Did you ever experience the typical scenario like this before?
The phone rings.
Engineer 1: Yes?
Engineer 2: Hi, it’s me. Look, I have a problem here with my
E1: Fine, I’ll come over.
Few minutes later.
E1: So, what kind of problem do you have?
E2: I’m trying to run this-and-that. And out of sudden, what I’ve got is
the following error message: bla…bla..bla..
E1: Hmm, that’s strange (thinking for a minute or two).
E2: Yeah, that’s not supposed to happen, isn’t it?
E1: Did you google already?
E2: Google..what? Ah, I see. No, I didn’t try googling for that problem…
E1: Well, let’s try it now.
And after 5 minutes of googling and flipping web pages, the problem was easily solved. As a matter of fact, it could have been solved earlier.
Although it looks simple, the above scene happens quite a lot. Those who grow up in the late nineties and take for granted that Internet exists for their conveniences often quickly open google.com whenever they find a problem (even as far as replacing the pocket calculator) and most of the time just mechanically and without too much thinking. Whether it’s about using Google or other search engines, searching for some support articles, or even reading discussion archives, the idea is the same: let’s tap into the vast amount of knowledge available out there. Given enough brains, likely one of them solved the problem already. However, the previous generations (granted, not all of them of course) sometimes struggle with this concept of “information at your fingertip”.
Ever witnessed something similar?