As of Monday, Girl Scout cookies – previously only available through your niece, your neighbor’s kid, or that one coworker of yours who was selling cookies on behalf of his child even though he wasn’t supposed to – can now be ordered online. I am very excited about this, because it means you will all finally realize that Girl Scout cookies are not very good.
Please don’t email me. The cookies are fine. I mean, they’re cookies! They’re pretty good! They’re cookies. But if they were available year-round, they’d be treated like any other unremarkable boxed cookie at the grocery store – perfectly suitable for your basic treat needs, nothing special. It’s the scarcity that makes people respond as if Girl Scout cookies are baked with cocaine instead of flour. There’s no cookie on earth that tastes as good as Thin Mints do in your mind when you can’t have one.
The sweetness of forced scarcity doesn’t only apply to snacks – it works for information, too. I think about this often, whenever I remember the time I looked up a TV show I didn’t believe existed. It was something my friend had been telling me about for years, a kids’ show he apparently remembered from our childhood. It featured, he said, some kids, and two machines, one like a typewriter and one like a computer, and the machines both had googly eyes, and the kids had to put out a newspaper, and also there was a rollercoaster in space. Nobody ever knew what my friend was talking about. I kept telling him he’d dreamed it, and I wasn’t completely joking.
When I sat down to Google the show (you’d think he would have done this, but it was 2007, and Google as we know it was half as old as it is now), I found it in a couple of minutes. It’s a Canadian show called Read All About It (which explains why none of our American friends had any idea what it was), and it is not very good. In my friend’s memory, the space rollercoaster was terrifying and exhilarating, the kind of thing that remains lodged in your brain until adulthood; on YouTube, it looks like a cardboard shoe. Pretty much all I gained from watching it was the knowledge that my friend’s imagination was less vivid than previously assumed.
But the ease with which I demolished my friend’s eerie half-memories did get me thinking: Does the immediate availability of information on the internet mean we value all our knowledge less?
Before Google ended every argument instantaneously, it used to be that if you had a vague memory of a show or book, you had three options for finding it: research assiduously until your nebulous information finally yielded something concrete, ask everyone you knew until someone thought your nostalgia rang a bell, or wait to stumble onto it again. If one of these approaches worked, it would generate a powerful sense of accomplishment, or connection, or serendipity. Powerful enough to offset the reality that your spooky space-coaster is now an origami loafer? I don’t know, but probably; even if the payoff was a little limp, you could take pride in real-world success. The cookie that’s hard to get tastes awfully good.
I’m finally at the age where I have to worry about going all Andy Rooney on the internet; I’ve been on here since 1994, so I have a pretty good idea what I’m doing, but the internet of my youth is not the internet of today. I’m very aware of the danger that I might slip into some kind of curmudgeon-fugue when I talk about something like, say, how easy it is to get information today. (“Back in my day, if you wanted song lyrics, you had to go to a Usenet group! They weren’t just lying around on Rap Genius for anyone to find!”) So I want to be clear that I’m happy it’s so damn easy to find information these days. My mother, old enough that she doesn’t have to worry about Rooneying, hates it when people pull out their phones the instant there’s a moment of factual doubt; she thinks the value of conversation lies, sometimes, in exploring mutual ignorance. I can’t weather that anxiety. I have to self-soothe immediately with Wikipedia; for me, the conversational lagtime between “I don’t know” and “let’s find out” is on the order of seconds.
How can you not love that information is now available easily and widely? When it takes a lot of time to know something, knowledge is only available to those with time on their hands. Information shouldn’t be the sole benefit of the leisure class.
But instant knowledge gratification comes at a price: when practically all answers are a click away, we sometimes stop really valuing the search or the solution. I’m willing to deal with that if it means I can know everything that is known (at least hypothetically – Google’s taking forever to scan every book, and let’s not even TALK about how long it’s taking for them to get me a Wikipedia implant). As far as I’m concerned, if you have access to a Samoa cookie any time you happen to crave one, it’s OK if they’re a tiny bit less delicious than they were when you had to serendipitously stumble across an eight-year-old and wait six weeks for a box of them. But I can’t deny that I treasured my research successes and serendipities much more when they were more difficult.
Every so often, it seems like a good idea to sit with your Tagalong like it’s a madeleine. I mean that literally – take the time to enjoy your cookies, everyone! They’re all perfectly fine; they’re cookies, and cookies are good. But it’s important to spend a little bit of time – even just a second – to really appreciate the staggering riches of the internet, and how little effort it takes to mine that wealth. Twenty years ago, you might have gone your whole life thinking you made up that halfway-decent kids’ show that’s been haunting your dreams since kindergarten. Now, you can retraumatize yourself within two minutes, using a device that fits in your back pocket!
It’s easy to take information for granted when complete world knowledge is as close as your rear end. But even if you’ve never known information scarcity, it’s good to remember how amazing it is to be a know-it-all.
