The Google Guys
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Rollerblading math whizzes who launched Google, may not look like your average business tycoons, but they stand firmly in the tradition of the great American industrialists of the last century. They’ve brought the ethic of speed, automation, and efficiency—the ethic of Henry Ford’s factory—to the work of the mind. What is Google but a lightning-quick assembly line for knowledge? Before the two Stanford buddies invented their miraculous search engine, finding facts and other information was drudgery. You traipsed through the corridors of libraries. You pored over journals and magazines. You read books. Now research is a breeze. Three billion times a day we ask Google for advice, and 3 billion times a day Google replies with a neatly arranged list of suggestions. It takes about a second. How could we live without Google? The fact is, we couldn’t. In just a decade, the Internet search engine has become as deeply embedded in our personal lives and in society’s routines as the internal-combustion engine. But has Google made us any wiser? Probably not. As we zip between snippets of information online—click, click, click—what we sacrifice is the kind of deep thinking that comes only to the calm, attentive mind. Unlike old-fashioned libraries, the Googlized Web offers no quiet corners for rumination and reflection. An assembly line exists to be in motion. Page and Brin brought the Internet economy back to life after the dotcom disaster. Their intellectual legacy will likely be equally momentous, if less laudable.
source: newsweek
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