Boy Who Looks Like A Thumb Raises The Big Questions

The Boy Who Looks Like A Thumb

Nothing’s changed. The balance remains the same. We don’t know any more now than we did then.

I was watching a presentation made by Americans for Americans in education, imploring them to wake up. It was full of hurt wonder at how the rest of the world, without US permission, had kept on going about its business.

It quoted birth-rate figures in the US compared to India and China. It said things like “China will be the number one English speaking country by 2015” and “There are more Indian honours students than there are American students” and “The top five most employing type of jobs in ten years time, haven’t been invented yet.” The video is called Did You Know? and for anyone living outside the US borders, the answer is pretty much “Yes we did.”

It includes some spurious claims along the lines of "A PC costing only $1,000 will have more computing power than all of humanity combined” and all that other immeasurable (and quite frankly, pointless to try and measure) stuff that you expect from someone trying to put together a techno-propaganda piece.

But there was one thing that I wanted to focus on and it comes back to thumb-boy… eventually.

The Did You Know? video quotes a statistic that is quite measurable and one that I won’t argue with. It tells us there were about 700 Billion Google queries last year. Then it asks, “where did those questions go before the existence of Google?”

I was thinking about this, and with no proof or evidence other than the picture up the top there, I will pose the following theory.

Most of those questions wouldn’t need answering if the internet wasn’t there.

When we used to debate about facts and figures, or have lapses of memory that needed jogging, we’d go to our reference books. I used to collect them. I have a proud assortment of encyclopaedias, thesauruses, dictionaries, books of quotes, biographies, art catalogues, atlases and books of lists and comparisons. In other words; I’m pretty sure the big important questions were not going unanswered. I’m pretty sure that most of the net querying is self-referential. We’re looking for answers about other things on the net.

The net also raises as many questions about extrinsic things as it answers about intrinsic things. By the same viral process that ensures everyone in the world now knows what a kid looks like when he thinks he is alone with a video camera, a golf-ball retriever and a love of Star Wars, I received the above photo four times in one day. Not only is it amusing, and then after a while a little scary, it raises a question that didn’t need to get asked, but once out there cannot be unasked.

Where are his ears?