It can be kind of flattering: a young, attractive colleague sees you and says, "Oh, Paul, you'll know. What does 'boked' mean?"
Until you have to admit that you've never heard the word, and you see in her eyes a little disappointment, like somehow you haven't quite measured up.
So you head to your best dictionary and search the word. The next time you see her you say, "It's past tense of 'to boke'; it means to thrust or poke."
"Yeah, I know," she says.
"From the Germanic.."
"Yup."
"It's ob-"
"-solete. I Googled it," she says and smiles sympathetically.
The word hangs in the air, and you can see that 'obsolete' is what she's thinking about you and your dictionary. So you turn and dodder back to your class with your book under one arm and your reading glasses perched on your head.
The nature of knowledge has changed so dramatically in the past few years. It used to be that we would turn to those with education and experience to answer questions, and if they couldn't answer them, we were confident that they'd know where to look. But now we simply "Google" questions we have.
Our access to information is, quite literally, unlimited and I think that it has changed not only the way we search for answers to the questions we have, but also the value that we place in knowledge.
In class, when I ask students to take out dictionaries, many of them grab their iPhones and their unlimited data plans instead of reaching under their desks.
And why not, the access they have to information on-line far surpasses what they'll find in the 20-year-old dictionary that's available to them in class. And it's much more efficient to type in the question and scroll through the possible answers than to leaf through pages.
But sometimes I wonder if they will ever know the thrill of uncovering some new bit of knowledge and making it a part of themselves. That information is so easily available, in some ways, diminishes its value. Because it is so easy to find, there's no sense that it's special or important.
In university, I took a history course in which we studied no history; we just learned how to research and how to record our findings. It was fascinating, and I remember sitting in the stacks in dusty corners of the library with books piled around me and index cards full of notes strewn about my feet.
I remember, too, the satisfaction I got from uncovering some small tidbit of information. I can't imagine, in the age of Google, anyone either going to that effort or having the pleasure of discovering the information. It's all become so cheaply had.
But then again, if the probability that an English student has an iPhone is 0.087. And the probability that they're texting on-line instead of listening to what I say anyway is 0.68. Then the conditional probability that they give a damn about what I did in university is only 13%.
I know because I Googled it.
