Welcome to the Christian Educator Podcast number 39. We have been speaking about the issues that our children face because they will live out their lives in a Digital World. As educators, committed to discipleship-based Christian education, we have the difficult task of preparing our children for a world that is very different than the one we grew up in. In the previous podcasts this year we have talked about the issues of technology, specifically the computer and the internet, and how both have become ubiquitous in our culture. This phenomenon of the 21st Century has led us into a time of unprecedented change, full opportunity and danger. In podcast 31 we talked about the Doubling of these technologies every two years which in turn has continued to break open new frontiers in four specific ways. We are in the midst of a Communication Revolution that will overshadow such historic technologies as the codex and the printing press. I spoke about this in podcasts 32 through 34. The second frontier of change caused by these technologies is towards Globalization. Our world is getting smaller and closer every day. Boarders, ethnic divisions, culture, governments, economies, and language barriers are all but mere inconveniences in this world that connects digitally. This has been the topic of the last four podcasts. Today we will introduce the third frontier of change, Informationalism. The fourth area is taking place in the scientific field of Biotechnology where we are now integrating technology into our human bodies which we will talk about in future podcasts. These four areas of cultural transformation are the subject of my book, “Discipling this Generation for a Digital World” which we will send to you for free. The details will be at the end of the podcast.

Informationalism is the new word; it probably won’t show up in the dictionary yet, to describe what is happening in our internet connected world where we can share everything that can be digitized. This begins with sharing everything written from the Encyclopedia Britannica to what is on your cereal box. It now includes any image or home movie that can be scanned or created with a digital device. In fact anything that can be digitized and put into a computer can now be categorized, stored and shared over the internet.

Most educators, I know, have come to have a love/hate relationship with the new world of Informationalism. It is this area of change in the Digital World that most affects education. It has removed the mystique of the teacher, the keeper of knowledge. Teachers are no longer the storehouse or the guide to information. On the other hand the internet has made available to any grade five student vast storehouses of information and learning that only the most privileged University graduate students could access just 15 years ago. This amazing mix of hardware and indexing technology is altering our schools, our libraries (what’s left of them) our businesses, our economics, our governments, our cultures and the very structures of our minds and memory. And, our gifted grade 5 student can find it much faster in multiple sources all because of the most comprehensive and grandest library to ever to grace the planet instantly accessed by simply typing google.com into their computer.

This odd and strange word “Google” and has become the mantra for any and all information and it is changing how we think and remember in ways we never imagined. The story of how Google arrived just ten years ago will help us understand how two young men have shaped the world we live in today and what is motivating the architects of this brave new world. Here is a brief history from the audio version of my book :

Informationalism

“The next best thing to knowing something is to know where to find it.” Samuel Johnson

In 1979, when Sergey Brin was five years old, his family decided to leave Moscow. They were weary of the anti-Semitism both his mother and father were facing as academic and scientist. Sergey’s father is a mathematician and his mother is a rocket scientist. They found a way to come to the land of opportunity.

Unlike most immigrants to America, Sergey’s family quickly found excellent career opportunities. His father became a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland and his mother eventually used her specialty at NASA.

When Sergey was nine, he received his first computer, a Commodore 64. It wasn’t long before his genius for mathematics and computing was apparent to all. He left high school early and enrolled in his father’s university. When his Science Degree was complete, he moved on to Stanford University and by August 1995, received his Master’s Degree in computer science, again ahead of schedule. He began his doctoral program without a true sense of direction. He couldn’t seem to find a project that satisfied his blended skills and interest, until he met Larry.

Larry Page was born in Lansing, Michigan, also to academic parents. Larry’s father is a professor of computer science and his mother teaches programming. Both are part of the faculty at Michigan State University.

Larry grew up as the typical geekie kid at school which made him somewhat of an introvert. He was often compared to Bill Gates as he possessed some of Gates’ nerdish quirks. Larry even looks a bit like Bill Gates; not a bad thing when your whole life revolves around computers.

