From Cave Paintings to Google Searching the Internet
Since cave paintings began, humans have exhibited this unique desire to connect with each other and share ideas. This is perhaps one thing above all else that sets us apart from the beasts, and I often wonder if the Internet simply provides an ultra evolved extension of this same pass time. It was a recent post by my friend Michael Wharton about The Church of Google that had me thinking :- If humanities knowledge is a computer system, then Google, Social Networking and the Internet might be better described as the heuristic, control bus or selection process, responsible for connecting, sharing and interbreeding the appropriate ideas between people. Interestingly, Google are against proposition 8, which is nice to know.
Google as God?
Just as creatures evolve, I like to think that ideas evolve too and – likewise – the means we use to express these ideas must grow to facilitate this expansion. Realising that caves make a pretty lousy means of broadcasting, the humans invent paper which turned out to be much more portable and allowed these ideas to travel more freely. Then came radio and television which would quickly come to decide wars and inform the public about the world at large. The Internet is different in one important aspect – that we get some choice over our intellectual diet.
Could Google be thought of as God? I certainly don’t think this idea is as crazy as it must sound, given the inherent importance of language and communication to all human civilisations. Nothing changes the fact that Google is a collection of distributed computers that run code and have access to a massive database. It is a working masterpiece of form and function, but is certainly not a deity in the classical sense. But – perhaps like evolution – this is because our beliefs were wrong.
Google – Catalyst of the Human Condition
Nara is one of my all time favourite Japanese cities, packed full with national treasures and ancient temples. Like many throughout Southeast Asia, TÅdaiji (æ±å¤§å¯º) temple in Nara has Kongorikishi (金剛力士) or NiÅ (ä»çŽ‹) at the gates. These are two guardians, the left is known as Naraen KongÅ (那羅延金剛) and has it’s mouth in an “a” position (AgyŠ阿形), symbolising the birth of all things. (Like our Alphabet, the Japanese consider ‘a’ to be the first letter of the alphabet). The right one is known as Misshaku KongÅ (密迹金剛) having it’s mouth in an n or m position (last letter of the alphabet), known as UngyÅ (å½å½¢) – symbolising the death of all things. Amazingly, a similar analogy exists for life and death in Christian civilisation with Alpha (A) and Omega (Ω) – the first and last letters of the classical Greek alphabet (Book of Revelation verses 1:8, 21:6, and 22:13) :
Revelation verses 1:8
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come…
Revelation verses 21:6
…“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End”…
But why is language so important that many cultures measure their very existence against it? Language shapes our beliefs about the world, and affects our behaviour. It is used to document our journey of self discovery and what is left behind after we are gone will form pieces of a jigsaw that will ultimately come to define us.
The truth is, when it comes to subjects like birth and death, we develop all kinds of elaborate beliefs in an attempt to find meaning for something which is only temporary. It predisposes us to fixate on where we came from – how we got here, and where we are going. We become search. From a young age we learn to start asking questions. Google aims to match you up with someone who (it believes) has the answers. Ideas that would have been limited by geographical borders, by culture or by language can now be almost totally free.
I suppose I would see Google as a catalyst of the human condition. Whatever our creators intended for us, whatever purpose our lives serve, or whatever it is that separates us from the animals … Google and the Internet help us do it better!
