Slashdot Mirror
To Google Friends Or Not To Google, That Is the Question
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Henry Alford writes that in an ideal world, we would all use Google to be better friends by having better recall and to research our new friends and acquaintances to get to know them better. 'It's perfectly natural and almost always appropriate,' says social anthropologist Kate Fox. 'Obviously, one is always going to have to be discreet when talking about what you've found. But our brains haven't changed since the Stone Age, and humans are designed to live in small groups in which everyone knows one another. Googling is an attempt to recreate a primeval, preindustrial pattern of interaction.' But the devil is in the details. If we tell a new friend that we've read her LinkedIn entry or her wedding announcement, it probably won't be perceived as trespassing, as long we bear no ulterior motives. If we happen to reveal that we've also read her long-ago abandoned blog about her cat, we're more likely to be seen as chronically bored than menacing. 'I'm so baffled by this idea that we're not supposed to Google people,' says Dean Olsher. 'Why would there be a line? Like everyone else is allowed to know something but I'm not?' But doesn't taking the google shortcut to a primeval, preindustrial pattern of recognition sometimes rob encounters of their inherent mystery or even get us in trouble? Tina Jordan, an executive in book publishing who has the same name as a former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, says, 'I typically tell any blind dates before I meet them that they probably shouldn't Google my name, otherwise they'll be sorely disappointed when they meet me.'"
You're seriously asking if one should dig up shit about one's friends or not, as if that was a valid question?
Are you insane?
Perhaps they meant "friends" (of the Facebook variety) rather than friends (real ones that you meet in real life).
If anyone I care about had any online-only "friends", I'd probably consider it wise if they Googled such "friends" and still kept them in the dark about private items. On the other hand, I'd consider it curious if anyone were to Google their real friends.
As TFS and TFA said, we're wired to have a relatively small group of friends whom we know quite well (and who know us in return) through regular exchanges in real life. All others are merely acquaintances (like members of a neighboring tribe whom we hear about but rarely encounter), even if deceptively labeled as "friends" by network or workplace. The friend word is really being abused nowadays.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Yeah, now Google Kim Stafford and Tea Party and then you know every HR person she ever meets will do the same.
http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/10/internet_fail_the_truth_about.html
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The origin of information reported is part of the morphology in Hopi, not the lexicon. It is reported by specific morphemes, not specific words. Any language can report such things with specific words, e.g. English "Mary is pregnant, I saw it myself" versus "Mary is pregnant, that's what John said."
Furthermore, morphological encoding is hardly unique to the Hopi, as this typology is found in languages all over the world (including a number of European languages). See Aikhenvald's Evidentiality (Oxford University Press, 2005) for a survey. No need to patronizingly romanticize Native Americans.