slow down

I remember being so excited back when I discovered Prodigy in the 80s, an online forum for chatting with people of similar interests, checking this new thing called e-mail, and searching for all kinds of information right from my own computer in my own home. I thought this was just incredible. It was like having an entire library right at my fingertips, right on my own private computer, right in my home! Among other interests, I recall being part of a group who self-selected into a little social club where we talked about the geology, topography and the rocks where we lived. We even sent each other samples. Random? Yes. Geeky about research? Well, that’s me, so yes again. I was just so amazed that you could look up anything on Prodigy. Anything! So cool. And then – a zillion exclamation points – then came Google which was hyper-Prodigy. Prodigy on steroids. You could ask it to find something and click on all those different Os in the word GOOGLE at the bottom of the search page and go farther and farther down the rabbit hole.

Fast forward four decades.

Part of my work for one client is proofing their social media posts, among which is a Motivational Monday quote. They are always inspiring and it’s a great (and fun) way to keep in touch with your customers. A recent quote I reviewed was attributed to Shakespeare. I always look them up (still geeky about research all these years later) and in this case, I saw there was some confusion. The quote in question was also attributed to George Santayna, the great Spanish and later American philosopher and novelist. It turns out neither was correct. Instead the quote was written by an obscure poet named Reginald Vincent Holmes. So, the promise of this library in my hands has been broken, or at least besmirched. But I’m going with broken. I pulled my old Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations off the shelf and gave my client a few alternative suggestions for the Motivational Monday quote that still riffed off the season, the earth, the music of the spheres. But the internet? Well, it has repeatedly let me down.

I think we have become accustomed to quick answers (“just Google it” seems to be the first impulse now) and we so often take the first O in that long Googolplex implied at the bottom of the page as the right answer. And, now, with the force multiplier of artificial intelligence (or as I like to call it, aggregated information) we frequently just take what is handed to us and call it right, and that’s a real concern for me.

So, I go back to my mantra of Slow Down. Modern times ain’t bad and the good old days ain’t necessarily good. But it would do us all some good to slow down.

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4/13/2026