A Search on Eggs

1973:

Because we can ‘Google’, we don’t necessarily need to learn from other far more long-winded sources. Anyone’s access to the Net helps to shed light on big and small issues as quickly as it occurs to us to want to find out about something.

Take the subject of ‘egg’ for example. We can Google it and find out about its nutritional qualities, how it is produced and what foods contain egg. With that information at hand (if we use eggs) we can learn how to use them and if we don’t use them we can find why we don’t need them and of course ethically why we shouldn’t use them. This ability to gather information relatively painlessly makes us better informed and more self-reliant. We know it’s ridiculous to trust what political leaders or corporate advertisers say (they never tell the truth!) and we can’t necessarily trust our teachers and priests.

If a lot of what we’ve been taught is no longer believable, we have to start again, to search for information and come to rely more and more on ourselves. Via our computers, we can re-examine things for our self instead of accessing inside information by joining up with an organisation whose beliefs we might not completely agree with and whose information we may not entirely trust. Institutions and organisations often have reason to skew the facts to win support, and truth goes out of the window.

To gather information from a variety of sources, to become our own judge and jury, one needs to search widely, and all this is possible by using our computers intelligently. It’s not fool-proof but it’s a whole lot easier and far less time-consuming for getting what you want. And if we need basic information, the Net is more forthcoming than trawling through books, attending specialist courses or making do with limited information.

Because the Net is a world wide network, fed and read by many millions of people across the world, it’s information is scrutinised by many people and made available for anyone who wants to know. And it’s free. Once you’ve Googled the egg you can know all there is to know about this item, sufficient to make a carful judgement about it.