Google vs books
I am reading up on usability at the moment and I passed a usability guru’s website – Jacob Jensen. He has strong opinions – and I like strong opinions and tend to agree with him mostly. Well, that’s up until now – I read an article by him entitled “Google makes you dumber” (link). That one irked me enough to be writing this blog post.
His basic premise is that by making it too easy to obtain information – people will stop being critical about the information and just take the first search result as truth and skip over the in-depth discussion – making us dumber. I read through the comments – and one struck me in particular: “This seems to me a continuation of the eternal “calculators are evil” debate” (Leonid S. Knyshov). I agree whole-heartedly with this one. If you need to calculate the interest of your loan – would you do it by hand? Of course not, you would ask your calculator – but wait, does that make you dumber? No, it makes you more efficient (and less errorprone – remembering long-division when it is 10 years since you were taught it…). For me it’s a matter of perception and reason for doing the calculus. If you are trying to learn calculus – yes, you should spend some time understanding why it is calculated this way – study the proofs – trying it out by hand to see if you understand it fully. If you are ‘just’ a user of math… don’t bother. You should only know enough math to use the calculator correctly.
If I didn’t have Google (or StackOverflow for that matter), I would be a much less efficient programmer. I work in such small teams that we will eventually reach a consensus on what is best practise. We will search for information using our best practise as the basis. Which will in turn lead us to reading books that agree with our best practise. Also, if I had to understand everything about the compiler, performance of List<T> when doing swapping and the internals of representing colors on a TFT screen with backlighting – I would be in an never-stopping loop of trying to stay up-to-date. And if I had to do it by reading books using library indexes to find relevant information… well, you get the picture.
I rely on frameworks, 3rd party condensed API information, blogs, forums, google… and books to give me just enough information to be able to do my job right – which entails doing things efficiently and good enough for the customer to be happy. Will I be rewarded by increasing the performance of my IO-operations by 10% by spending half a year understanding how SSD-disks perform? Probably not. Basically, throw your energy at your core competency – for me this means: “Read everything you can find on design patterns, commanding, templating, styling and nHibernate. The rest… I’ll rely on peers.
So, Google isn’t making me dumber – quite the contrary. Everyone using Google intensively for just one project will know that Google isn’t the answer to everything – and you have to very carefull about who you trust. I once heard a comment about people using Google as a spelling-checker – that you would only find people that were spelling as badly as yourself… You need to know how to search and how to figure out if that site is reliable. So, source criticism is vital – just as it is with books. As for reading in-depth about a particular subject – yes, the author of a book has probably done more research compared to a blog-writer – but a blog-writer will have used the time spent researching doing practical work.
So, trying to conclude… it’s not Google vs. books – it’s a stupid battle – each works differently, but used in unison – they are close to unbeatable… (I use Google to find the right books…) Treat Google as what it is – a great (and fast) indexer. Google will not answer questions you didn’t know you had, books, blog-content etc. might. But Google will let you find that enthusiast that just never got around to writing that book his knowledge entitled him to.