Google can only do so much

Google can only tell us what it has already been told.  It does that brilliantly but it cannot do complete justice to many subjects because so much of the information has not been captured.  Sure we know facts that have been published and are digitally stored in archives or that are regularly updated in such vehicles as Wikipedia.  But to really understand a particular subject, nothing can replace personal experience.  Until the day that search engines/aggregators are able to read human memory, I think our common human database of information will contain only a representative sample of all that we’ve lived.

Do a Google on yourself.  You might be surprised at what you see.  You probably forgot you clicked on Like or that you commented on that article you read in an online newspaper, or that you were a speaker listed on the agenda of a long-forgotten corporate event.  Do the collected links tell the whole story of you?  Of course not.  Just as TV and other two-dimensional media cannot fully portray to the viewer the exquisite proportional accuracy of the statue of David, neither can a search engine find and present to the viewer enough information to flesh out a human subject. Too much memory of that person’s deeds and life remain stored in the private realm, in the memories of the people with whom they lived and knew.

I thought of this recently when my sister informed me that Reno Bertoia had passed away.  It’s almost a certainty that the name rings no bell for you.  I knew him for the first 20 years of my life, first as the great guy with the young family who lived directly across the street, then as my hometown’s most famous former professional athlete (this was during a time when pro athletes lived like mere mortals), and finally as a very engaging history teacher during my high school years.   If you were to click on that link I embedded above, and if you were to read all the information contained in all those links, you would not learn that Reno Bertoia gave a baseball bat and ball to two very young boys who lived across the street.  You would also never find it written that those items were from the collection belonging to the Detroit Tiger baseball club, for whom Reno had played.  You would also not read that Reno took them to Tiger Stadium to meet the ’68 World Series champions in the dressing room one hot summer day.

You may read about all this in the future though, since I wrote it down.