The Case for a World without Google (or, Facebook for that matter!)

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The author can place a safe bet that you ‘googled’ for something yesterday, if not several times today.

The free Internet, with Google and Facebook at its pinnacle, has helped us in so many ways – finding a restaurant or a recipe, planning our holidays, rediscovering offbeat music, connecting with long lost friends, and of course, seeing cute dog and cat videos.  This list of potential benefits is endless.

However, the more discerning among us know that nothing in this world comes for free. And this ostensibly free Internet too comes with a hidden cost. The digital algorithms that drive these services learn by connecting the bits and bytes of our online behaviour. It then optimizes advertising content that is targeted at us consumers in real time for maximum marketing efficiency.

Ever wondered why a new acquaintance who connected with you over email suddenly shows us in your Facebook ‘People you may know’ list? Or how, immediately after exchanging an email with your close friend on a summer getaway to Pattaya, TripAdvisor sends you a list of potential hotels and offers in the same destination. The extreme case of this was that Target, the store, knew that the daughter was pregnant even before her father did! Digital ninjas call this ‘contextual predictive targeting’. In layman language, we are helping the Internet predict what we need in the future by sharing our current behaviour.

However, this is not an article on the real costs and benefits of this contextual targeting. There are enough propagators and detractors on both sides of the story to give you a complete view on the subject. All you need to do to learn more about this is to Google it yourself!

The real human tragedy of a predictive Internet is that, as Tim Cook mentioned recently, in a free ‘made-for-advertising’ Internet, we are not the consumers but we are the products. We only get to see what we want to see (or overtly state what we want to see). In other words, we are being taught to put on blinkers, out of our own free will.  Or, as the Eagles sang way back in 1976, we are prisoners here of our own device.

Nicholas Carr asks “Is Google making us stupid?” In essence, he asks, as we enjoy the free Internet, are we sacrificing our ability to explore and think independently? Are we becoming a slave of the search keywords we can think of? For the more rabble-rousers among us, are we allowing some software engineers to limit our world? For the more moderate among us, how do we not throw the baby out with the bathwater?

The author has a prescription to avoid such a doomsday scenario. It is not something new or radical. It is not even something original. But it is learned wisdom over time and across other similar thinking individuals.

It is a listicle on how not be pigeonholed by your own digital behaviour.

1. Install ‘Do Not Track’ apps like Ghostery: As someone put it well “What the big print giveth, the small print can taketh away”. Install some tracking busting software like Ghostery, so that you can choose the companies you do not wish track your online behaviour.

2. Clear your computer’s cache: When you systematically get rid of the cookies, no online company can correlate your various behaviours to predict your next move. Simple, but rarely done. And that is because it is not a part of your learnt behaviour.

3. Have a ‘un-digital’ passion: What motivates you to stay away from your mobile, your computer or your television (i.e. be ‘screenless’) for an extended period of time? Cultivate that behavior! Ensure you dedicate time to it!

4.  Read up a chapter on a subject that never crossed your mind: Go to a bookstore, take the third book on the left of the fifth aisle, irrespective of the topic and read its seventh chapter. Do not be bound by what you like, what you need at work or what you are curious about. Make a game out of randomness and unpredictability in learning new subjects.

5. Explore a flea market: They are amazing places, filled with irrelevance, rubbish and nostalgia. They open your mind to beauty in unimagined places. They urge you to explore a new aesthetic.

6. Meet interesting people: This one comes with a ‘conditions apply’ clause. You need to be gregarious, extroverted and wanting to meet new people. If you are one of them, no better way to have an interesting ‘human’ conversation and get to learn about life.

7. Do something that you have never done before: It starts with asking the question “What amazing things have I done in my life?” Do note that it is not seen, not heard, but done in your life. And then ask what can you do today or in the near future to add to the list. In other words, create your own story rather than follow someone else’.

8. Travel: Nothing opens up your mind to possibilities like exploring new places, new cultures and new food. Take all the leave you can get, and deliberately choose to go to places you know nothing about.

In summary, do continue to use the Internet to satiate your curiosity. But, at the same time, learn to unlearn it and not become a slave to its algorithm. This is the only way forward if you do not want the beginning of the end of the world to look like what it is likely to look.

Now, please don't Google that!