By Pat Cashman

Sometimes the shouting coming from the neighbor house would become so strident, you’d swear the place would soon be surrounded by crime scene tape. But there was nothing indictable going on---the Smith’s were just a loud and voluble family.

(NOTE: Yes, the last name was Smith. It is supposed to be the most common in the country, yet most of us are immediately suspicious when we see it. Why, I wonder? Perhaps I’ll ask Mr. Johnson sometime.)
The Smith’s were a boisterous group---and from dad and mom to their seven obstreperous kids---not a moment of quietude ever occurred. Plus, there were always equally clangorous aunts, uncles and cousins dropping---and weighing--- in.

Their high decibel conversations always seemed to be arguments about factual details---and my mom and dad---and our entire family loved listening in. It wasn’t like you had to try too hard:
“The capitol of Delaware is not Wilmington, you dolt! It’s Dover!”
“Wrong, you bozo! You’re thinking of the English town of Dover in the county of Kent!”
“The Dover in Delaware is also in a county called Kent, you idiot!”
And so the genteel discussions would go.

I thought of the Smiths the other day and wondered how their spirited family debates would be different in our new times. After all, no longer can so-called facts be bandied about as freely and unchallenged as they were just a few years ago. That’s because the world has become…Googlized.

Facts and information are now so amazingly available---and so quickly---that the answer to nearly every question is a slam dunk. (From Wikipedia: “A slam dunk is a type of basketball shot that is performed when a player jumps in the air, controls the ball (s) above the horizontal plane of the rim and scores by putting the ball directly through the basket.”)

From the lesser known Cashmanipedia: “A slam dunk is an ill-advised type of maneuver that is performed when a person forcefully jams a donut into a cup of scalding hot coffee.”

There have been a bunch of studies on this Google thing by a bunch of people who do studies. And some of them are very concerned. I know because I Googled them.

“We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools,” says a Harvard professor named Betsy Sparrow---who must be plenty smart because she uses words like ‘symbiotic.’

She continues, “(We are) growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information---than by knowing where that information can be found.” In other words---mine---we increasingly don’t have to know stuff anymore---as long as we can remember where to look up stuff that we don’t know.
This frees our brains to remember other things such as…I’ll think of it.

Some observers don’t believe it’s such a bad thing to rely on the Internet to recall things like the name of the guy who killed John Wayne in the 1972 movie The Cowboys. (It was that dirty, rotten Bruce Dern. I’m glad he lost the Best Actor award last year.)

Other scholars say we are simply treating search engines like we formerly treated trusted, clever friends. In effect, the Internet is something like a buddy brimming with factoids and trivia stuff---remembering things so that you don’t have to. Except the internet doesn’t ever ask you to drive it to the airport at five in the morning---or try to steal your girlfriend.

It seems to me though that Google and the like would never have stopped my Smith neighbors from their cacophonous expounding. It may have only made their blusterous exchanges even louder---interrupted now only by the occasional clicking of keyboard keys and mouses.

But like anything, the search for Internet answers can be used for good---or for…well…not good.
Case in point: I know a guy who sits himself in front of the TV to watch recordings of the TV quiz show Jeopardy. At the right moments, he frequently pauses the video---and then Googles or sometimes Bings the correct responses---cheating his way to Final Jeopardy victories, without conscience.

Because of him, I am rethinking my position on capital punishment.

pat@patcashman.com
Pat can be seen on a new sketch comedy show “Up Late NW” airing Saturdays on KING 5 and throughout Washington and Oregon. He also co-hosts a weekly on-line talk show: Peculiarpodcast.com