Internet a great modern source

Jan 19 2008 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

A GOOGLE is, according to my ancient Chambers dictionary, a cricketing term.

Don’t ask me anything further because everything to do with cricket baffles and befuddles me.

Oh, go on then. The definition is: ‘to bowl an off-breaking ball with an apparent leg-break action on the part of a right-arm bowler to a right-handed batsman, or conversely from a left-handed...’

Right, so that’s all cleared up then.

I am, however, more than a little familiar with that other Google, the one that has become the fount of all knowledge; the internet search engine invented by a couple of American PhD research students back in 1996.

The story of how it all began has become almost mythical. Apparently, Californians Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed their search engine in a friend’s garage. It offered something new – the ability to compare and cross reference websites, analysing their contents rather than just relying on the frequency of key words in a site. It was to have been called Googol (a mathematical term for a really big number – 1 with 100 noughts) but someone else already had the domain name. Today it is worth billions of dollars and dominates the internet.

I know all this because I googled Google (origins) and it opened up Wikipedia, that other fount of all knowledge.

To think that at one time I thought I could do my job WITHOUT recourse to the internet, In fact, when we first acquired computers in the Examiner editorial department the internet was still in its relative infancy and it wasn’t deemed necessary to give us all an internet or e-mail connection.

Where would we be without it today?

And yet I see that this very week a professor of media studies at Brighton University has announced that an over-dependence on googling by students is leading to a generation of young people who can’t think for themselves. Prof Tara Brabazon says that students must be trained to be critical thinkers rather than educating themselves at the “University of Google.’’

She should know what she’s talking about because her list of academic credentials – printed from her website – runs to 17 pages and includes the fact that she has written a number of books, including the title: ‘Digital Hemlock: Internet education and the poisoning of teaching.’

It’s an interesting point, but among those of us educated from books there’s a tendency to diss information gleaned from what we think of as a potentially dodgy source, ie the internet.

Wikipedia, a particular favourite www of mine, is updated and written by the users. So, in theory, you could be accessing a pack of ‘lies, lies and damn lies’ (according to a quick trawl of the internet this expression is variously attributed Mark Twain, Disraeli and many others).

But, what I’m wondering is, how can we be sure that anything we read – be it pixellated on a screen or printed on a page – is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Why is the printed word considered to be more reliable and than cyberwords? People with cranky theories and axes to grind have been known to publish books.

The big difference between the two is that it’s so much easier to type a few words into a search engine than to rummage through a library. For all its evils – and it has many – the internet can be a wonderfully educational tool and it’s one that has been embraced wholeheartedly by today’s young people. Whenever the Offspring are researching a project for school the first place they look is the internet – and they have the full backing of their teachers. If I suggest that they might consult A BOOK they give me that ‘mum’s an old bore’ look.

We move with the times. While I can’t say I’m deliriously happy that the Offspring, The Boy in particular, spend so much of their time hooked up to the internet, I know that this is the world they are growing up in. Mine revolved around reading copies of Jackie, going to Girl Guides and meeting chums at the youth club. I rang my friends up; the Offspring text, e-mail or MySpace theirs. We ate white bread or brown bread, they know all about ciabatta, focaccia, baguettes and pain au chocolat.

I wrote essays for school based on what I found in one or two books and rarely questioned what I read; they have the world wide web of knowledge to trawl and will frequently turn up conflicting information, which becomes a matter for debate.

A lazy student will be lazy no matter where they sit down to do their research, be it in a library or at a computer keyboard. You have my printed word on that.

Games for many a laugh

MY FRIEND Susan rang up on Monday evening to thank us for a night out her family had enjoyed at our house last weekend.

“I’m still laughing now,’’ she said, referring to a game of Cranium that we began playing at 9pm and were still engaged in after midnight.

“Even if it was a bit late when we got home. In fact, very late.’’

I sympathised about the lateness because, like Susan, I still haven’t entirely pulled round from the years when the Offspring were small and 10pm was considered to be the witching hour.

Seventeen years later, and we’re just recovering the ability to stay up after 11pm, even on a Saturday night.

But Cranium is one of those games that is either over in a flash or goes on and on and on. In that respect it’s like Risk, but a good deal more good natured and less likely to lead to a real conflict.

With four teams, of course, it was never going to be a quick job.

But for comedy value it can’t be beaten. If you’ve never played before then here’s how it goes. Each team takes it in turn to elect someone to act, draw, sing, hum or sculpt a clue that the other members of the team must guess.

Susan’s husband, now known as the Humming Man, got the first laugh with his rendition of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. Beautiful it was not. This was followed by my Madonna-in-mime, which involved much flailing about and wailing “I can’t do this’’. Fortunately for me, the Boy didn’t capture my efforts on his ’phone for transmission to YouTube, which he keeps threatening whenever we play any games.

We discovered that the Man-in-Charge and our friends’ youngest shared an astonishing mental symbiosis when it came to guessing drawings and Playdough sculptures.

Two lines and a squiggle, with the clue ‘book’, were all it took for the diminutive one to shout (correctly) ‘Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe,’ while my game partner, the Humming Man, found all my artistic efforts to be so sadly lacking that he kept shouting: “What’s that supposed to be?’’

Laughter is often said to be the best medicine and I can only say that Cranium should be handed out – along with Rapidough, Pictionary and all those other silly games – on the NHS, instead of pills.