The Hindu Business Line : When information is a click or two away

Agatha Christie's fictional detective Hercule Poirot has often repeated these famous lines, "It is the brain, the little grey cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within not without." However, the grey cells are now having a tough time surviving the onslaught of technology. When Google arrived more than five years ago, it transformed information search into a reliable process. If it were online, it would be found. In June this year, Google won a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, while "to google", with a lower case `g' was included last month in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, America's leading reference book.

The Disease

A few weeks ago, I was with some middle-aged friends at a get-together where a software manager from a reputed MNC was telling me that he is fortunate enough to have very diligent software engineers reporting to him. They had done very well academically and were generally bright. There was just one issue he faced — the moment any of these young executives have any problem, they immediately put a search for the solution on search engines and online forums and wait for the answers. Online help resources and manuals lie untouched in offices. I do agree that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. But there are things one has to apply one's mind to. At times one has to think one's way through instead of simply navigating.

Most urban school children seem addicted to browsing the Internet for their projects. We have a new `Ctrl C-Ctrl V' generation of clones coming up. A friend asked her son to find out the time of the year when `phlox' can be grown. After two hours of browsing, he declared that if he could not find it by browsing, it could not be done. Meanwhile, my son was busy preparing for his test on Great Expectations by quickly reading the condensed versions available . Who cares about the greatness of Dickens's writing?

In the name of technology, are we losing our ability to use those grey cells? Is original thinking slowly dying?

Some erudite fixes

Original thinking seems to be slowly giving way to organised plagiarism. A few teachers are now insisting on an oral presentation so that the students at least read what they paste. Many competent professors are now screening their students' papers and thesis by running them through software to check if it has been plagiarised. I am sure that there are a few bright young minds that will find a way to get around this bottleneck as well. I had a professor who would cut grades if the project was not handwritten. She had a very simple and perhaps resigned logic. She felt that this would ensure that even if it the assignment was copied, the student would have read it at least once while writing it up in long hand.

Some ground rules

Think before you browse is a good warning. Search engines are powerful tools, but cannot read one's minds. Even MIT, the Mecca of education in the area of technology, has a few pointers on when not to use browsers and general-purpose search engines.

Some of them are:

When you want to access high quality, targeted information like academic articles, standards, patents and so on.

When you need to find a very specific piece of reliable technical data. Articles, handbooks and manuals will help you with this.

When you want to find extremely up-to-date information. Going directly to the official Web sites would be more helpful.

MIT, of course, assumes that you are looking at the Web only for information and not solutions. And I must confess that I found this piece of information by typing in a search for the keywords, "When not to Google" in, well, we all know that place.

The pitfalls

Search engines by their nature gravitate toward either their advertisers or those who put up their material fully online. They therefore first display articles and random pieces of opinion.

If you want to search for the details of a particular product or company, results mentioning the official Web site will sometimes be displayed after the critiques and newspaper items about it.

Using online tools is a bit like outsourcing. You should aim to reduce the time taken for the job. You shouldn't lose your core competence or forget how to do the task altogether. Problem solving skills are a major asset for any aspiring executive. Banishing your problems to the World Wide Web will mean that one is actually developing a handicap. The good old thinking cap can help one use technology instead of being enslaved by it.

(The writer, an alumnus of XLRI, is a freelance HR consultant and trainer)