The invention of the search engine has fundamentally changed the way we find information in today's society. Whether its google, yahoo, or bing, information can be found quick and easy with the simple click of a mouse. However, there's more to the search engine than efficiency and speed. The search engine represents an old form of philosophy that seems to be absent from our current classrooms and Universities: asking questions!
Any college student that reads anything involving Socrates will eventually become annoyed at how many questions the man asks throughout the text. It's in the philosopher's nature to ask questions and find answers. Socrates wants to find answers by asking tough questions and he wants to challenge his skeptics with debate over the issues posed with his questions. The only way to find the truth is to search, and the only way to search is to start asking questions.
So what does Socrates have to do with college and search engines? First, almost every class in college (for me at least) has been a lecture class where the professor spits out information onto a blackboard or powerpoint and expects the students to retain the knowledge. The most disturbing observation I've deduced is the lack of participation in these classes; more importantly, the lack of questions. Without questions, students cannot learn the material properly and thus fail to retain the information. We need to ask questions so we can fully understand every facet of a thing. Furthermore, if we don't ask questions, we are limiting our knowledge to whatever the professor tells us. In other words, instead of expanding on an idea, we are taught the "idea of the idea" and then we move on to the next concept.
This finally brings me to search engines. Search engines allow us to do something that classrooms today struggle with: ask questions. If we want to find out the 3rd quarter financial report of McDonalds in 2004, we can go online and find out everything we need to know. The construction of the search engine is meant to have us think of things, ask questions, and type them in. We are not limited to what we can ask; instead of learning the basic points of the War of 1812 and then moving on to the Civil War in a history class, the search engine allows us to simply ask the question, "what is the war of 1812" by typing in War of 1812. We can then find out more information about the war than the simple fact that it happened in 1812, which I feel is sometimes the only information students retain in a lecture class.
Ask questions! We will never learn anything or expand our knowledge if we do not ask questions. Universities have forgotten how to pose questions to their students; they are more worried about them regurgitating information than expanding their consciousness and expertise in a certain thing. Socrates and his way of thinking are still alive today, but, contrary to popular belief, his ideals aren't found in a classroom; they are found in a search engine on the internet.