Don't Just 'Google It'

It is time, if not past time, to end “Just Google it” Culture. 

I have found that there is a direct line between my mental health and how much time I spend in “the comments section” of any given corner of the internet. So, noting the scrolling spirals and spats I’ve been in lately, my prognosis is not good. However, one upside to spending too much time watching strangers yell at each other underneath hackneyed “takes,” is being able to watch which way slang, temperaments, and the zeitgeist is drifting. “Google it” culture has fallen on hard times. 

When I first started working in the field of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (there I said all of those words, come arrest me) it was very common to hear people haughtily recommend  “you know, Google is free” and that the emotional labor of explaining things should not lay at the feet of the person with a marginalized identity when all the information in the world lay at our fingertips. Although I do agree with all the sentiments surrounding not expecting a person who is i.e. Jewish, queer, of color, etc. to help you see their humanity, I do not agree that sending minds ignorant of whole communities and cultures into the wilds of the Internet without a compass is building justice.

The issue I found with what feels like a dismissive 'digital exiling' even BEFORE the advent of AI being the loudest voice on the browser,  is that Google doesn’t know. Google has resources that hold answers and if you don’t know where to look or what you are looking at, it’s very easy to learn something incorrectly. If someone’s angry blog has good Search Engine Optimization and there it is -the first hit on the first page,  then you might inadvertently think true the “alternative facts” (also known as falsehoods) presented.

And now, it’s even worse. When I tell you that even some of the most discerning people I know are not going much further than the result Co-Pilot or Gemini spits out above all the links and articles on a topic. I shake my head in chagrin to think about how we made fun of Wikipedia in the early days and how much I now wish people would open it and go down the clickity rabbit holes of yore. However, given that recent data suggests that 75 percent of people don’t even open the links they share with others, it is no secret that on the whole we have stopped reading as a society.

TLDR, but make it everything. 

In this new world with its BETA+ versions of LLMs summarizing and skimming the breadth and width of the Internet, sometimes the answer comes out sounding still like a hedged bet  “Oh, Pronouns, well, Pronouns might be referring to...” or worse- the answer bots spit out a blurb that is just completely and utterly wrong because it has been eating and regurgitating all the wrong things. Who knew the old saying "you are what you eat" would one day apply to AI?

During the early days of my DEI career, I would have conversations with my colleagues in which we all agreed that the reason we were in this line of work was to answer the questions people had, we wanted to be that person who could give a straight, or complicated, or difficult answer. 

I still believe in my commitment to have difficult conversations, inspire people to nuance, and help build bridges across gulfs of Insolation  that “ just Googling it” in a silo can make worse. It's why the field is still needed, why teachers of all walks are still crucial and why we need to remember that all the technology we have still cannot outshine a conversation between two seeking and willing people.