Google...Gooing...Gone.: Before Google Reflection
Google has become such a normal part of today’s society that it’s almost a given. It’s like another arm. Can’t think of that word? Google it. Not sure when the movie starts? Search it up. It’s just part of what we’ve been conditioned to do in our daily lives. But what about before Google was such an accessible resource? We forget that there was a time (and still is in some places) that Google didn’t exist. When getting information wasn’t as easy as pulling out a smart phone.
One of these times is not too far in our past: the 1950s. I’ve been doing research about poets and writers who made up (arguably) the most influential group of this time: The Beat Generation. One of these people is the very polemic Elizabeth Smart. In 1958, she wrote “A Little Book of Private Information on A Collection of Friends by Anon.” This was a homemade booklet with a list of all of her friends that lived in San Francisco at that time; she compiled all of her personal thoughts and opinions on these people in the journal to be given to her friend (and future lover) George Barker.
Besides the fact that this is incredibly petty and gossipy (which I love), the fact that Smart felt the need to create this booklet for her friend meant that there was information he wouldn’t know just by moving to the Bay Area. Barker didn’t have Google. He couldn’t just look up their bios.
What’s even more interesting is that these people exist from Smart’s perspective only in this book, and will only exist as long as it’s binding and paper can beat the test of time. Unless someone types up her thoughts word for word and publishes them in an online database, they’ll remain in pen for however long they can. But even then, the online version won’t be able to fully capture their presence.
While I sat in Emory’s Rose Library and carefully flipped through the pages of this piece of history, I realized that we are too used to the digital. There is something about being able to hold and interact with history and the past that we will never get by typing on a computer. At least not until computers become artifacts themselves.