Like Sergey, Larry attended his parent’s university where he received his Bachelor of Science degree. He transferred, at the end of his Master’s program, to Stanford. When he arrived at the school, he was given the standard tour of the campus and its programs from a second year student. That student was Sergey Brin.

Sergey and Larry did not hit if off in the way that you would expect, having so much in common. In fact, they argued and fought the entire tour and, for the next few days, over almost every topic they discussed. Nevertheless, this guy seemed to challenge Sergey and it wasn’t long before he considered teaming up with Larry for their Doctoral project. What they did agreed upon was the significant place the internet was taking in their digital culture. They dreamed about how to make it useful. They began their project which eventually put their academic pursuits on hold. Together they launched one of the most successful technology companies of all time, Google Inc.

And Then There Was Google

At the time of their arrival at Stanford, the internet was gaining momentum in the commercial world but still had its roots in the academic world. Academia’s biggest complaint was trying to find information on the web. The internet was a great research tool if you could find the papers specific to your field of study. If you entered a search term into one of the most common search tools such as Altavista, multiple links would show up that had no relevance to your topic. Research on the web was still very time-consuming and often led to page after page of useless information.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked to solve this problem by developing a method of ranking webpages based upon how they linked to other pages and how other pages linked to them. The challenge was to back-link pages. It was easy to count how many links a page went out to, but to discover everyone who was linking in to a particular page became very difficult. And ranking the significance of the page-linking to the website was a huge mathematical challenge. Page and Brin developed programming called Page¬Rank to do this work.

The next step of this process was to “crawl” the web in order to collect the data of links necessary to rank the pages. They begged, borrowed and stole as much hardware as they could possibly use for this task at Stanford. They started their web crawler, called Backrub, on Larry’s own webpage and it went out into the net. They quickly discovered that this was a much bigger undertaking than they originally thought. Their hard drives rapidly filled with data and there seemed to be no end to it. At one point, half of Stanford’s computer resources were being tasked for this work.

Among the University insiders, the new search tool, dubbed “Google,” was a big hit. The ability to index and search the University’s knowledge and the growing number of links became a very useful tool, yet not without its challenges.

A major side effect was the difficulties the web crawler created in the outside world. At the time, webmasters and companies didn’t have a huge desire to be searched. They were suspicious that their intellectual property was being stolen. Also, entire servers were shutting down because of the load placed on them by Stanford’s computers. By the time one quarter of the internet was cataloged, Brin and Page were being gently pushed out of Stanford. It was just too much for the University. Stanford’s computer network, one of the most sophisticated in the world, was also straining under the load and on one occasion ground to a halt because of Google’s ambitious webcrawling.

Another side effect started to emerge as Google began to be used outside of the confines of Stanford. Outsiders were finding Google helpful but complaints started to come in regarding where sites were ranked on Google. At first this was mostly an academic complaint but businesses were also taking note. Google was beginning to shake up the internet. In The Search, by John Battelle, he remarks on this ranking of sites on the web:“Page and Brin had clearly hit a nerve…with every person who labored over a website. To many, unleashing a ranking system, based on a bloodless algorithm, felt like a supreme act of arrogance. Who were these kids from Stanford telling the world how we ranked? What did they know about the work and the passion that went into our sites? Well, in truth, Page and Brim made no claim to such knowledge. As these early complaints illustrate, the Google service made no pretension about actually reading a particular site, or of understanding its content. It simply laid bare the often ugly truth of how well-connected a site happened to be. No matter how great a site might look or how many awards it might receive, if it was not linked to by other sites, ideally sites that were themselves well linked, then, in Google’s estimation, it didn’t really exist. That cold hard fact was hard for many to swallow.”

