Truly Dependant

The internet was anarchy before Google existed. The World Wide Web was a hard place to navigate in and often specific information about certain things was a challenge to attain. Obviously other search engines existed before and side-by-side Google but none of them could achieve the rank and status that Google did. Google is the perfect search engine and through our needs we are becoming dependant on it.

Everybody and everything uses Google nowadays; as Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it, there is a “Googlization of everything”. What Vaidhyanathan means is that Google is affecting us on a larger scale than just being our favorite and best search engine. Google brings everything in the world together under one single place. We can access library archives, government records, everything within entertainment, information on anybody in the world and endlessly more things. Google collects an immense amount of information that is all organized and made easy for us to access.

We as humans are by nature lazy and Google with its mission being “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” plays right into that nature. Probably the most attractive thing about Google is that it is effortless. With a couple of keystrokes you are able to access essentially any information you need. Google’s ambition to create the perfect search engine is very dependent on the user’s appreciation of the service. Playing into our nature and also with help of accessing our personal information, opinions, habits and judgments; Google has undoubtedly accomplished the feat of its ambition.

We have become extremely dependant on Google and what it offers. Google is absolutely great but as Vaidnynathan explains also dangerous. “It’s dangerous because of our increasing, uncritical faith in and dependence on it … for the worse.” Vaidnynathan is saying that we use Google far too much. We are moving towards being incapable of functioning without it. Just like when automobiles and planes emerged we became dependant on them not knowing the full effects of how dangerous they actually are. Vaidnynathan mentions that this dependency is not necessarily an altogether terrible thing, as Google is also helping change our culture for the better prospering our world markets and culture. However, the way we will let Google shape the future needs to be proceeded with caution.

Our dependency on Google has helped it thrive and it is now truly amazing. Google has become the perfect search engine and continues to improve every single day.  Every time you go on to the internet to do anything today you basically use Google. If it is to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving or to see how your stocks are doing, Google is where you will first go most of the time. The amount of information that can be found through Google is unimaginable and is why it is so very important to us. If Google were to shut down today it would be very hard for us to manage and would affect everything poorly worldwide. “The perfect search engine”, Google, has us wrapped around its “cyber-finger”.