Every day, I get closer to chucking this whole Internet thing and living in the basement of a real, honest-to-God library, where real information lives and breathes. At the very least, everyone the least bit interested in researching anything should be banned from all search engines. They do nothing but feed advertisers, erode depth of thought, and do more damage to intelligence than E! News.
To save us all, they’ve got to go. (Okay, maybe we can keep Ms. Dewey, but delete the rest, for God’s sake.)
Here’s the tragedy.
In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday, I had my ninth graders write a two-page paper on someone, alive and well these days, who could be said to live up to the standards set by Dr. King. You’d have thought I was God talking to Lot before the burning of the cities. No one could possibly live up to the name of King. I reminded my students that anyone was up for grabs; the trick was in the research.
And so, a few days later, the essays came pouring in. Oprah was acknowledged for her generosity here and abroad. Tupac Shakur was given props for speaking for his people. (I know Tupac’s been dead a while, but the argument was pretty good, so I let it fly.) There was even an argument for Jerry Springer. (Don’t ask. That’s anger for another post.) What made me almost quit was the Malcolm X essay.
Yes, Malcolm is dead, and by default, didn’t count for this essay. The problem was the kid’s research. He’d used Wikiality–Stephen Colbert’s Truthiness search engine–as his main source. I wanted to be angry and fail him on the spot. But then I realized that he was earnest. Colbert is more popular than, say, Brian Williams, and, in a twisted way, is probably seen as more informative or, at least, more informed than Williams. That’s when it hit me: this kid had never been taught to use a library, never scoured the stacks for ages-old tomes, never cracked the spine of a Reader’s Guide to Periodicals before. Sarcasm with a straight face becomes the fact, while real research becomes the joke and it’s all because people don’t do real research these days.
I read about Heath Ledger’s death online. I was going to Google information about his movies and to see if “The Dark Knight” (this summer’s new Batman film in which Ledger plays the Joker) was still going to be released but then stopped myself. I read that many people who Googled certain keywords about Ledger ended up with a computer virus.
The death of your hard drive for trusting Google? Sounds like poetic justice to me.