From the American Atheist zine comes an interesting article “Google As God: A Theology of Information Technology” (in PDF).
The world’s most famous Internet company has never claimed to be god. Unlike the classically understood ‘uncreated creator,’ Google’s giant brain is hosted on an estimated half-million servers, is invented by humans, and remains contingent upon us.
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Its stated higher purpose is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Its followers — Googlers, if you will — rely on its search engine as the main directory of all knowledge and consider any piece of information not known to Google to be effectively non-existent or irrelevant.
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The typical personal computer with an Internet connection has become, for many of us, a household shrine visited more regularly than any mosque, church, or synagogue. Does this activity, in itself, constitute a religion of Googleism?
Then, a great line I can’t overlook:
If a god teaches how to live, Google teaches us how to look up the answers to our own questions.
I love a line drawn between the “knowledge” of a faithful person (a contradiction for sure) and, um, knowledge.
