"I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research in a shorter time"
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Friedman’s line is a small victory lap for a particular kind of late-20th-century professional: the columnist who learned to treat information as a friction problem. The brag is almost casual, but the intent is loud. He’s not just praising Google as a tool; he’s legitimizing a worldview where speed equals depth and where the gatekeepers of expertise (librarians, archives, slow scholarship) look like inefficiencies waiting to be routed around.
The subtext is status management. By framing Google as “library research,” Friedman borrows the credibility of old institutions while swapping in a new pipeline he can control from a keyboard. “Richer offering” does double duty: it flatters the platform as a quasi-neutral mirror of human knowledge and flatters the author as someone savvy enough to extract it. What drops out of frame are the invisible curatorship decisions that make Google feel comprehensive: ranking algorithms, SEO incentives, digitization gaps, and the fact that what’s easiest to find often becomes what’s easiest to believe.
Context matters: Friedman became a signature voice of globalization talk in the era when “the world is flat” was both thesis and mood. This quote carries that same ideology in miniature: technology as an equalizer, markets of information replacing institutions, and the substitution of access for understanding. It works rhetorically because it’s aspirational and self-soothing at once. If a single search box can replace the library, then the work of being informed starts to look less like discipline and more like lifestyle.
The subtext is status management. By framing Google as “library research,” Friedman borrows the credibility of old institutions while swapping in a new pipeline he can control from a keyboard. “Richer offering” does double duty: it flatters the platform as a quasi-neutral mirror of human knowledge and flatters the author as someone savvy enough to extract it. What drops out of frame are the invisible curatorship decisions that make Google feel comprehensive: ranking algorithms, SEO incentives, digitization gaps, and the fact that what’s easiest to find often becomes what’s easiest to believe.
Context matters: Friedman became a signature voice of globalization talk in the era when “the world is flat” was both thesis and mood. This quote carries that same ideology in miniature: technology as an equalizer, markets of information replacing institutions, and the substitution of access for understanding. It works rhetorically because it’s aspirational and self-soothing at once. If a single search box can replace the library, then the work of being informed starts to look less like discipline and more like lifestyle.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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