The new religion

When i was a child i prayed to God, now i am an adult i pray to Google.

When life was hard and there were no answers i fell to my knees and prayed for guidance. Now my pleas go straight into google and wikipedia. No question is completely unanswerable, in seconds i can bathe in the collected works and opinions of thousands of people. I can think big thoughts and head off into the blogosphere and find answers. Not all are true, many are completely insane, but they are answers none the less.

They say God is in the details, well the Internet has details in abundance.

My reliance on useless information became startlingly apparent when i was discussing the importance of extra-curricular activities on job prospects with my grandfather. He was talking about how little general knowledge skills are cultivated in young people and i responded with "But they are able to find the answer to almost any question within 30 seconds wherever i am because of technology". This got me thinking about the importance of the web to our basic interaction with life itself. We crave information, we cultivate it like a precious food crop and without it, we wither and our lives feel devoid of meaning. Because meaning and answers go hand in hand.

We strive to better ourselves (most of us do anyway) and i find that tech minded people like myself head to the Internet first. We study good eating guides online, exercise tips, film reviews, book reviews, we shop online and date online. It has become central to our study of what it means to exist on this planet.

Is this a bad thing? Well it depends on a handful of things. Chief among those is what you do with your precious crop of information. Do you take it out into the real world? Do you meet up with friends and share it with them? Or do you stay in and hoard it.

I know what i do, I go out on a Friday and i start talking to a random and i share something interesting i have learned. I talk about a new band i have heard and try to persuade them to track them down, or i talk about a film i have just read about. I act as an information broker, parcelling out suggests of wisdom to enrich those i come into contact.

If information is the new religion, then i am a prophet.