By mid 1998, Page and Brin sought out other search-oriented companies to license Google. At the time, they were reluctant to start their own company which might be swallowed up, or worse, smashed by the mega companies now positioning themselves on the web. They presented their technology to nearly every search-oriented company from Yahoo to Infoseek as well as several venture capitalists. Everyone thought their technology was interesting but no one could see how it could make money. These companies were all trying to create “portals” to the web: sites where people would come and stay not where people would be immediately hyperlinked away. Search was only the bait to bring people to their places of business. Most of these companies felt their search engines were good enough.

Licensing Google was not going happen; starting their own company was the only way Google could find a home outside of Stanford. In an arranged meeting by a Stanford adviser, Brin and Page were introduced to Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, who immediately saw Google’s potential. Without any hesitation, he gave the inventors a cheque for $100,000 and said he would look in on them later. They didn’t even know who he should make the cheque out to so he wrote it to Google Inc. This created a challenge as Google Inc. did not exist. They couldn’t cash the cheque until, several weeks later, on September 7th, 1998, Google Inc. was incorporated with Page as CEO and Brin as President.

Google Inc. was launched out of a friend’s garage and rented room in a five bedroom home. Through some other outside investment they were able to raise enough money to hire a few more engineering techs, but they quickly outgrew the garage. In the spring of 1999, the company relocated to an industrial complex in Palo Alto. As the Google index migrated from Stanford to their new complex, Google’s insatiable appetite for processor time and storage space continued to grow. They perfected a means of linking inexpensive PC computers to combine the effort and storage. And so the Google index grew and grew.

It was about this time that I remember my first search using Google. Being an Altavista user, I was a bit taken back by the almost blank page and simple graphic. But that first impression was set aside when I found what I was looking for on the top of the search results. I was looking for the Online Bible (a new initiative to share free Bible software and resources over the internet) and there it was: number two on the Google listing. In other search engines this site was buried deep within commercial pages. Even the Word of God was hard to find on the net at that time. I was immediately converted and to this day am an avid Google user. This book has been written with my browser poised at Google for the next search.

Eventually in June of 1999, Brin and Page found the real investment money to make Google into a viable internet company. Over the next two years, with an investment of multiple millions of dollars, their financiers began to require accountability and revenue from this new company. Larry and Sergey had to invite a new partner to their team, Eric E. Schmidt.

Schmidt was an engineering graduate of Princeton University, a successful executive from Sun Microsystems and had been CEO of Novell Networking from 1997 to 2001. Now he had to help Brin and Page become corporately acceptable and profitable. Not an easy task because of the anti-commercial, anti-advertising stance they had taken over the years. They began a compromise by adding Google AdWords. These Ads would not be allowed to change the culture they had built in this growing company. They adopted the motto: “do no evil.” They refused to give up the democratic way the software would answer a search query. The Ads would be listed on the side of the page and the advertiser would choose on which words they wanted to list their site. To this day Google is devoid of annoying banner ads and pop-ups. They seem to be staying true to their course.

Google now had a way to “make money without doing evil.” And thus Google grew and grew and grew.

By the summer of 2004, Google had secured a place in internet history. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had changed internet culture and made it realize that the future of search was indeed the future of the internet. That summer Google became a publicly traded company and by the end of year, tripled the value of its stocks. Page and Brin, in just a few short years, were launched to iconic status. They are now the “rock-stars” of the internet. Google continues to be the fastest growing company in digital history and some argue it will, in the next couple of years, pass the giants Microsoft, IBM and Intel as the digital world’s most dominant technology.

I find this story both inspiring and a bit frightening. Inspiring because this world can be changed by two men who have the right vision and understanding of how to use technology at the right time and frightening for the very same reason. As Christian Educators we have to understand how powerful Informationalism has become in the minds of our disciples. We have to learn how to us this technology and how to teach with it, not against it, because your students are mastering it as we speak. I hope to spend all of next month discussing this with you. Please begin to weigh in on this subject and perhaps I can include your thoughts in our discussion.

Next week we will revisit a podcast that I created last Easter about the need to celebrate Christmas and Easter well. I think you will find it very inspiring for this holiday season. We would love to hear from you and I deeply value your comments. If you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.