Before Google Reflection

As a society, how do we decide what is important? This is the question I was left with after my time in the Rose Library and our Before Google presentations in class. My presentation was on The Work of Colored Women compiled by Jane Olcott. The only thing that I found when I googled it was a picture of the cover of the book by the New York Public Library (who presumably had the book before Emory). The page doesn’t even have a mere description on what the book is about—which was shocking to me, as it is such an important testament to the struggles African American women faced working in the Red Cross. Without books like these we would not know the dedication these women had to their country, even in the face of adversity. The other book that I looked at was “Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces,” a book about African American women who sought to help men in the armed forces who were stationed abroad. Thankfully, this book has scanned pages online and free to the public, so that we can educate ourselves on our country’s history, and the history of those often underappreciated or even left out. Before Google has opened my eyes to the way that search engines have decided what in our society is important. It seems that nowadays if something is not accessible for free online it is deemed less important or forgotten altogether. We live in a society where there are 32 times the results about Kylie Jenner than there are about an entire group of women who dedicated their lives for our country in spite of hardship. As a society we owe it to women like the ones highlighted in these books, to share their stories and educate ourselves instead of saturating the media with trivial information.