For KB

In the early 15th century the Incas created a system of distributing information through their empire. Across the Andes Mountains, at elevations higher than 17500 feet, the Incans built a complex system of roads and bridges for messengers. These messengers, or Chaquis, would run from one station to the next along narrow mountain roads and bridges, relaying each message further than 150 miles a day. The Chaquis are famous for chewing cocaine leaves to keep their blood circulating while they raced across frozen mountain paths. Without this stimulation, their extremities could become frozen stiff. Their tough workouts doubled their lung capacity. The Chaquis played a nation wide game of telephone, and in the process, they created a complex system of disseminating information. This system required a lot of hard work, but accurate and up-to-date information was crucial to the empire.

Google is my Chaqui. It relays the important, up-to-date information I need right to my computer. Within .6 seconds I have over six million applicable results.

In the early 1990’s Larry page, a graduate student at Stanford, attempted to download the entire Internet. Even though the internet was smaller back then, his project didn’t work out. He kept running out of memory. Besides, having every webpage is useless if you can’t find the one you need.

Along came the spider.

This Internet spider is a web crawling automated robot. This spider robot in no way resembles either a spider or a robot. Rather, it is a computer program that automatically scans the far reaches of the Internet to download tiles, phrases, and words. The spider then categorizes and archives the information. A search engine can then scan through the spider’s info to match up your request to the applicable websites. For any query, Google can present you with around six million responses in less than six seconds. These web crawling creepers are always scouring for new websites to read, catalogue, and archive for future reference.

The instant results are changing the way the readers interacts with the news. While backpacking in Mountains of Thailand, I met a young boy. He wasn’t older than seven, yet he ran up to me, looked me in the eyes and asked—Obama or Hillary? How did he know they were the two leading democratic candidates? It was only the primaries and there wasn’t even a paved road leading to his tiny mountaintop village.

Later that evening the boy’s father asked me about American politics and current events. Eager for an update, I could tell he was slightly surprised by how little I understood about current events. Instead of teaching him about American politics, he taught me about current events in America, and their impact on the rest of the world. Somehow in the media saturated world of news I had forgotten to see what was going on. He had been eager to learn everything possible streaming on the few AM radio stations. He was driven by natural curiosity to access information and learn about the world around him. I had grown complacent when news became instantly accessible.

This easy access to massive amounts of information is also changing academic and educational research.

The 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer contained the largest personal library of his day. It was considered presumptuous to own so many books—around five thousand dollars worth. Yet this massive library only contained sixty books. Why would anyone need access to such a wide and extensive personal library?

Today, entire libraries are read, categorized and ready for instant access. Research formally confined to late hours in the basement of a musty library is done instantly. Those sleepless caffeinated nights are unnecessary. Simply type in the author, title or subject and the search engine will scour for you. If you show up to class without completed research, it’s not because you couldn’t find it, but because you didn’t look.

The step of looking—the motivation required to get through those books—instilled a desire and a reward for finding information. Now, articles aren’t praised by where they were found, how hard you looked for it or why you think it’s important. The process of searching comes not only from the initial curiosity that spurred the search. Research is solidified during the search. It is time spent analyzing and questioning why and what you are looking for. Without this process, students have become lazy and are only concerned with whether or not an article is interesting —does it entertain? Research lost its meaning when the search for information was distilled to typing a simple phrase into a search bar.

The time between searching and finding keeps shrinking. Yet an understanding of the value of finding is also depreciating. Running across the mountain ranges, a Chaqui knew the importance of the information. Atop the mountains in Thailand, I saw unadulterated natural curiosity––always eager to search. But now in the saturation of news feeds BBC videos, I am completely unaware of my surroundings. During that .6 seconds of insecurity, waiting for Google to find my results, I lost the drive to find what it was I was looking for.