Who Told You That?

Coffee meditation loosie talkin bout sources, trustworthiness and searching.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve slid on you. Here are some loose thoughts, with no definitive landings or conclusions.

Who told you that?

I’ve been searching.

Google ain’t the reliable source that we once trumpeted it as. Result positioning and authority, we know now, can be bought. Gemini can truncate, extract and condense a variety of sources into a quick statement at the top after you hit ‘search’ providing you with simple suggestions without the mistakes, politics or consideration of humanness. Oh and not to mention your results are based on an ale-gore-rhythm of your geographical locations, those advertisement cookies living in your cache stash and the other data they’ve collected from your online activity. So what is trustworthy, when for most of us, the results already confirm any biases or preferences we already have? No more using those satirical comebacks to outright bullshit and idiot opinions or claims cause heads or tails, they probably have Google’d it and landed on some result that confirmed their stupid ass take. What are the alternatives? — Duckduckgo. And using other search options like your local digital library (Georgia actually has a DOPE partnership with Galileo that I’ve used to just search a topic).

Now I’m not promoting Googlephobia. Search engines still bang for strings of input like “ coffee shops near me” or at very least a survey of who and what is vying for your attention and what they’re offering to get it.

Tiktok and IG, Twitter/X use to be some sort of search engine that provided some historical or archival results. But you cant even use that for accurate information anymore. Yea there’s a difference between the analysis of historical phenomenon, the analysis of media/literature/spectacle and the analysis of accuracy or meaning. We could take my beloved Bible— a minority report on shit the culture was saying versus what they was actually doing— for example, but that’s literary analysis for another coffee time. What I’m saying is tiktok, IG, Twitter and even Youtube can become sink holes of “information” without trustworthy meaning, context, review, source, authority or accuracy by which some of us don’t even have the range to tell the difference or even question it.