Fun with Google

So, while copyediting a book review, I wanted to verify a couple of things about a title, How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth) by Henry Alford. Just to be quick about it, I Googled the title. I found it right away, of course, but also found (among the top of the total of 95 million listings) the following other guidelines for living:

How to live a life of contentment~a blog of Zen habits, chock full of advice such as: focus on what's important, do less each day, do only one thing at a time, eat slowly.

How to live Online~Not sure why, but the top post of this blog was how to stop being sad, which included advice such as accept why you are sad, talk to a trustworthy person, write/talk/paint your feelings.

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day~A Wikipedia entry for a 1910 book by Arnold Bennett who (as part of a larger philosophy) suggests setting aside 90-minutes (to start) a day to improve your life by reading and learning more about your business, history, and art. Suggested reading includes Milton's Paradise Lost.

Forbes magazine article "Ten Ways to Live Longer"~It all starts with attitude (I stopped reading after that) and references Woody Allen and Hugh Hefner. In the same paragraph.

Audioslave's video for "Show Me How to Live"~Includes the lyrics, "You gave me life/now show me how to live."

Thinking How to Live~From the Harvard University Press catalog, Allan Gibbard's book that is based on his philosophy that our thoughts, actions, beliefs all stem from the questions we ask ourselves. Or, as the university press puts it, "The result is a book that investigates the very nature of the questions we ask ourselves when we ask how we should live, and that clarifies the concept of 'ought' by understanding the patterns of normative concepts involved in beliefs and decisions." Phew! "Metaethics" indeed.

Of course, with all this advice on how to live, one wouldn't really have time to live.

This is your brain on Google

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” inquiring minds at the Atlantic Monthly (July/August) want to know.

Google’s power and appeal (or powerful appeal or appealing power?) cannot be ignored. But while Google does put a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, it, at the same time, closes off even more from consideration. Yes, they have been trying to remedy this by scanning every book they can get their electric mitts on (copyright be damned), but they make it too easy for students, scholars, and writers to neglect all the source information that is hidden in archive boxes and bookshelves in out of the way libraries. Not to mention that there is something tactile and satisfying in touching and reading an original letter that has long been hidden away and all but forgotten about that you just can’t get from keyboard clicks and the glow of a computer monitor.

All that being said, the folks at the Atlantic Monthly are getting at something more basic and elemental. All that quick reading that we are doing by flipping through Google snippets and flitting from Web page to Web page is having a physical effect on our brains. (As McCoy once said, “They’ve got Jim’s brain!”) Only it’s not the aliens, we’ve done it to ourselves by how we now read. As the Atlantic Monthly’s Nicholas Carr puts it, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

As it turns out, reading is not as hardwired into our brains as speech and oral communication is. This is evident, clearly, in the history of communication. We were speakers and listeners long before we were writers and readers. And we brought the instinct for oral communication, according to researchers at Cornell University, along with us on our evolutionary journey from the sea.

Reading, apparently, is not that fundamental.