Thursday Thinking - What It Means to Search

Last week on Marketplace Morning, there was an insightful essay by Nicholas Carr on how "the digital age has changed what it means to search." Carr is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr offers some very perceptive analysis and I encourage you to listen to it. Here is an excerpt from the transcript to pique your interest:

These days, Google's search engine doesn’t push us outward so much as turn us inward. It gives us information that fits the pattern of behavior and thinking we’ve displayed in the past. It reinforces our biases rather than challenging them, and subverts the act of searching in its most meaningful sense.

There was a time when search engines opened new vistas for us. Now, they hold up a mirror to us, giving us back a reflection of ourselves. Search has become a tool for self-absorption.