section on them in an encyclopedia, but if I, a Very Normal and Well Adjusted child, wanted to create a 50-page booklet ranking my favourite tanks, I needed the specificity of the internet.
The experience of not having access to answers and then suddenly having all the information you need as a child is why I suspect my generation (ergo, Millennials) have the strongest urge to Google. We know what it’s like to yearn, oh how we yearned, but, friends, we yearn no more. The data is right there, on our phones.
Each generation has habits enforced upon it by technology. It’s why older music fans stick to albums and younger music fans veer towards playlists; the former grew up with vinyl and CDs, formats in which the album was the de facto method of consumption. This is how they grew up consuming music, and it’s something many broadly stick to.
Millennials got stuck with Googling shit.
Of course, people of all ages search online for answers, but it’s this segment, the generation that grew up both with and without the internet, where it hits the hardest.
But now we swing to the crux: is Googling bad? Should we be Googling while chatting?
Let me fix this for you right quick: no and yes. Googling is fine, Googling is great, and Googling is a conversation enhancer — but with two conditions. Firstly, you signal that you’re going to look something up on your phone before you do it. Just disappearing into your screen is rude and pointless. Two, you talk through what you’re looking at while searching and then immediately return to the conversation after the search.
There you have it.
Oh, and that question you had? It’s Spencer Perceval. The only British Prime Minister to be assassinated.
Love the idea of a Googling etiquette. Where my own frustration comes in is my absolute inability to not know something that I know is easily google-able. I recently started Bricking my phone (love this overall), but nothing itches so badly during moments of Bricking like the need, NEED to google. It’s like an addiction, I absolutely can’t cope otherwise.
And while I like the idea of googling as a conversation enhancer, I also think that the ability to reason into a guess without the fear of being wrong is a lost art. Imagine the following:
“Has a British PM ever been assassinated?”
“Well gosh, probably, the rest of the world has a pretty clear track record in that. Hmm. Well, when was the office established? Obviously it existed during the world wars and shortly before, but what would the impetus of the office be? Well surely, as long as there’s been an elected body in the UK or England, there has been an elected head of state…” blah blah blah
It’s a different conversation, but equally as enjoyable and valuable in a casual environment and all built off of not googling.
Really like this piece, really got me thinking, obviously. Thanks for sharing 😃