Searching: July 07, 1997 issue of New Thinking

July 07, 1997 New Thinking:
Searching

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July 07, 1997

Searching

By Gerry McGovern

Some of us spend our lives searching, particularly from a spiritual point of view. However, in our daily lives, we don’t search that much. We have habits, we have patterns of living. If we want milk, we know where the shop is.

For most of our needs we know where and how they can be satisfied. Only for the products and services which we don’t buy or use on a regular basis, do we turn to directories.

The popularity of search engines and directories, such as Yahoo! and Alta Vista, are reflective of an environment in formation and a population finding its feet in such shifting landscapes. As the Internet settles and as people become more familiar with ‘their’ Internet, such popularity will wane.

It is very important that we should not look at how the Internet is today and expect that it will have essentially the same characteristics in five years time. As much as the architecture will change, so too will the patterns of behavior.

We describe people who access the Internet as ‘users.’ This clinical term is very restrictive in its scope. The people who live in Dublin are not described as ‘users of Dublin,’ but rather as citizens of a city.

The Internet is not a technology to be used, but rather a place to be inhabited. It is not some device with certain applications, but rather a space with wide possibilities. At the moment, we are in a period of exploration, of searching. The early pioneers have indeed spent their time pushing boundaries, but the mass of the people who will follow will want to set boundaries within which they can live with relative security and dependability.

Searching is a good thing, but to be continuously searching leaves you little time to do and build things with that which you have found. Imagine if every morning, you had to go to a search engine and search through an ever increasing list so as to find a shop near you that sold milk? Imagine if you had to figure out each morning how to get to work?

Choice is something which is rightly championed, but too much choice is really no choice at all. If the process of choosing takes too long, then the choice becomes limited because the time left to exercise the choice has been limited.

People complain about walls. Most celebrated when the Berlin Wall fell. However, if we complain about walls so much, how come we spend a lot of our lives surrounded by them? We tend to eat, drink, sleep and work within walls.

James Joyce has been described as a great innovator. I found it interesting that Ulysses had so many walls. Homer walled it. Dublin walled it. One day walled it. It seemed to me that Joyce needed walls, because within defined boundaries his invention and innovation became distilled into a potent, pointed force.

There is only so much time I want to spend searching. I want to do things and if I am continuously forced to search for tools and information, then I will end up doing less.

What is a house, what is a city, without walls? The Internet needs walls, not simply for those tired of searching, but also for those keen to create and live life to the full.

Gerry McGovern

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Searching is a good thing, but to be continuously searching leaves you little time to do and build things with that which you have found.