A few months ago I wrote on an article called The Googlization of Bible Study. Here I lamented the shortcutting that was happening to my Bible study. At the time I considered doing a little experiment to see how indebted I really am to Google. I put it off until now. This week I am doing it:
ONE WORK WEEK WITHOUT GOOGLE*
I am primarily concerned with the way that Google has impacted my personal Bible study, my sermon preparation, and the things that I do as a pastor. I want to see the influence that it has. Therefore, I will keep this confined to a work week. That means that if I am at home and Isaiah asks me a crazy question about the length of a frogs tongue we can Google it. But if that question pops in my skull at work I can’t.
Starting at 8:00 AM this morning I will not use Google during my work week. This experiment will end at 5:00 PM this Friday.
There will be three permissible uses of Google:
- Google Reader (I have to be able to check this for my Today in Blogworld feature or else it would take most of my day to sift through all the pages)
- Blogger or other Google platforms like YouTube. (I use Blogger to blog).
- Pictures for the devotional I am writing for Isaiah or for blog articles. Because I am finishing up the Colossians devotional that I am giving Isaiah for his birthday this week, I will still need to search for clipart and pictures. I will allow myself to do that. And also for blog articles.
Goals:
My main goal is to discover how indebted I am to Google in personal Bible study and other work related things. I want to discover how Google has shaped the way that I think. I will post a reflective piece within the next couple of days.
At around 5:00 every day I will post an article that will probably be quite humorous on all of the things that I wanted to search on Google. I might also share a couple of stories about the crazy ways I had to figure something out because I could not use Google.
It should be an interesting week. But I might be better equipped to survive the forthcoming zombie apocalypse because of this little experiment. Only time will tell.
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*Obviously, I’m just using Google as the example but I will not simply be switching to Yahoo or Bing or any other search engine to serve in its place.
