[extropy-chat] The Danger of 'Google History'

[Amara Graps]

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/28/news-levine.php

March 14 -20, 2003 
The Danger of Google History in a Time of War 
Or ‘Dennis Prager called me a liar’
by Mark LeVine

Some quotes from the article:

<<"Since I can’t find it on Google, you’re obviously lying," Mr.
Prager informed me—and his listeners—as we returned from a
commercial.>>

<<Later, as my head cleared, I began to realize just how dangerous
our on-air exchange was for the future of history—as a scholarly
discipline and a public trust. To begin with, the Google standard
of history assumes that if something hasn’t made it onto the web,
it never happened. This is clearly nonsense, as there are
innumerable contemporary events that never become Googleable
"facts" because the people involved have neither the access to
official "recorders of history" (such as reporters, activists or
scholars) nor the technology to put it on the web themselves. Or
the information could be on the web, but in Arabic, French,
Japanese or a hundred other languages Prager might not have the
software to decipher. I>>

<<Google history also ignores the fact that quite a few important
events occurred before the birth of the web. Did the
Revolutionary War not happen because it’s not cached by Google or
in the Times’ online archive? >>I

<<The problems of Google history are not restricted to the
competing claims of Israeli and Palestinian violence. A group of
high school teachers recently showed me the materials they’ve
been given to help their students learn about Iraq. It reads like
Google history—a few names and dates, with the nuances and
complexities of the country’s history and our role in it nowhere
to be found. Worse still, most of the materials were created by
several mainstream news organizations for their "educational"
websites. This is one reason professors frown on students using
the web for research. >>

<<There’s a reason history should be written by historians and not
by Internet software or talk-show hosts: Who else today has the
time and patience to sift through the past to unearth the events
and ideas that are fundamental to reasoned public debate on the
most crucial issues facing our society? The ancient Greeks long
ago realized that history is crucial to democracy; especially in
wartime, we Googleize it at our peril.>>