Google: Good or bad?

Google lights up my life. I get sports scores in real time, know what the weather is going to be like in Rome tomorrow, convert my baht to euros, book flights and hotels, read the paper, blog. Google doesn't necessarily do all these things itself, but it does facilitate straightforward access to them. When I was young, growing up in the South Pacific, I sometimes wouldn't know who won the World Series until the following year, when the new season's preview magazines hit the bookstands - now I know the same moment that someone in New York or San Francisco or, less likely, Kansas City does.

I use Google in class a lot, teaching students how to use it effectively, primarily through using straightforward search strategies, but also using Google Maps, and Blogger, and Youtube, and as a starting point for research in numerous projects. Like a public library once was, Google is the place we head by default when we have a general need for information.

And, like a librarian, Google interprets our query and attempts to return the best possible result - not by in depth questioning of the user, or years of experience, or conversational nuance, but through use of an algorithm that is more secret than the recipe for Coca Cola. This does put the onus on the user more than the facilitator - to get the best results, our searches and keywords need to be carefully chosen. But Google is intuitive enough for most users to understand this to a basic level, and we can all usually find something we want on the first page of results.

So that is my perception of Google. I view it not as a great storage unit of information, but as a sort of robotic librarian - it knows where to go to get the information I want, even at 3a.m.

But a great deal of the information that Google can go and get would not have been in the public library of 1976. In some ways, Google is a library of iniquity: pornography, paedophelia, bomb making, terrorist tips, racism, gambling - these are all growth markets, partly because of the accessibility to these type of sites, as facilitated by Google.

Of even greater concern, I feel, is the deadening effect of Google. As in a casino, the world becomes timeless as we surf the net. Instead of great novels or poems, great pop songs or even great TV advertisements, Google encourages output in the form of blogs, or tweets, or email, or videos of our dogs bodily functions, or Facebook, or more usually - nothing. At least watching a TV show in the middle of the day, even if it was a rerun of Kojak, represented a linear event. Time passed, notably. Narrative occurred. There was a beginning and an end.

Now, using Google, it is possible to pass whole afternoons without even that minor achievement. Cricinfo scores flick over. Farmville swells, grows, recedes, swells again. 1979 is still on Youtube, and so is Benny Hill. I blog, I email - and at the end, I am pretty much at the same point at which I began. I want the man who ate McDonalds every day for a year to sit in an apartment, Googling from 8am-5pm, and find out which was worse for his health.

I'm overstating my case? Perhaps, but when 200 of the richest people in America get together to discuss brain-computer interfaces, it is time for people to dissent. Grow potatoes, write a haiku, wrestle with your son - anything. Take an hour a day that you would spend online and do something human instead.

I love Google. It is the advance of my lifetime that has most changed the way I carry out that life. But none of that change has been creative, none has been physical, and none has made me a better parent or husband or person.