Search Overload

I like the commercials that are running now that poke fun at people quoting things they've learned by web searching. They've even come up with a name for the phenomenon, "search overload," I think it what they say in the commercial. It seems we've all become researchers these days. And I know the feeling. Somehow lots of searching leaves all these facts loosely floating around in my brain in an unconnected sort of way. I don't know if it actually comes out in how I talk, but it's there in the way I'm thinking. How the content of media and the forms of media affect the way we think is an interesting subject for thought. Before the internet, and I'm old enough to remember well "life before the internet," I guess I might have suffered similar results from say a visit to the library and rifling through an assortment of books, or perhaps reading through a dictionary or an encyclopedia.

It's hard to know exactly how exposure to something affects my thinking. I remember years ago noticing that after reading Mark Twain I had started using speech patterns that he used in his writing, talking, or rather thinking in my head, like Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer, I'm not sure which. I can't think how that is, how they talked, I can't do it without going and "searching" for a copy of one of those books that is. I am sure I could find out easily enough, certainly those books are available online. We have so much information available at our fingertips! How does that affect my thinking? Does that matter?

It's hard to know, as I was saying. It's hard to have that much perspective. I've found myself thinking like a reporter or writer. I think I've done that for years however. I'll think something and then I rewrite. I recognized that habit in the movie about a reporter and a homeless guy, I can't think of the name just now, or the actors names. I'm completely drawing a blank, but I'm sure I could go find it. Stop and check my facts and then finish writing this. Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I don't really want to interrupt my flow of thought, but I want to have my facts right. Even though I probably don't need to worry too much about that in this blog. I don't think I have a very high readership.

That's another subject, the subject of the accuracy of what you find when you do searches. Who knows who wrote some stuff, how much they really know what they are talking about, and if they are just rewriting what someone else has posted somewhere else. I think a lot of inaccurate statements get circulated that way.

In the movie, about a reporter and a homeless Juilliard-taught violinist (I just searched how to spell Juilliard), the reporter guy keeps rewriting, rewording his story in his head. That's something I do.

And then it's just that everything I'm doing can become something to report about. I'm writing. I'm writing about writing. I'm writing about writing and I have a tv on in the background. I'm going to stop writing now. I'm going to click on the publish post button. That sort of thing.