The Google Done Broke My Brain!, page 1

So... I had an idea for a thread about a very narrow bit of subject matter from a much larger subject pool, about...Oh I don't know... nine or ten hours ago. An analog might be "Writing a post about The Carburetor" in a series of threads about the inner workings of an internal combustion engine.

Rather, I should qualify... I thought that I was researching an idea for a very narrow bit of subject matter". Because once I began looking for sources... They kept coming. Every link led to five more solid links and variations of concept... and each of those led five more.

Long story short. What I thought would be an hour of sourcing and maybe another hour of writing and BB coding has ended up as a bookmark folder with about eighty pages stored in it and an open occurrence of WordPad on my PC, sitting utterly devoid of so much as a single letter of type.

I had no clue that my little foray into a side street of a subject I often post about would lead me to so much information that I've cannot even begin to properly mentally categorize all of it. And, God knows,I tried. I really did. At one point I had two browsers windows running, at the same time, with about fifteen open tabs in each - trying to dilute it all down to some sort of Universal, generic presentation format. The longer I tried this, the more confusing things became.

Now I'm a fairly bright guy, and connecting dots and finding patters is usually my strong suite. I have a bit of a knack for identifying the relevant content and also for finding the commonality between different variations of theory.

I had, to use the popular ATS term, found a rabbit hole. Quite by accident, mind you, and totally unaware. And before I could even begin to realize what had happened... Google had me up against the cage, in a rear naked choke - and the ref was on the wrong side of things to see my frantic tapping.

Anyone else on ATS every have this experience? This moment of awareness when you suddenly realize that you aren't using the Google, but the Google seems to be using you? I could almost imagine some Google support tech ( or some Government sponsored "voyeur" laughing themselves teary eyes as they watched my successive series of clicks. I can honestly see some guy in a dark room, filled with computers and cubicles... And one of the inhabitants of one of those cubicles, seeing as those first couple of pages loaded, spitting his coffee on the monitor, and then loudly saying "Hey, everyone!!! C'mere. We got another code-overload in progress!"

One could analogize this to the idea that I hit my thumb with the hammer trying to tack in a nail. I see it in a different light. I hammered one nail and 20 more suddenly popped out of the wall. Each time I hit one of those, 20 more appeared.

So, here I am... a guy who sources most of what he posts ( outside of rant and joke forums ) furiously tapping and ready to the the entire world that the current score is now:

Google: 1
Heff: 0

I could throw on my best neon colored headbands and glasses and web cam a Hulk Hogan-esque "Whatcha gonna do" challenge to Google. It might help me quell the information overload happening in my skull casing at the moment. It might even allow me to salvage a bit of my dignity for having lost round one.

But the truth is... Google kicked my butt.

The bitter irony? In order to simply understand what was happening to me.... I had to ask The Google!

They say the soul weighs 21 grams, and now we have a measurement of the American mind on any given day: 34 gigabytes. According to a University of California, San Diego, study highlighted by The New York Times, the average American consumes 34 GB worth of content a day, including a whopping 100,000 words of information.

The Good news is that I think I may write an update to the book "Chicken Soup For The Soul" and call it "Format C: /S For The Soul"

~Heff