Are You A Google Addict?
December 22, 2009
Mindshare, commonly defined as the herculean battle for employees’ attention in a world of information overload, featured highly in the 2009 compendium of overused management terms. As learning professionals, we’re constantly being told how the competition for the workforce’s eyeballs has reached boiling point. Gone are the days of weeklong training retreats to the Catskills, 20 minute nuggets are the new 1 hour eLearning courses. How much further can we compress time and training programs?
As I spent another Friday afternoon trying to get a training proposal out the door while Googling Christmas gift ideas for my wife, I began to wonder…. What is the American workforce so busy with, that it can’t find the time to take a 20 minute course? Sales presentations, management meetings, expense reports? Maybe. But I’m beginning to wonder if the world’s largest economy is suffering a massive time deficit thanks to a 370 x 25 pixel rectangle otherwise known as the Google search box. Somewhere in Mountain View, CA a giant gamma ray fired from the top of Google’s world headquarter, is sucking in the time of helpless American workers and turning a billions dollars of lost productivity into Google profits.
My personal vice is compulsively Googling video camera gizmos, I can’t help myself; I’m a fully fledged information junkie. The Geek Squad at Best Buy, has nothing on me. My knowledge of CMOS photo sensors goes way beyond casual interest and borders on clinically obsessive. I have stalked the message boards of AV enthusiasts for hours spying the best way to rig a wireless microphone to a digital video camera for under $400. With the time spent on this Don Quixote-esque quest I could have earned enough money flipping burgers to buy the $2,000 microphone used by Larry King. I have gone beyond information overload and have achieved super saturation.
Informal learning and an employee’s ability to search just-in-time information is truly a blessing of living in 09 but everything comes with a price tag (just check on Amazon) and in our case, it’s likely our ability to concentrate and make decisions. Googling has become the new cigarette break, how many times an hour do we need to Google variations of “wife+cheap+gift+ideas” while trying to finish an expense report, before our productivity sinks below an 8th grader who’s forgotten his Ritalin.
I can no longer make decisions. As a grown man approaching his 30th birthday I am unable to purchase a $60 pair of discount sneakers without consulting “trailerrunner509” in Utah to make sure my planned purchase matches my running gait. Am I sick? I don’t know but Google probably does. Should I look for a new job? I have no idea but somewhere, out there, is the magic search term that will reveal my corporate destiny. I have traded my ability for independent thought for the anonymous approval of quasi experts, otherwise known as the technoratti.
Thus in the spirit of scientific research to benefit of all of human kind, I shall undergo 30 days and nights without Google. I will keep a diary of my mental state, track my blood pressure and take my resting heart rate daily. My palms feel sweaty but modern man must know, “Can he go to the North Pole”, “Can He Go To the Moon” “Can he survive in a modern metropolis without Google”.
For the month of December, I will only read quality news sources such as OK Magazine. I will see a trained medical professional rather than diagnosing myself online. I shall build my training courses using solid facts confirmed by experts and rebut the instant gratification of Wikipedia.
Should this I fail to post again, you will know the separation from Google was too much for the fragile human psyche to bear and I have been committed to a secure psychiatric institution. My friends in corporate education, to the free thinking café society of Satre’s Paris we shall return.
Editor’s note – parts of the posting were rewritten with the author’s full consent to maximize keyword search performance.
Tags: elearning, google addiction, humor, informal learning, training
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Burn Says: