Thought Process Outsourcing

Hurrah! Google just turned 17, just one year away from its legal drinking age (maximum parts of the world). The sober teen Google has somehow got into our heads and eroded the human capabilities of thinking, just wondering what the adult Google would account to.

The advent of internet, with highly efficient search engines has shown an easy path to the humans for finding answers to their questions. This is good from one way that we get to save a lot time, and have access to more information than what our ancestors had. On the other hand, there is an adverse effect of limiting our exploratory skills.

One of the dangers of this habit happens to be 'falling for opinions', rather than banking on facts. It is painful to see people sharing weird stuff on social media that carry no logic. All that they see is the number of likes and shares, to quantify the legitimacy and just hit the share button blindly. After all, this is the new way of saying 'hi' to the followers.

A classic case of such an instance was when a lot of people shared the picture of Morgan Freeman to mourn for Nelson Mandela's death. Similarly, the RIP status for Rowan Atkinson (famously Mr. Bean) who is still alive and healthy. Are we falling for opinions and manipulations? Rather making use of our key strength called thinking?

And, do not forget that we all believed a set of photos of Shanghai to be actually clicked in Gujarat, just because lot of people shared it and thinking they possibly visited there. We are just getting lazy and reluctant to explore more about things that we choose to believe in, leaving lot of opportunities for the pranksters and fraudsters. Yes, even today I won a lottery from the UK and a German lady wanted to donate all her wealth to me, as she got to know from internet that I am a good guy. In a couple of weeks I am expecting 4 more such lotteries and ladies who would make me as wealthy as Donald Trump! (Coming soon: Vote for Srini).

The more we fall for pranks and false facts, we become more vulnerable and exposed to the greed of corporations and politicians. Simple example of e-commerce sites playing around with pieces of goods, to create a mirage of huge discounts pretty much sums up this whole scenario. And, we are not far away from the babas and the god men making use of search engines and social media as channels of chatting with the gods.

Google is doing a brilliant job in helping us improve our lives. Let's not just think of taking advantage of it, rather think of ‘thinking for ourselves’ too. The day we stop thinking is the day when our soul starts creating a gap from our mind. Thought Process Outsourcing is never the answer, still Thought Process Differentiation could be one of the possible answers.