Do you remember the first time?

[franceslievens]

If you can, please share it with Siva Vaidhyanathan to use in his upcoming book The Googlization of Everything.
I can't really remember the first time I googled. I was still stuck with Alta Vista and Hotbot and Yahoo I believe, when my sister pointed me towards Google somewhere around the turn of the century. She assured me you could find anything on there. So I tried. I still couldn't find what I was looking for, but at least something would turn up, and the page wasn't as cluttered as the search bots I'd been using previously. When we had internet access in our first apartment, it was only Google that had survived. I believe it showed me the way when in my boredom I went looking for sites on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have never looked back since.

Via both Boing Boing and Crooked Timber.

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I can't either, which is kind of scary.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

The only thing I could remember was that my sister pointed me towards it, but I don't know whether I started using it while writing my thesis or the year after... I definitely used it the year after.

I also remember not liking search engines, because they would always turn up crap, or -- when I would try to sift out the crap by defining my search more -- they wouldn't turn up anything at all.

While doing the master Cultural Studies I had a class on internet and web-use. It was 2001-2002, and this guy was talking about differences between the different search engines, and he was stressing we should use multiple search engines to get the best results. Checking out the answers people gave, I guess everyone was already turning to Google to get all the results they needed.

[comava.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity - what exactly is Cultural Studies? We have something that sounds similar and it makes me wonder what yours is compromised out of.

I learned of Google in an computer and internet class too, I think.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia has a long entry on what Cultural Studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies) consists of. It gives a historical overview of where it comes from. Most universities stress what they think is most interesting. I studied it in Louvain as a one-year-master after having earned a master in ethics. There they stress art and other forms of culture. I chose modules relating to performance arts and theatre. Because this is cultural studies we got lessons about the history of theatre, but also its political relevance etc. The courses weren't politically or critically oriented as stated in the wikipedia entry. This was partly due to the fact that it was only a one-year-program, but also because most of our courses were chosen from the regular curriculum, and weren't specific cultural studies related. Most of the students enrolled because they wanted to work in the cultural field (theatre, music, museum...)

The free university of Brussels (where I got my first degree) has a similar course called "Cultural sciences". This is because they don't use the diversity of traditional cultural studies, but really focus on the arts.

[sweet-lil-rach.livejournal.com]

I remember where I was ... in the library in 6th form and someone mentioned this thing called google. I can't remember what I was googling, but I know it wasn't educational haha! After I gained an understanding of search engines and their purpose (Yes, I was that dumb) I used it to find the BC&S which has since led me to all of you - god bless google! hehe

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Oh wow! Googling must have been an experience for you. ;-)

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I can't remember either. I know that I was sort of introduced to the internet and email in 96 through a course at uni on German and Japan which had some sort of email cooperation with a Japanese university. That's when I got my first email address and I seem to remember that the first email program I used was still DOS-based. When searching for stuff on the internet I used Lycos, Yahoo and Alta Vista a lot and Metacrawler a couple of times. I think I came to Google pretty late, but it wasn't a Eureka moment or I would remember that.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

I think I got my first email address in 98 to correspond with an English friend of mine (we've lost touch since). It was a uni based address, and the email program I used was outlook express under Windows NT or something -- whatever the uni computers ran on back in the day.
It was the only part of the internet I dared using back then. I would just sit in the computer rooms checking my emails or writing papers while others around me were happily tapping away in chatboxes. I knew about all these things, because my friends all loved doing them, but I was too shy and scared to actually try them out. I guess it took my till I discovered the C&S before I dared talking on the internet.
Google wasn't a eureka moment for me either. Using it was just as awful as using other search engines.